Bin and refuse workers in Edinburgh will begin strike action this Thursday. It is the starting-gun in a first wave of strike action which will hit waste services in fifteen councils across Scotland over the coming weeks.
The action will inevitably lead to bins not being collected, waste piling up and streets looking dirty. It’s a travesty that this will happen during the Edinburgh International and Fringe festivals just as we are emerging out of the long cold shadow of Covid.
Yet, this travesty is not the making of hard working low-paid professionals who continued to turn up for work throughout the pandemic to provide services for you.
It's reported that more than half of Scotland’s 250,000 council workers are earning less than £25,000 a year for a 37-hour week. And who are these workers? They are our cleaners, cemetery workers, refuse workers, janitors — and many more.
It’s the workers who have kept our children and grandchildren safe and educated. We will also be jointly announcing the strike action impacting on schools in the near future.
No, the blame for this situation lies squarely at the doors of the local government body COSLA and the Scottish Government. It’s important to realise that Unite along with the trade unions rejected a 2 per cent pay offer in March.
So why has it taken five months for COSLA to ‘up’ their offer to 3.5 per cent? The latest paltry offer has also been swiftly rejected at a time when the cost of living crisis is really beginning to bite with energy prices rising through the roof and inflation soaring to 12.3 per cent.
Yes - even council leaders including those in Edinburgh and Glasgow agree with us that this offer is nowhere near good enough. So why even make it when you know it will be rejected?
John Swinney and the Scottish Government can point to its recent announcement of an extra £140m to councils but the bigger picture is that local government has been starved of money for over a decade.
The change in money between 2013-14 and 2019-20 for local government has decreased at more than twice the rate than the Scottish Government’s revenue budget in real terms. That’s a fact.
Local government emerged as the biggest loser from the latest Scottish Government spending review with its funding frozen for the rest of the parliament. That’s also on the Scottish Government.
Now we have the pathetic spectacle of COSLA and the Scottish Government doing a Hokey Cokey dance as they blame each other for this mess. The fact is both of them are equally to blame and it’s a mess of their own doing.
Our members are fed-up with this politicking because all they want is an offer put on the table which is fair and helps them deal with the cost of living crisis hurting families all across Scotland.
Unite makes no apologies for standing up for our members because they deserve far better and far more than what they are getting from politicians.
We hope that the people of Scotland will agree that everyone deserves a fair pay rise and that Record readers will support us in taking this strike action because we are also standing up for you.
