North Lanarkshire Unions



A regular reader has been in touch to ask why the trade unions have had so little to say about the big bonuses paid chief officials in North Lanarkshire Council.

Now I can't answer that to be honest although I suspect the bonus payments were very well known to trade unions because when I was Unison's Head of Local of Government most chief officials, including the majority of chief executives, were union members - members of Unison as a matter of fact.

Part of my duties as Head of Local Government involved negotiating the pay and conditions of all chief officials in Scotland, just like other groups, via the collective bargaining machinery established with COSLA.

But the Performance Management Scheme (PMS) in North Lanarkshire sounds like a local agreement to me and I suspect it was never approved or authorised by the Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC) for Chief Officials in Scotland.

I can say for sure that such a scheme would never have received my blessing in my time as Secretary to the JNC because if you ask me, it treats NLC chief officials in a fundamentally different way to the rest of the council workforce.  

And Single Status was all about bringing the local government workforce together under one common set of conditions of service, not treating certain groups more favourably than others.  

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