A strike by social workers about caseloads, pay and IT systems has been called off.
More than 200 social workers in Kirklees were expected to strike today over a long-running dispute about working conditions in the council.
However, the action was suspended yesterday as the union and the council agreed to enter talks about how the dispute could be ended.
When the strike motion was passed by union members earlier this month, the deadline for strike action was 6 February. The local Unison branch has agreed to extend it until 6 March as the council and union go to “joint conciliation” to try to bring the dispute to an end, The Huddersfield Examiner has reported.
Kirklees council was rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted late last year, and the director of children’s services left at the start of this year in a mutual agreement with the council.
Eleanor Brazil was appointed children’s commissioner at the council following Ofsted’s inspection to oversee improvements and report to the government on whether the services should be run by an independent trust.
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Have Kirklees been reading these pages and seen the overwhelming support our collegues have had???
Only asking . . . . . . . .
We can but hope.
Stay strong Kirklees, don’t be fobbed off with more false promises of improvements.
Let’s hope Kirklees Council will start taking these issues seriously now that Ofsted has highlighted many of them in their recent inspection. Unison members have been raising the same issues for many years but they have been falling on deaf ears.
This is ridiculous, expected to work with insufficient resources but achieve good outcomes. Unison should be taking legal action surely.
It is the dead hand of paid officials who in return for “talks” pulled the plug on the action and then told the branch officials and the members the action was off in a text book example of the member led union. This at a time when the government is waiting in the wings to privatise another social work service. It is shameful and tactically pitiful but the Kirklees councillors will be grinning like cheshire cats as they know the Tories will soon take the beleaguered service out of their control
Tories 1 Kirklees workers 0