1 June 2004

Glasgow Fights On

Nursery nurses in Renfrewshire have accepted the council's latest pay offer. The deal agreed will mean an annual increase of more than £2,000 for staff. Talks aimed at ending the pay dispute between nursery nurses and council employers broke up at a national level last month without a resolution and since then Nursery Nurses union, UNISON have been negotiating deals at a local authority level.

Staff in the Borders are set to vote on an offer by their employers, on 10 June. It is only there and in Glasgow, Fife and Orkney that nursery nurses remain on strike. The dispute began in June 2003 with nursery nurses seeking a significant improvement to their pay and conditions. Before the strike, nursery nurses earned about £13,000 a year but campaigned for an extra £4,000 to reflect the importance work they undertook. Staff staged a series of two and three-day stoppages before taking all-out action.

Despite the fact that the majority of nursery nurses have now struck local agreements to improve their pay, last week nursery nurses in Glasgow, who make up a quarter of all Scotland’s Nursery Nurses, rejected what their employers claimed was a final pay offer. At a mass meeting held at the Royal Concert Hall in the city, they voted 445-287 against the deal put forward by the city council.

According to the council, the settlement would have involved increases of between 4.2 per cent and 23.1 per cent for nursery staff, determined by their current grade and length of service. The deal would also have included lump sums of £2,500 for all staff. However, Unison said staff had been offered £9.83 an hour while those in 16 other council areas had received £10.13 an hour.

ENDS

Contact Vince Mills 0781 461 5224