Plans to fire and rehire thousands of Glasgow City Council staff on hold

Plans to fire and rehire thousands of staff at Glasgow City Council have been put on hold until the end of next week.

The council and unions are planning to get back around the table after negotiations over a new pay and grading structure broke down on Thursday.

The fallout comes as the local authority plans to implement a new pay and grading system after the previous one was found to discriminate mostly against female workers.

The proposals meant pay for most staff would stay the same or rise. However, around 11% would see their wages cut, with some by more than £10,000.

The council had said that in order to end the current pay arrangements, all non-teaching staff would be dismissed and rehired under new contracts, which would take effect from January 1.

But now, trade unions including Unison have agreed to start talks early next week after the fire-and-rehire proposals were put on hold.

STV News understands that will be likely be on Tuesday.

Colin Edgar, the council’s director of communication and governance, said the situation was “hellish”.

“Our grading scheme is discriminatory. It has to be done away with and replaced with a new scheme. There are two ways we can do that. We can do it through collective agreement with our trade unions or we can do it by dismissing and re-engaging,” he told STV News.

“Until very recently, we thought we had a deal with our trade unions. Two of them, Unite and GMB, were at the table with us. They wanted to do a deal and unfortunately at the last minute Unison, knowing what the implications of it would be, walked away. And that’s why we’re here today.”

Unison argued that it had not walked away and it will “ballot its members on an offer once discussions have concluded”.

Mr Edgar said: “We have to come back to the fundamentals, which is that our scheme discriminates against people.

“We’ve spent ten years now and three quarters of £1bn of taxpayers money in compensation for this. We need to do away with it, and unfortunately, there are only two ways to do away with it, and Unison has taken one of those ways off the table.”

Sylvia Haughney, Glasgow’s education convener at Unison said: “They can’t rob Peter to pay Pauline, and in fact the Paulines who are the equal pay big claimants, they’re facing detriment.

“These are low paid women who were out in these streets in 2018 in the big strike, and some of those women are facing detriment.

“We will go back round the tables, they need to go and find the money.

“They need to do the right thing and pay people properly.”

A spokesperson for Unison said: “Following a series of meetings today with the Scottish Government and the joint trade unions, Glasgow City Council has paused the threat of fire and rehire to allow talks with the joint trade unions to commence early next week.

“The Scottish Government have also committed to a further meeting.

“Unison Glasgow City Branch welcomes this, but we emphasised that for these discussions to be productive, they must be based on increased funding to address the concerns we have outlined.”