Will care pay deal turn out to be an illusion?

To understand why government policy in Scotland has been so ineffective and why the civic sector keeps persuading itself that things may be better than they are, it is worth looking at the deal made between trade unions and the Scottish Government on collective bargaining of terms and conditions for early years staff.

If you look at the Unison media release, it gives cause for substantial hope. Care services remain one of the sectors of employment with stubbornly low pay and conditions, and Unison celebrates this negotiating breakthrough.

It is right to welcome progress; low pay in care has significant impacts right across society. For example, it is perhaps the single largest cause of society-wide gender pay gaps. Care work is overwhelmingly done by women and is very poorly rewarded, and this distorts the entire gender pay gap statistics.

It is also a major factor in overall economic inequality and financial duress in society. The care workforce makes up eight per cent of Scotland's entire working population, and yet pay levels are on average less than one pound per hour more than the legal minimum wage. The fact that nearly one in ten workers is on basically the least they can legally be paid accounts for a substantial proportion of national inequality.

This low-pay, low-standard employment is driven by fragmentation. Care services are scattered across myriad private and public providers, in exactly the way the NHS is not. It leaves employees with low levels of power in the workplace and poorly positioned to negotiate their terms and conditions.

Collective bargaining is one of the most effective solutions to low pay and poor conditions. When an entire workforce can negotiate as one, its negotiating power is greatly increased, and the power gap with the employer is closed.

So this development appears to be all-round good news. And then we get to the Scottish Government's media release, and we immediately see that this entire development is undermined by one substantial flaw – it is to be purely voluntary.

The voluntary nature of this scheme is not something the Scottish Government wants you to miss – it is the third word of the text of the media release. It appears to want to make sure that no one mistakes this for a radical, binding or genuinely transformative step. In other words, it appears to want to assure its private sector 'partners' that this will not affect their business.

Let's just remind ourselves, Scotland's care homes have a record of aggressive profit extraction. Substantial proportions of Scotland's care homes are ultimately owned in offshore tax havens, and costs passed on to residents are often ruinous, while quality is hardly great, with more than half of care homes having complaints upheld against them. One in three is considered unsatisfactory, weak or merely adequate. All three assessments are rated as 'high risk'.

Meanwhile, Common Weal has been campaigning to highlight the extraordinary methods used by private sector providers to extract profit from children's care services, despite that being illegal. A range of nefarious practices has been put in place to make non-profit services highly profitable.

All this is being driven because care services are now often delivered by companies owned by private equity and run to maximise the amount of public money they can syphon off. But that model requires care to remain a very low-pay sector of the economy. It is worth reminding that representatives of private care providers spoke directly to the Scottish Government more during Covid than the entire state care sector.

It certainly seems that the Scottish Government is signalling that there is no reason that should change, even at the same time, the trade unions are celebrating a breakthrough. Perhaps the voluntary agreement will work effectively, but it is hard not to feel like it isn't meant to.

This is one of the recurring problems with the government in Scotland. It says it wants to create a 'high pay care sector', but given the chance to do that, it tries to create loopholes and get-outs. It wants to claim a breakthrough while largely maintaining the status quo. It has taken a lot of work by trade unions to get this far, and they will rightly want to highlight progress made.

But this is another reason why the government has been bad – civic Scotland has been too fast to celebrate strictly limited wins and not to highlight how many proposals have been watered down. Care workers are led to believe something major has happened, and it is not yet clear that a voluntary scheme will turn out to be it. This risks people feeling misled and disillusioned, growing further.

Once again, the Scottish Government can increase pay levels in the care sector, or it can protect the profits of equity capitalism, which is invested in care services. It cannot do both. With this decision, it seems to want to get credit for two opposing things at once. The risk is that one of them didn't really happen at all.