News

• Workers in London set to strike again
• Pay body rejects minimum rate for low paid social care staff

“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others,” said George Orwell in Animal Farm - and never a truer word was spoken when it comes to social care, writes Natalie Valios.

According to Unison, one of the key reasons that the local government workforce is so poorly paid is because local government has failed to take equality issues seriously. This emerged as one of the main themes in the Local Government Pay Commission’s report.

The National Joint Council, made up of the Employers Organisation and trade unions Unison, the T&G and GMB, set up the Local Government Pay Commission to look into pay and related issues following last year’s first national strike of local government workers since 1989. The industrial action was in response to a 3 per cent pay rise instead of the 6 per cent claim that had been put forward.

But low pay was sidelined in favour of equality in the commission’s report. Home care and residential care form two huge areas of part-time work, and these posts are traditionally overwhelmingly dominated by female staff and very poorly paid. The commission said that equality in local government employment “is a necessity not an option”, and should be treated as a policy priority.

Unison’s head of local government Heather Wakefield said: “If local authorities take the report seriously it’s a wake up call to get to grips with that."

This will be a challenge, said Rob Pinkham, deputy executive director of the Employers’ Organisation. “The commission is saying we could do more about equal pay and close the gender gap. The truth of the matter is it is closing, but we need to do it more quickly and more completely.

“Our problem isn’t that we pay women and men unequally for doing the same work. Our problem is that more women are in low paid occupation than men, so we have to break down occupational segregation," he added.

One of the primary reasons for women taking part-time or lower paid jobs is that they allow them the flexibility to juggle work with motherhood, but the end result is that they can only progress so far up the career ladder. If the solution to inequality is to move more women into higher paid occupations, then flexibility will have to cut across the board far more. “The commission is asking whether we can extend some of these flexibilities up the structure,” said Pinkham. “It’s difficult, but I think it’s 'doable'.”

Minimum rate rejected

Low pay and inequality are naturally interlinked, but the commission was clear that the two must remain separate issues: “Local government contains a number of job categories which are generally low paid throughout the wider economy. It is important to untangle low pay of this nature from issues of pay equality.”

Perhaps part of the problem lies with the fact that there is no agreed definition of what constitutes low pay. And while the unions urged a minimum hourly rate of £6.50 for public sector workers, this was rejected by the commission which said that while it agreed that there were recruitment hotspots for occupations at the lower end of the pay scale, it did not believe this was pervasive enough to justify a general uprating of the minimum rate of pay.

Unison was “disappointed but not despondent”, said Wakefield. “We don’t think they have taken our evidence on low pay as seriously as we would have liked. It’s crazy that local authorities are paying such low wages that tax payers are subsidising it. A large proportion of people wouldn’t have to supplement their income with state benefits if the minimum wage was raised.”

And Bill McKitterick, chairperson of the Association of Directors of Social Services' human resources and training committee, said: “There’s an issue to ensure that social care is recognised as an area where we can’t afford in terms of service quality to always be paying the minimum.”

Employers, on the other hand, welcomed the news. “Benefits are often calculated on family incomes and not just the individual’s and that is not something that employers can take into account,” said Pinkham. “Distribution of income is not a matter for employers, but for the state. Employers can only react to labour markets.”

Pay for unsocial hours 

Tied up with the wranglings over pay is the employers wish for a rethinking on premium payments for those who work unsocial hours. Employers can’t see why they should have to pay more money for people working evenings and weekends if that’s what they want to do: “People want to work all sorts of patterns of hours, some of which fit in well with delivering services, and it doesn’t make sense to pay a premium for them to work the hours they want to,” said Pinkham.

Employers will be pleased then that the commission recommends moving towards a set of national principles for remunerating certain working arrangements in the national agreement, rather than stating the rate at which specified working times should be remunerated.

Graduate development

Another key theme to come out of the report was improving staff training and development, and the commission also encouraged local authorities to introduce or extend their own graduate development schemes.

“The commission agrees with us that training for frontline workers is poor and that investment in training, and better training opportunities have to be part of the future picture,” said Wakefield.

This is another challenge for employers, said Pinkham. “I can’t say how we would do this. The message is that we need to create skills pathways so that employees at the front line can acquire skills.

He said: “Unions want to simply raise wages at the bottom end, but we will price ourselves out of the marketplace. We need to allow them to acquire skills and move into better jobs. It will cost money but hopefully we will get the money from central government.”

Gap between health and social care

The commission raised the point that the earnings gap between local government workers and competitors for the same skills, such as health professionals, has been widening. This perceived disparity in pay and rewards between social care and NHS staff is causing discontent, particularly where they are working together, for example in community care settings.

“We will need to see what 'Agenda for Change' [the new pay and grading system for health] brings about, and then we must seek to ensure that people doing similar jobs within the public sector aren’t on widely differing pay and reward packages,” said Wakefield.

This isn’t as straightforward as it might appear, as differences in weekly working hours and holidays makes it a more complicated matter than just comparing pay rates.

Social workers and other public sector staff are often motivated by the desire to “make a difference”, the commission said, adding “it is important that it is not seen as legitimising lower pay”. But by not raising the minimum wage, this may be exactly how employees are left feeling.

Report of the Local Government Pay Commission