Around 50 Bristol City Council housing officers and team leaders responsible for managing the local authority’s 27,000 tenancies are due to walk out later this month in an ongoing dispute with the council over workloads. The members of the Unite union will be striking on December 14, 15 and 16.
Previously employees took four days of strike action in late October after claiming the council had failed to act despite staff reporting that taking on extra work was causing high staff rates of stress and anxiety. Bristol City Council said in October that they were ‘disappointed’ by the strike action but were carrying out an ‘essential modernisation’ of the service.
Unite claims that staff have seen a 64 per cent increase in the cases they deal with involving vulnerable tenants over the last year, which has placed them under enormous strain. They are calling on the council to reduce workloads and allocate additional resources.
