Thousands of Glasgow council workers face being sacked and reappointed under less favourable terms in one of the UK’s biggest ever “fire-and-rehire” exercises, after union negotiations broke down once again this week.
About 23,000 workers – all of the council’s non-teaching staff – first heard they were affected last week when talks between the SNP-led council and the GMB, Unison and Unite unions fell apart. Those negotiations concerned a new pay and grading system designed to resolve historical pay equality issues. Unison refused to ballot its members on an offer that would see pay cuts for 11% of council employees, prompting the council to begin issuing fire-and-rehire letters.
The beginning of this week saw the fire-and-rehire plans temporarily paused when Unison returned to the negotiating table. But when discussions collapsed again midweek, the council’s leader, Ricky Bell, suggested Unison members could still be fired and rehired while negotiations with GMB and Unite continued. Unison said it was seeking advice on the legality of its members being treated differently based on union membership.
An emergency motion by Green councillors to block the scheme was also rejected on Thursday by the council’s City Administration Committee, with the Glasgow Greens co-leader Anthony Carroll saying the city was “facing a genuine cliff-edge of one of the largest fire-and-rehire schemes in the UK being implemented”.
“We are angry and shocked that the SNP administration moved to fire and rehire all 23,000 staff last week despite its own government’s position,” he said, calling on Bell to personally rule out the move.
The deputy first minister, Jenny Gilruth, reaffirmed the Scottish government’s view on fire-and-rehire last week, saying “our position is that such a practice does not align with the principles and expected practice of fair work.”
On Friday, Gilruth chaired mediation talks between the council and Unison, securing a further pause to fire and rehire for the weekend. But the union said it must be taken off the table permanently for negotiations to be “productive and in good faith”.
For those affected, the week’s tumultuous events have caused anger and uncertainty. “It’s been handled terribly,” said one worker affected. “It’s like a rollercoaster ride of anxiety; we can’t plan for anything and nobody knows what’s going to happen next. We are all furious about how we’ve been treated.”
One person close to the negotiations said the unions were particularly aggrieved by “the blatant cynicism” of the council’s fire-and-rehire plans, which were communicated to staff in letters sent at the end of September, meaning a required 12-week notice period expires shortly before the practice becomes illegal in January under UK-wide changes to employment law.
“We’re talking about a so-called progressive administration who have spent years taking credit for ending the equal pay dispute,” they said. “It beggars belief they would treat workers who are already undervalued and overworked like this.”
In 2019, the council agreed to pay more than £500m to 8,000 mostly female workers who had been discriminated against by unequal pay structures. As seen in Birmingham in 2023, the authority risks financial ruin if it cannot agree a new pay structure after almost a decade of negotiation.
“We know equal pay is still an issue local authorities across Britain need to solve,” one union source said. “Council workers everywhere will surely be looking at what’s happening here and feeling very worried about what might happen to them next.”
Glasgow city council agreed in earlier negotiations to protect the pay of those facing wage cuts for an extra year, but Unison said they wanted a further year of protection alongside a number of other concessions.
Bell said in a statement: “I’m deeply disappointed that, despite the council putting a further year of pay protection on the table, Unison has once again chosen not to put this offer to its members. Taken together with improvements made since August, this represents a package well over £100m in extra pay for our staff.”
Bell said some of Unison’s remaining demands were “simply unworkable”.
Unison’s Glasgow city branch said: “We want workers who have waited decades for equal pay to receive every penny they are due. But we will not abandon workers facing devastating losses, or the thousands who still don’t know their outcome.”
They called for “a properly funded settlement that delivers equal pay without leaving thousands of other workers behind”.
