Workplace reforms should be built by workers

Glasgow City Council’s plan to fire-and-rehire 23,000 non-teaching school workers is apparently back on the table after public pressure forced a pause to the plans in recent weeks and in the light of the UK Government planning to make the practice outright illegal (it may come as a surprise to some that it isn’t already). The Scottish Government has stated that they consider the practice to be outwith their Fair Work Principles, which begs the questions of why those principles are not being followed, or why they can’t be?

The chances are great that workers that are rehired to do essentially the same job as they were doing before will be taken back on substantially weaker terms. Lower pay, fewer overtime rights and a break in term-of-service leading to weaker employment rights are not uncommon during situations like this.

There may also be a substantial risk of discrimination that absolutely must be guarded against. Another unrelated story in the Herald this morning discusses discriminatory hiring practices that make it difficult for young mothers to ask for greater flexibility in the workplace or even outright say that some employers view them as a burden. It would be a bitter irony if a fire-and-rehire that has the outwardly stated aim of redressing historic equal pay disputes ends up discriminating especially against women in a different way.

There is a deeper warning to this dispute too and that lands on the Government’s proposals for Local Government Reform.

If the proposal as initially mooted went ahead then it would effectively dissolve all local authorities and could lead to the firing and rehiring of all of their staff right across Scotland. It’s not clear from the proposals whether or not staff would be hired by the new Regional Councils or by the new District Councils but in either case there is the possibility of people ending up being employed by the same government authority but coming from different sets of pay and conditions than their now-colleague working in the same job. If they are moved “upwards” to the Regional level, there’s the chance that they could be “doubling” work meaning that they could be faced with competing several other people for a single vacancy that used to be the old job for each of them. This doesn’t even account for the possibility of the one person being rehired not getting a substantial uprating of their pay and conditions to reflect that the job they are still doing now has a wider remit and greater responsibility.

If the case of Glasgow’s non-teaching staff is the current warning and the case of care workers facing something similar a few years ago during the National Care Service debacle was the previous recent warning, then it is well past time for the Scottish Government to heed them ahead of things like local government reform. The prospect of “fire-and-rehire” is precisely why we formulated our own local government reforms in a way that would avoid the mass firing-and-rehiring of workers right across Scotland all at the same time. Under our scheme, the new local Development Councils would be an additional layer of local government that would “pull down” powers from the current Local Authorities in a way that the staff behind the administration of the powers would stay in play but merely point to Development Councillors for instruction rather than Local Authority Councils. Only when the local layer of government was in place, bedded in and well developed would Local Authorities start to consider the prospect of gradually merging upwards into Regional Councils and would do so by harmonising pay and conditions on a national level across affected staff.

The reforms Scotland must undertake – from equal pay to local democracy – are important and must happen, but they cannot happen at the expense of the workers that they are supposed to protect and support. Those workers also must not be cast in a role of merely opposing changes that are being forced upon them but should be at the heart of building up those changes so that everyone has already bought into them before they reach the approval table. Had this happened in Glasgow, we likely would not be seeing this present dispute. It certainly should not be repeated during reforms to come, possibly in the near future.