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.
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A housing officer, who chose to remain anonymous, said in a statement: “The reduction in services due to austerity has significantly increased our workloads. We feel like support workers sometimes rather than housing officers. We are a broken service with a broken staff.”
Unite says this experience is common among housing officers. The union's general secretary Sharon Graham said: “Our members cannot carry on with unsustainable workloads being forced upon them. Stress and anxiety amongst the housing workforce have gone through the roof. Our members have Unite’s 100 per cent backing in taking strike action over their terrible working conditions.
"Bristol council cannot let this situation go on any longer; it must present a full resourced plan our members can accept.” Unite claims that the council’s senior management has failed to acknowledge the increased workloads it says staff are dealing with and that the service needs to adapt to changing needs.
Unite regional officer Joseph Murphy said: “Bristol council’s housing department is in crisis. But instead of addressing the situation, senior management are making increasingly unachievable demands on our members. The leadership must reduce workloads and provide the resources necessary for it to function properly.”
A spokesperson from Bristol City Council said in response to October's walkouts: “Housing demands have changed dramatically in recent years. As a result, we need to change, and we are re-designing our housing service to ensure we are equipped to provide the best support we can for our tenants.
"We have been working closely with the unions and our workforce, and while we are disappointed there is a strike during those discussions, we will continue to include our staff as we carry out the essential modernisation of the service.”
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