Tories twist knife into council staff

Tory council bosses have given a taste of what a future Cameron-led government will mean by torpedoing wage negotiations with unions and telling 1.6 million low-paid workers they will not get any pay rise at all this year.
Council leaders raking in six-figure salaries bluntly dismissed workers' demands for a 2.5 per cent increase on wages that average just £18,000 a year, insisting that local authorities were in an "extremely tight financial situation."
Jan Parkinson, managing director at the Tory authority-controlled Local Government Employers (LGE), proclaimed that "councils are facing a perfect storm of falling revenues and increasing demand for services and many are being forced to cut thousands of jobs to balance the books."
The Tory pay freeze comes as councils from Swindon to Brighton attempt to cut council workers' poverty wages even further to meet equal-pay claims by underpaid women workers, while other councils, such as Birmingham, demand swingeing job cuts.
But union leaders representing hundreds of thousands of workers - from librarians, refuse collectors and cleaners, to carers and lollipop ladies - slated this latest attack as "outrageous."
Public-sector union Unison negotiator Heather Wakefield emphasised that council bosses had not even attempted to talk to the unions.
"There have been no negotiations at all," she revealed.
"We know a pay increase is affordable and with inflation going up to 3 per cent a pay freeze will obviously mean a real-terms pay cut for the two-thirds of council workers who already earn less than £9 an hour."
Ms Wakefield added that "last year Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne said the Tories would not freeze pay for those earning in this pay bracket - but now the Tory LGE is doing just that."
GMB negotiator Brian Strutton stressed that this attack was nothing less than "a political decision by Conservative-controlled local government.
"David Cameron needs to rein in his right-wing mavericks who have the audacity to think that this pay cut is how to deliver local services," he said.
But as the Tories tried to draw battle lines over council workers' pay, GMB rep Mark Wilson reported on a dispute that showed that bosses can be beaten.
"Just last week, Northumberland County Council executives were forced to back down from their own attempt to impose a pay freeze on 1,500 workers after the unions threatened strikes," he reported.
"We made it clear there are strong legal and moral arguments against pay freezes and we are glad that the council decided that this course of action is not appropriate."

Story by Paul Haste.