Secret Tory Guide On How To Sack 100,000 Council Staff Revealed

[cashinmattress]

Link

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.

Advertisement - article continues below »

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.”

It will be boom time for the repo men and insovency conveyors of the UK!

[Harry Monk]

I signed on this afternoon and I said to the woman who signed me on "At least you're in a boom industry" and she said "I'm being made redundant in April".

I imagine that next year I will go to sign on but instead of being signed on by a clerk, I will have a webcam chat with somebody in Bangalore who will ask me "How's the job searching going?" except at a tenth of the cost.

[thecrashingisles]

I imagine that next year I will go to sign on but instead of being signed on by a clerk, I will have a webcam chat with somebody in Bangalore who will ask me "How's the job searching going?" except at a tenth of the cost.

[Fudge]

Link

It will be boom time for the repo men and insovency conveyors of the UK!

I would love to read this guide if anyone has it.

[Stay Beautiful]

My local council love getting private companies in to conduct reports on all manner of issues and paying them thousands to do so. Their conclusions always seem to end up "stating the bleeding obvious"

[Fudge]

My local council love getting private companies in to conduct reports on all manner of issues and paying them thousands to do so. Their conclusions always seem to end up "stating the bleeding obvious"

We all know what the Tories want to do for ideological reasons and for their mates in big business and that is privatise public services.

It wont be any cheaper and it wont be any better but it will transfer tax payers money into profits for their mates private companies.

Bit like whats happening with the banks.

[interestrateripoff]

I signed on this afternoon and I said to the woman who signed me on "At least you're in a boom industry" and she said "I'm being made redundant in April".

I imagine that next year I will go to sign on but instead of being signed on by a clerk, I will have a webcam chat with somebody in Bangalore who will ask me "How's the job searching going?" except at a tenth of the cost.

To be honest you can go further, if most people have a laptop with a webcam you can sign on from home without even leaving your house and speak to lowest wage worker in the world at the time.

[Democorruptcy]

I signed on this afternoon and I said to the woman who signed me on "At least you're in a boom industry" and she said "I'm being made redundant in April".

I imagine that next year I will go to sign on but instead of being signed on by a clerk, I will have a webcam chat with somebody in Bangalore who will ask me "How's the job searching going?" except at a tenth of the cost.

Are there any cameras where you sign on? If there are start wearing a disguise. They might have software to cross match people seen there with people withdrawing cash at ATMs.

[RufflesTheGuineaPig]

I signed on this afternoon and I said to the woman who signed me on "At least you're in a boom industry" and she said "I'm being made redundant in April".

I imagine that next year I will go to sign on but instead of being signed on by a clerk, I will have a webcam chat with somebody in Bangalore who will ask me "How's the job searching going?" except at a tenth of the cost.

Except that while the person in Bangalore costs a tenth of what you were paying the UK worker, the UK worker is not entitled to a redundancy payout, housing benefit, job-seekers allowance, free council tax, free dental care and prescriptions, plus they aren't paying that 40% of their income in tax anymore. If they have a large family they will probably net receive more than when they were working.

Making public sector employees redundant doesn't save any money unless you can get them a job a in the private sector straight afterwards. And giving them early retirement is even worse.

[Harry Monk]

Are there any cameras where you sign on? If there are start wearing a disguise. They might have software to cross match people seen there with people withdrawing cash at ATMs.

Astonishing as it may seem, even people on JSA are allowed to withdraw cash from an ATM

[shipbuilder]

Anyone running a public service should be able to come up with a 'dossier' on how to improve processes and efficiency within their service, improving services while reducing cost. Instead this is all they can come up with - showing them to be utterly incapable of managing - they should be sacked themselves.

Edited December 1, 2010 by shipbuilder

[SarahBell]

The other view of this is "Govt prepares councils to deal with cuts in a sensible and legal way"

[Democorruptcy]

Astonishing as it may seem, even people on JSA are allowed to withdraw cash from an ATM

I was picturing this chap reading a newspaper sat at the side of his PC as each image was cross matched. He gets the occasional bleep for someone going to an ATM but ignores it. Then when a certain person's image is fed in the system it goes berserk - sirens sounding , red lights flashing and a printer spewing out all the transactions as they had been withdrawing from the ATM every day for months

[Bloo Loo]

We all know what the Tories want to do for ideological reasons and for their mates in big business and that is privatise public services.

It wont be any cheaper and it wont be any better but it will transfer tax payers money into profits for their mates private companies.

Bit like whats happening with the banks.

the idea is that as we are short £150 Billion pounds every year. that services are to be cut.

Its not Tory, its maths.

As for the Banks, it was LABOUR that bailed them IIRC.

[dissident junk]

Why don't they just bring back half day closing in many public sector departments?

Or just shut offices one day a week, and make the first tranche of savings that way?

There are a load of things you can do before you cut this kind of level of jobs, and slowly over time, with a frozen recruitment policy, you reduce numbers without having to throw people on the dole.

[Harry Monk]

To be honest you can go further, if most people have a laptop with a webcam you can sign on from home without even leaving your house and speak to lowest wage worker in the world at the time.

Or just on the phone, initially communicating with a robot that isn't paid anything at all...

"If you have worked, press 1. If you have not worked, press 2. If you would like to spend ten minutes being unable to understand one single word of English spoken in an obscure dialect from the Indian sub-continent, please hold".