Category: blog

Local government workers are ‘everyday action heroes’

Every day, everyone’s lives are affected by local council staff. Our communities depend on the 1.3 million local government workers who spend their working lives looking out for others.

We may not see them when they’re working through the night, caring for older and disabled people, or at the crack of dawn when they’re clearing up our streets and parks to keep the environment clean and healthy, but the impact of their work is there when we wake up.

We don’t get to see every minute they dedicate to educating our children and keeping them safe, or to running council services like housing, libraries, and social services, but we rely on them to keep the cogs turning.

We entrust them with some of the most precious people in our lives, and the most precious places, because they are our every day heroes.

When I speak to our members working for local authorities across the UK, they tell me that, although they love their work, they often feel taken for granted. They feel like the silent workers who are often on the sharp end of criticism from the public.

They don’t do it for the prestige, they do it for the difference they can make to people’s lives, every day – but greater understanding from the public would go a long way to making their jobs easier.

It’s UNISON’s job to make sure their work is valued and understood. It’s also our job to make sure they’re treated fairly at work and we campaign all year round to protect the public services they provide.

So today, we’re launching lifelike action figures of crossing warden Sandy, librarian Emma, residential care worker Denise and refuse worker Richard, to recognise the ‘everyday action heroes’ that are our local council workers.

Every community has a Sandy, an Emma, a Denise, and a Richard dedicating their working lives to keeping everyone safe and supported. We saw the extent of their dedication through Covid-19. They went to work – exposed to risks – so that others could stay at home safely. Their colleagues are heroes too, and as Denise says in the video, UNISON makes members feel like they’re not alone.

With these action figures, we hope we can encourage the public, and politicians, to appreciate their superhuman efforts, just as much as UNISON does.

Watch and share the video

Find the cartoon strip on Twitter

This is one of many reasons why NJC workers deserve and inflation busting pay rise. Find out more at the campaign page below:

NJC: Council and school pay 2023

The article Local government workers are ‘everyday action heroes’ first appeared on the UNISON National site.

Local government workers are ‘everyday action heroes’

Every day, everyone’s lives are affected by local council staff. Our communities depend on the 1.3 million local government workers who spend their working lives looking out for others.

We may not see them when they’re working through the night, caring for older and disabled people, or at the crack of dawn when they’re clearing up our streets and parks to keep the environment clean and healthy, but the impact of their work is there when we wake up.

We don’t get to see every minute they dedicate to educating our children and keeping them safe, or to running council services like housing, libraries, and social services, but we rely on them to keep the cogs turning.

We entrust them with some of the most precious people in our lives, and the most precious places, because they are our every day heroes.

When I speak to our members working for local authorities across the UK, they tell me that, although they love their work, they often feel taken for granted. They feel like the silent workers who are often on the sharp end of criticism from the public.

They don’t do it for the prestige, they do it for the difference they can make to people’s lives, every day – but greater understanding from the public would go a long way to making their jobs easier.

It’s UNISON’s job to make sure their work is valued and understood. It’s also our job to make sure they’re treated fairly at work and we campaign all year round to protect the public services they provide.

So today, we’re launching lifelike action figures of crossing warden Sandy, librarian Emma, residential care worker Denise and refuse worker Richard, to recognise the ‘everyday action heroes’ that are our local council workers.

Every community has a Sandy, an Emma, a Denise, and a Richard dedicating their working lives to keeping everyone safe and supported. We saw the extent of their dedication through Covid-19. They went to work – exposed to risks – so that others could stay at home safely. Their colleagues are heroes too, and as Denise says in the video, UNISON makes members feel like they’re not alone.

With these action figures, we hope we can encourage the public, and politicians, to appreciate their superhuman efforts, just as much as UNISON does.

Watch and share the video

Find the cartoon strip on Twitte

The article Local government workers are ‘everyday action heroes’ first appeared on the UNISON National site.

Blog: A significant step forward for pregnant workers and new parents

The beginning of February marked a significant step forward for pregnant workers and new parents, as a bill to provide new and expecting parents with additional protections in the workplace passed its third reading.

UNISON worked with Dan Jarvis MP on the new law – the Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Bill – to prevent employers from laying off expectant mothers and new parents, by extending redundancy protections to six months.

Raising a family is becoming even more expensive as the cost of living crisis continues. What new parents often need most is job security, but pregnant workers and new parents are too often first in line for redundancy.

Around three quarters of working people currently experience maternity discrimination and 54,000 pregnant women are forced out of their jobs each year.

In theory, the law already gives women on maternity leave priority over other employees at risk of redundancy – a woman on maternity leave is “entitled to be offered” any suitable alternative vacancy, where one is available, as soon as her job is at risk of redundancy.

However, in practice, this is often not happening. Those who have just given birth or have been away from the workplace for months, are unlikely to pursue an employment tribunal claim. So, it’s hardly surprising that maternity discrimination cases form a disproportionately large percentage of UNISON’s legal caseload.

