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So much for David Cameron’s ‘Accountability and Transparency’ Mantra!
Secret Tory guide on how to sack 100,000 council staff revealed
COUNCIL chiefs have been handed a guide on how to sack 100,000 staff as savage Tory cuts swing into action.
The shock document outlines sneaky ways of getting rid of public sector workers and warns bosses to prepare for a bitter war with the unions and widespread industrial unrest.
Secretly drawn up by Tory town hall leaders, the 14-page manual tells how to slash services, cut wages and shed staff.
It recommends ditching paid workers in community services such as libraries, sports centres and museums and replacing them with volunteers.
The dossier also suggests sending staff on unpaid career breaks or sabbaticals, imposing pay freezes and axing entire workforces then rehiring them on lower pay and worse terms.
And it tells how to sack staff without union involvement.
The paper, created by the Conservative-run Local Government Employers’ group, says: “Councils will be facing a severe budget squeeze.
“The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development predicts that up to 100,000 jobs will be lost by 2013–14.
“Councils will be busy managing redundancies, restructuring and the possibility of industrial action.” Entitled Reducing Workforce Costs, the paper, leaked to the Mirror, warns bosses to take a hard-line approach with unions – who have vowed to fight the job losses. It says: “Make sure you have high-level human resources specialists who are ‘doers’, good negotiators, with the resilience to persist in the face of many challenges and difficulties.”
The document has sparked fury among workers. Unite’s national officer Peter Allenson said: “Tory-run Local Government Employers know the unions will stand up for their members, so they secretly produced a blueprint to bully council workers into accepting cuts. Workers up and down the land are being threatened with the sack unless they swallow the changes. We fear councils will try to replace workers who provide vital public services with volunteers and even conscript people on benefits.
“Unite is demanding councils tear up the manual and negotiate constructively with the unions to deal with the Government’s cuts. Our members are furious and we are talking to them about a ballot for industrial action.” The manual suggests short-term and long-term ways of slashing jobs.
In the short-term it recommends recruitment freezes, using more casual and agency staff and “deleting” posts as they become vacant.
Longer-term measures include urging staff to take unpaid leave, using interns and apprentices more to get skilled workers at “an affordable cost” and cutting discretionary overtime.
But they warn if those measures don’t work then redundancies, early retirement and pay cuts will be forced upon employees.
The leaked manual comes just days after Communities Secretary Eric Pickles dismissed fears of widescale job losses from town halls across the country.
He said predictions were “scaremongering” which were based on calculations “put together on the back of a fag packet”. But Labour warned rising unemployment levels were becoming a “real and present” danger to the UK.
Shadow work secretary Douglas Alexander said the Government was “complacent” about the risks of a jobless recovery.
He added: “In many areas, the local council or the local hospital are the biggest employers.
“We don’t just need to avoid a jobless recovery across the country, we need to prevent one in any community.
“Otherwise, the risk is that we don’t see jobs emerging in those areas and a hugely expensive and socially damaging trend of rising long-term unemployment can’t be reversed.”
The LGE said: “This is advice and guidance for employers which is not binding. Councils are individual employers which make their own decisions.”