Unison and Rail Unions to Picket the Conference Over Settlement Rules
Britain’s biggest union demonstrates outside the conference today, demanding care workers be exempted from the Home Secretary’s settlement plans, under which the wait for indefinite leave to remain rises from five years to ten for most workers and to fifteen for those who arrived on health and social care visas. Striking outsourced rail workers protest alongside them. Unison wants the five-year route kept for all skilled workers.
The rules would apply to people already living here who have not yet secured settlement, which is what turns an immigration policy into a broken promise: staff recruited to fill a staffing crisis on one set of terms, told years later to wait a decade longer. Those who have relied on benefits for more than twelve months would wait twenty years. The comparison the unions keep making is the sharpest weapon they have — Unison’s Debbie Rowden noted that “the government wants to give bankers a three-year route to settlement, but social care workers will be kept waiting for 15 years”, and that ministers had described such work as “low waged and low skilled”. A motion demanding withdrawal passed the Trades Union Congress unanimously this month, more than a hundred Labour MPs have signed a letter seeking an exemption, and the Prime Minister has said he would rather keep the five-year wait. Watch whether he says so from the platform.