The news that the Labour controlled council at Rhondda Cynon Taf is threatening to make 10,000 of its staff redundant in order to re-employ them on worse terms and conditions beggars belief.
For me, it brought back memories of the same sort of thing happening with the Labour council in Liverpool in the eighties.
... out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs ... and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round the Valleys handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.
Except for the taxis, what's so different? What's so wrong with talking ... with trying to negotiate a mutually agreed solution? But instead of that, we see a Labour council that votes to let a Labour executive bully its very own workers.
Yet how many people in RCT will still keep on voting for an out-dated, misplaced party that has become irrelevant to the real needs of the people it's meant to serve?
3 comments:
I think pay restraint/freezes, pay cuts, changes to pensions and unfilled vacancies have some element of inevitability across the Welsh public sector.
However hard it is to accept, it's much more preferable than laying off people by the thousands into an uncertain jobs market in my view.
But to strong-arm like this, like NPT have tried to do recently too, is unacceptable.
It makes me lead to believe that someone in Cardiff Bay may have given them a tip-off as to the forthcoming Welsh budget. I don't see how any council with any integrity would do this willingly unless it was urgent.
I agree that some sort of pay restraint (maybe including reductions in pay, or pension, or holiday etc.) is necessary too, Owen. But, as you said, the point is how they go about it.
I think Labour are falling over themselves to implement this quickly in order to put as much daylight between now and the Assembly election in May/June.
That's why we're not going to hear Carwyn Jones or Ed Miliband stand up and condemn NPT or RCT for what they're now doing in the way that Kinnock did in the eighties. They obviously think that if everything can be "done and dusted" now, people will have either got used to it or forgotten about it ... and will just keep on voting Labour as if nothing had happened.
Which Labour council will be next, I wonder?
I wonder how the other (mostly non-Labour) councils will deal with retrenchment?
Maybe LAs and other public bodies should seriously start looking at 4 day weeks for their staff - maintaining the same establishment, so no redundancies, but cutting the staffing coat according to the settlement cloth.
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