A better deal is needed for London's public workers
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Your support makes all the difference.The Trade Union would be the last people to admit it, at least publicly, but the best service they could perform for their members would be to press for the break-up of the national pay bargaining structures that so dominate the landscape of public-sector pay. The teachers' strike in London this week and the firefighters' continuing action are the latest symptoms of a problem that has been too long neglected; how to recruit and retain public-service workers in a capital city where the average house price is now £250,000.
It is not a new issue, of course, and the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has tried to raise the profile of the problem, which, as any hospital manager or police recruitment officer will readily attest, is more acute than ever. London prices are, on average, about 7 per cent more expensive than the national average; with services, on average, 13 per cent more expensive; and rented property about 50 per cent more costly. Much the same could be said of most of the south-east region.
The answer to the problem is not, as London's teachers have found, to rely on a crude, inadequate and often frozen "London weighting" to redress the problem, but to move the general rates of public-sector pay in London and the south-east up towards something like a market rate, while moderating the growth of pay in areas where shortages of labour are far less severe.
That can only be done by local managers dealing with union representatives at a local level, and it is, of course, the natural corollary of the move towards decentralisation slowly taking place in the National Health Service and the education system, with the growth of foundation hospitals and specialist self-governing schools.
The nurses, teachers and firefighters would do well to examine the case of the train drivers, whose national bargaining structure was ended with privatisation and the break-up of the industry in 1996, but who have proceeded to win themselves some extremely handsome awards. A firefighter's or police officer's salary goes much further in Lincoln than it does in London; it is strange that our unions find that such an obvious truth so difficult to cope with.
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