Glasgow to Dismiss and Re-engage 23,000 Staff on New Contracts
Glasgow City Council has issued dismissal letters to all 23,000 of its non-teaching staff, who will be re-engaged on new contracts from New Year’s Day after equal-pay talks with three unions collapsed. Individual notices follow next week. The GMB and Unite agreed to ballot their members; Unison withdrew support, which the council said came with “no substantive reason”. The notices would be withdrawn if all three unions ballot.
The timing is what makes this national rather than municipal: the United Kingdom government intends to outlaw fire-and-rehire, and a council run by the Scottish National Party is using it weeks beforehand. Scottish Labour’s leader Michael Marra called it “straight out the Tory playbook” and said it beggared belief that the council was “threatening to railroad through fire and rehire before it is made illegal”. The unions are not aligned — Unison’s Mandy McDowall said staff would not “be bounced into a shoddy deal by bosses trying to bully them with arbitrary deadlines”, while Unite’s Graham McNabb promised “the full force of Unite”. Underneath sits an equal-pay liability that has run for years and has already cost Glasgow hundreds of millions. Watch the ballots, and whether Holyrood intervenes.