It seems Unison members have voted for strike action over pay. Will you be going on strike? What do you think of the 2.45% offer? It seems pretty measly to me, considering the rising cost of food and fuel.

 Strike action appears the only way to bring the government back down to earth.  They are being totally unrealistic about inflation and using government workers as a porn in their desperate bid to keep it at thier target level of 2%.  Obviously that is a dream and the sooner they realise that the better.  Why should hard working council employees only get 2.4% when most other workers are getting 4.5%.

I don't agree ethically with withdrawing services to the most vulnerable - so will probably do what I did last time and that is work and donate the pay to Charity.

And if there is an increase to the original offer on the back of a strike will you accept the new deal or will you continue to give the differebce to charity? 

Does it help the vulnerable people that the Council is not longer an attractive place to work? That fewer people want to be Social Workers because it is such a challenging job for so little money? Is this what I am expected to tell the kids on my caseload when they complain that they do not see me often enough because we do not have enough staff to take on cases?

With the increasing transfer of direct services to private companies at lower wages with poorer conditions, it is hard for local authoriy officers, some of whom must have taken part in this process to seek to protect a better set of conditions in the face of reductive change elsewhere. This change is also going to affect service users and PAs with local authorities looking for savins on hourly rates. The pension time bomb was raised with Councillors as far back as the CCT process when contracts achieved savings at the expense of pensions for poor workers. You reap what you sow.

Strikes discredit both sides and are never acceptable when the impact is on someone who cannot copw without support - but having had no pay rise for two years, inflationary or incremental, it is difficult to feel much sypmathy.