To make matters worse, many maternity protections are under attack through the Retained EU Law Bill, including protections against discrimination for pregnant women and women on maternity leave, and the right to suitable alternative work on no less favourable terms.

Without these core protections, UK workers – especially women – will be thrown back to the 1970s, which means the bill is even more urgent.

This new law will represent a significant win for UNISON members as well as add greater workplace protections to the statute book, and I hope it receives the full support of the House of Lords too.

The article Blog: A significant step forward for pregnant workers and new parents first appeared on the UNISON National site.

Blog: It is within their power to give NHS workers the pay they deserve

UNISON is now into the second full week of our NHS pay strike ballot in England, Cymru Wales and Northern Ireland. We’re still pressing ahead with encouraging as many members as possible to vote and return their ballot papers.

The £1,400 pay award for NHS England and Cymru Wales is a real-terms pay cut for the majority of staff, and staff in Northern Ireland have been given no pay rise at all because of the political paralysis in Stormont.

Our activists and organisers have been speaking to thousands of members, every day since the ballot opened.

Meanwhile, I’ve been out visiting UNISON branches at hospital sites, ambulance stations and control rooms, to help them get the message out to their members.

Ambulance workers in London told me they’ve never seen wait-times outside hospitals so bad, while a branch secretary in a big hospital trust said they’ve had a 25% increase in the number of members requesting hardship support.

Just today, I spoke to operating department practitioners about the foodbank that’s opened in their hospital to help feed staff.

Is it any surprise that trusts are struggling to recruit? With reports of just one healthcare assistant for 14 patients on a night shift, and experienced staff – some with 30 years of service – despairingly describing an NHS that’s never had such a bad staffing crisis.

One member, who’d already voted ‘yes’ and returned their ballot paper, told me: “I want to tell the government that we’re not being selfish by trying to draw attention to the deep problems in the NHS, we’re doing this to save services and patients”.

My fears that the government was failing to either acknowledge or grasp the severity of the crisis were confirmed last night when I was on Newsnight. I had to correct Tory MP Tobias Ellwood on his NHS staff vacancy stats. He said there are 25,000 vacancies, but he’s wrong – it’s more like 135,000.

That’s the true scale of the recruitment and retention crisis in the NHS. And with government threats of a 2% pay cap next year in the public sector, the crisis is only set to deepen.

There are many things that need to be fixed in health and social care across the UK, but sorting out pay would make a huge improvement.

A real-terms pay cut, handed down after the NHS dealt with a traumatic two years through COVID, is insult after injury. And what I’m hearing from NHS staff is that they’re angry and fed up.

They were being clapped when the government needed them to go out to work every day during the pandemic – before we even knew we would find a vaccine – only to be told, now, that they shouldn’t expect their pay to keep up with the cost of living, and that they would be selfish and reckless to take strike action.

This government let frontline workers take responsibility when times were at their toughest, but now it refuses to take responsibility for the things that are in its control.

It is within the government’s power to give NHS workers the decent pay they deserve.

 

UNISON ambulance workers share heartbreaking stories of wait times 

The article Blog: It is within their power to give NHS workers the pay they deserve first appeared on the UNISON National site.

Blog: The time to act on the cost of living is now, prime minister

Liz Truss believes Boris Johnson was a marvellous prime minister – and he agrees with her. I watched the news in disbelief as the shamed, outgoing PM made his self-aggrandising, final farewell speech from the steps of Number 10.

How could he be more concerned with his memories of space-hoppers and his own future career than showing remorse for the trail of crises that he leaves behind him?

His debasement of the integrity and probity of the highest public office in the country was only confirmed with his departing words.

How could he possibly claim that social care has been reformed? That is a blatant lie. With over 160,000 vacancies and care homes at risk of closure because of soaring energy costs, the sector is in a worse state than when he took office.

And this is just one sector where the cost of living crisis, the energy crisis and the cost of working crisis are biting hard. 

Working people and the services they deliver – which we all we all rely on – are on their knees. Liz Truss has the chance to get the government back to governing.

She could address the income inequality in the country and turn the fates of millions of working people around. But only if she makes the right political choices.

UNISON is calling on Liz Truss and her new cabinet to take urgent action. They must scrap her planned tax cuts that will only benefit the wealthiest and instead increase tax on the highest earners.

They must also give immediate relief to households across the country who are struggling with bills and living costs; deliver a genuine, above inflation pay rise for public service workers, and increase the minimum wage to £15-an-hour.

Higher pay is one of the answers to the cost of living crisis – Liz Truss said it herself in May of this year – and while I have very little faith that another Tory prime minister will offer anything different, I hope she will deliver on our asks, because millions of working people have been failed by this government for too long.

The article Blog: The time to act on the cost of living is now, prime minister first appeared on the UNISON National site.