Union bosses threatened strike action yesterday after a county council sent out dismissal notices to 6,500 social workers, care assistants and cleaners.
Shropshire County Council said that all staff would be sacked on September 30 and immediately rehired, but only if they agreed to a 5.4 per cent pay cut over two years. The pay cuts will start at the chief executive level but do not include staff who are on less than £13,000 a year.
Staff have also been told that they will have their sick pay reduced as part of the council’s efforts to save £76 million over the next three years. Workers who do not accept pay cuts will be dismissed without compensation, according to individual letters that are being sent out.
A spokesman for the county council said that the authority had originally suggested reducing the working week from 37 to 35 hours, but this was rejected by the union. Yesterday Unison officials were advising staff to notify the council that they were rejecting the new terms. If they continued working “under protest”, they could claim for unfair dismissal if the council tried to sack them, said Rick Tudor, the Unison regional officer.
“People are scared and intimidated by the tone of the letter and the way it’s been delivered by the authority,” Mr Tudor said.
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He is hoping that a mass rejection of the new terms would force the council to change its mind before the dismissal notices came into effect. “But we are also holding a strike ballot which could see workers take industrial action in the near future,” Mr Tudor added.
Jackie Kelly, head of organisational development at the county council, said that because earlier negotiations failed, Shropshire had tried to make changes to terms and conditions to avoid large-scale redundancies and protect public services.