A delegate meeting of nursery nurses voted overwhelmingly at the end of February to request a ballot for strike action. Unison will decide whether to endorse this request at a meeting on 6 March, after which local authorities will be notified of the union's intention to carry out the ballot.
The nursery nurses' vote followed the breakdown of talks by a working party that included representatives of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA), Unison and the GMB and TGWU unions. The working party met three times, in October and November 2002 and finally in January this year.
Carol Ball, chair of Unison's Scottish nursery nurse working party, said that after pressing Scotland's employers to sit down and look at the issues, Unison had been presented with proposals that 'took us precisely nowhere'. She said, 'Nursery nurses are rapidly coming to the end of their tether. We feel we have wasted six months.'
The working party was convened to discuss a pay claim submitted by Unison to all of Scotland's 32 local authorities in February 2002. Unison decided to submit the claim to each local authority individually in an attempt to achieve a Scotland-wide re-grading for nursery nurses on a local basis.
The union had put in the same pay claim to the Scottish Joint Negotiating Council, which includes representatives of unions and local authorities, in September 2001. But CoSLA rejected it on the grounds that it did not have the right arrangements in place to deal with a national pay claim on behalf of any specific set of workers, and that nursery nurses' pay and conditions should be tackled as part of the single status agreement for all council employees, under which each local authority carries out its own evaluation of jobs to harmonise payscales.
The single status agreement, originally intended to be implemented by 1 April 2002, has been subject to delays. Unison has argued that it is not appropriate for the specific issues around nursery nurses' pay and conditions to be dealt with via single status, given that the single status job evaluation scheme is generic and might not give nursery nurses' roles full recognition.
Ms Ball told Nursery World Scotland, 'They've stalled us. I think they wanted to get to a point where local authorities are in a better position to carry out job evaluation under the single status agreement.'
She said CoSLA had sent out a questionnaire to all local authorities asking them whether the working party should only deal with nursery nurses' terms and conditions, rather than pay. There was no consensus over whether the working party could discuss national job remits or grades, but the councils agreed that the working party could discuss a job description that could be sent out to local authorities.
Ms Ball said, 'We said that was very disappointing and doesn't begin to discuss any of the claim.' Unison's claim put forward draft job descriptions for the roles of nursery nurse, senior nursery nurse, deputy head and head of establishment, with salaries ranging from around 16,000 to around Pounds 33,000.
CoSLA expressed 'extreme disappointment' at Unison's decision to ballot for strike action. The chair of the working group, councillor James Mutter, said, 'We have been working closely with the trade unions involved to try to discuss some of their concerns on career structure and pay.'
