The claim came last week after Unison member nursery nurses voted overwhelmingly in favour of all-out strike action to get their starting salary increased from 10,000 to around 14,000. About 70 per cent took part in the union's ballot and 81 per cent of those voted in favour of the strike.
Unison insisted it wanted to see a nationally negotiated settlement to the strike and said that CoSLA was 'disgraceful' for prolonging the strike by failing to negotiate at this level.
However, local councils have prepared offers which could substantially improve on CoSLA's recommended pay rise of between 11 per cent and 16 per cent last year, said Anna Fowlie, CoSLA's team leader, children and young people. 'A lot of councils are ready and waiting with proposals - that's what the vast majority of councils are telling us.
'The evidence is that local authorities are ready and waiting to deal with this, but there seems to be a false hope that they are going to get something better (if they hold out for national negotiations), when some of the individual councils have offered better than the recommendation Cosla put forward.'
Unison maintains that its agreement to negotiate locally no longer applies because councils have failed to complete job evaluations necessary for the grading review.
Carol Ball, chair of Unison's nursery nurses working group, said this evaluation was supposed to be complete by April 2002 and now the extended deadline of April 2004 was going to be missed by most councils.
However, Ms Fowlie said that April 2004 was a target, not a deadline, and the union understood this during negotiations. Meanwhile, the evaluation process was well underway, she said. 'Councils are all on the way. We are getting councils to give nursery nurses a priority in the job evaluation.'
She said individual councils that had settled the dispute, including Stirling, Perth and Kinross, South Lanarkshire, Aberdeen, Shetland and the Highlands, showed that nursery nurses could get more than Cosla's recommendation, and pay would rise further still as the evaluation process eliminated the gender pay gap.
Ms Fowlie added that another reason Unison should also negotiate locally was because the nursery nurse role differed between councils.
She believed that while some councils employed nursery nurses in traditional roles in nursery schools, some employed them in children's centres and new community schools, where the role would require co-ordination with social services and health services. These extra responsibilities, she believed, should be recognised with increased pay.
But Ms Ball said the idea that nursery nurses did different jobs from council to council was 'rubbish'. 'Nursery nurses' jobs are determined by 13 care standards, and a national curriculum document that the executive has downloaded to all councils dictates much of the activities in nurseries.'
She said that although there was some variation because of community priorities, like teachers, nursery nurses essentially did the same job throughout the country.
With both sides so entrenched it is likely Scotland will see its first all-out strike among childcare workers.
Unison branches were due to meet earlier this week to discuss the strategy for taking industrial action.
'We can really more or less say the strategy is action. The nursery nurses have said what they want to do. That will happen anyway, regardless of the meeting,' Ms Ball said.
