At 5pm today, if Hammersmith and Fulham Council in London has its way, a group of refuseniks who have not signed new employment contracts will leave their place of work for the last time.
They will be deemed to have put themselves out of work because they oppose the council's changes to flexi-time and entitlements, including maternity pay and dependency leave.
Needless to say, the terms are inferior to the ones that expire today in Tory leader David Cameron's model borough.
Perhaps also needless to say, senior management are not affected.
Although Hammersmith and Fulham says most staff have signed the new deal, if you can call it that, it is understood that only a handful of employees in the statutory approved mental health service have agreed to it.
Hammersmith's treatment of its staff is redolent of the way the municipal employees were dealt with in Robert Tressell's seminal work on class struggle, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
In the fictional Mugsborough Council, the elected representatives drove down the pay and conditions of the corporation "workmen" to align them with the poorly remunerated private sector. It was not fair to the ratepayers, it was agreed, that the council employees should enjoy superior terms.
There were beneficiaries, however: senior management, such as the borough engineer, were looked after.
For Mugsborough, read Hammersmith. Only Tressell's work was written in the Edwardian era and published just before the First World War.
Where this leaves Hammersmith and Fulham's mental health and social services in 2009 is anybody's guess. But if were a service user I might be looking forward to 1 October with a sense of foreboding.
I am one of the AMHPs in Hammersmith & Fulham who have very, very reluctantly signed the agreement letter. However, like many of my colleagues I will be looking for another job - two of my colleagues have already found new jobs!
This is on top of an ongoing battle to get parity for social work senior practitioners and managers in the CMHTs with our nursing colleagues - Unison first raised this officially with management in November 2007. Although management have agreed in principle to restoring parity, the pay increase has to be self-funding through cuts elsewhere to the mental health budget!
What really gets my goat is that if Unison had listened to us earlier, we could have used our statutory role as leverage in this dispute, but they haven't made the most of the strength that we potentially had.
Unison also played into mamagement hands by handing into management agreement letters signed "under protest and without prejudice" instead of holding on to them. But at least the Unison branch made an effort, which is more than could be said for the London Region, whose response was truly pathetic.
And the icing on the cake? Geoff Alltimes, the chief executive responsible for ensuring the new terms and conditions are implemented is an ex-social worker! See his thank-you to staff extraced from the council intranet below!
"Just a quick note to thank staff for signing to accept the council's offer of new terms and conditions of employment which came into effect today. The level of acceptance was overwhelming. Only a handful of people in the end chose not sign up and are therefore no longer employed by the council.
"The council had very sound business reasons for modernising employee terms and conditions. This outcome will assist us in our aim of becoming a modern and forward thinking organisation that delivers the highest levels of services and resident satisfaction, as well as improving our business efficiency.
"Thank you once again and we can now look forward to a smooth implementation.
From Geoff Alltimes, Chief Executive"
Where are his social work values now?