Equal Pay redundancy letters recalled - the biggest Tory cock-up yet?
Amongst the catalogue of disasters presided over by the Conservative Executive struggling to guide Bury Council through its Equal Pay review, today’s news of recalled redundancy letters must rank amongst the worst.
To cut a (very) long and painful story short, the end of the Equal Pay review sees all staff made redundant and then re-hired on different contracts including their new pay. This was supposed to happen this week. Unfortunately, having sent out 4,000 redundancy notices to staff, the Council have now had to rescind and withdraw them, and have agreed to come back to the table and talk to Unions. Whilst I admire their support for the Royal Mail, the Council’s completely unnecessary use of the postal service for these letters makes us all look stupid and incompetent.
I don’t know why this has happened, but I do know that it represents yet another huge indictment of a Tory Executive clearly incapable of managing this process in a way which doesn’t simultaneously destroy staff morale and make the Council look like a laughing stock. When they come to write the book on how to implement Equal Pay like an idiot, they should ask our Council Leader Bob Bibby to write the sleeve notes.
The Council have sent out a note to staff explaining why the letters have been recalled. I don’t really understand it and I suspect that many staff won’t either. It says the delay isn’t about the pay line, the points accrued during the evaluation, appeals or personal circumstances, or the Executive’s decision to implement the scheme. What’s left then? I really don’t know. All that’s clear is that the Council’s unique way of saying “happy new year” to its staff by telling them they’re all sacked is actually even worse than that because then they turn round and say “er… not really, but you will be next week, just hang on.”
God knows how much this latest debacle has cost. In financial terms, thousands. In terms of staff morale and their faith in the process, even more. The Conservatives running the Council have known for months, months, that these letters had to go out, and yet within hours of sending them they are withdrawn after Trades Unions contacted their lawyers. This begs so many questions: Why were the letters sent out without checks to make sure they were legally sound? Why are the Council willing to enter into talks with Unions now, when they weren’t before? And perhaps most importantly, what will the impact be on the staff whose futures are once again thrown into doubt? They must think we’re all complete clowns.
The letters were the final execution of a plan put forward by the Executive to implement a pay review which has seen thousands of staff lost part of their salaries, some over 25% of their pay. Whilst the review itself was a legal requirement, its implementation has lurched from one disaster to another, and from one kick in the teeth for staff to another. The Liberal Democrats (and, to be fair, Labour) in Bury have criticised the Tories for their intransigence and callousness in the face of staff suffering for a long time. And now when it comes down to it, the Tories can’t even get redundancy letters right without having to back-track. And to make it worse, the back-tracking has been done through the media in a mess of confusion. I read about it on Ceefax, and it appeared on the news long before staff got anything official in an email from the Council. It’s disgraceful. Staff who serve our communities shouldn’t hear about the future of their jobs when they turn on Key 103.
The Council’s Resource and Performance Scrutiny commission looked at the whole process last month. It approved the Executive’s decision without comment (in a split vote 5-4 - I voted against), but a large reason for the 5 “yes” votes was, I suspect, the dire warnings of financial penalties for the Council were redundancy notices not sent out within 90 days of March 31st. Running into the next financial year would be awful, we were told. Well, it’s less than 90 days now after the withdrawal of these letters. I have contacted the Leader of the Council, the Executive Member for HR, the Chief Executive and the Director of HR asking what the hell’s gone on here and how it affects both the financial situation and the staff. I expect to hear back from them in the morning.
At Scrutiny on Tuesday night, the Executive Member for Resources smiled and sneered as he it was drawn to his attention that increased Council performance was in a large part down to staff losing out in equal pay. This attitude is, sadly, typical of an Executive that has never understood the hardship it is placing staff in. This latest sorry mistake is yet another nail in the coffin of employee relations in Bury. The Executive should be ashamed of themselves.
Rick
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Maybe if the Torie leader of the council did his homework before he sent out letters and other such examples of pure wasting of money were saved then Bury council could pay its staff a more realistic wage
They weren’t redundancy letters - they were dismissal notices! What a farce.
As somebody affected by this pay farce, 1st April 2009 was always given as the date the ‘new pay rate’ would be implemented. We were also told salaries would be protected for first 2 years, then 1 year, I have no idea what happened to this?
However we were only given the new pay scales in November (despite them being dated July 2008) and a couple of DAYS to say which job description was the ‘best fit’ for the job we were currently doing, however there were limitations. For example, for somebody who has paid out themselves to educate themselves to a Level 4 standard for the job, meaning around a year of study in their own time, was not eligible for a Level 4 grade and salary to go with it, despite meeting 90%+ of the criteria for that job description. To qualify for this Level 4, the job dexcription included, planning lessons, delivering lessons marking and assessing childrens work. This is the job of a TEACHER and if I wanted a Teachers job I would go and get the further qualifications AND EXPECT the pay to go with it!! As a parent I also expect my children to be taught by qualified teachers, not support staff for the equivalent and minimum of one morning per week!