Picket lines 'solid' for second day of council strike » Education » 24dash.com

More council workers joined the second day of a strike over pay today, closing thousands of schools, town halls, libraries and leisure centres, and disrupting rubbish collections and other services across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, union leaders claimed.

Unison said half a million workers including teaching assistants, care workers, librarians, environmental health officers, building inspectors and social workers continued with the walkout in protest at a 2.45% pay offer.

General secretary Dave Prentis said: "After yesterday's strong showing, picket lines up and down the country have today remained solid and are even growing in some regions.

"The resolve of local government workers is hardening, particularly in Wales, where there is evidence of intimidation of some of our members.
Public support is on our side, so the employers must realise they have a fight on their hands.

"With inflation at an 11 year high and set to rise further, local government staff and their families cannot take another year of pay cuts. The employers need only dip into their £11 billion reserves to end this dispute - they do not have to resort to cutting services or raising council tax."

Unison claimed that councils were "wasting" millions of pounds of local taxpayers' money on agency and temporary staff.

Initial returns from Freedom of Information requests suggested that local councils were spending at least £800 million a year on consultants and another £1.5 billion a year on agency staff, it was claimed.

Mr Prentis said: "Local government employers say they cannot afford to give staff more than a below inflation 2.45% pay offer, yet they are wasting millions on agency fees and consultants every year."

Employers said they believed only 100,000 workers joined the strike yesterday.

The Conservatives said official figures showed that in the first 11 months of Gordon Brown's premiership there were almost three times as many days lost to strike action as there were in the same period in the previous year, under Tony Blair.

An average of 84,000 working days were lost to strikes every month since Mr Brown became Prime Minister, equivalent to over one million days a year, said the Tories.

This is more than four times the number of days lost to strikes in 1997, and almost three times as many as under Tony Blair in the final year of his premiership, said Shadow Business Secretary Alan Duncan.

The new figures, covering July 2007 to May 2008, do not include the estimated one million days being lost this week due to strikes by local government workers, resulting in schools, sports centres and museums closing, and disrupting refuse and recycling collections, he said.

"Gordon Brown has already shown great weakness with repeated policy U-turns in the face of opposition. With the Labour party now totally reliant on union funding to avoid bankruptcy, union barons clearly believe they have only to lead a wave of strikes to force our feeble Prime Minister into yet another U-turn.

"Unless Gordon Brown finds the bottle to confront his union paymasters, we could be in for a long summer of discontent."