Green Book threat?

Yesterday's news from the GMB (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5gva30hBSvJ4-f9sg6pD_5_X905Zg?docId=N0218091339432377892A) may really have been about the importance of an appearance of radicalism as members are recommended to swallow a cheapening of their pension scheme.



However, on the reasonable assumption that GMB officers did not invent the story, it's worthy of note that our employers have malicious designs upon the sorry remnants of our national conditions of service (and that they appear to have shared this news "in confidence" with our negotiators, presumably so the negotiators can be seen to breach this confidence in order to redeem themselves in the eyes of activists for their conduct of the LGPS talks).



The national agreement for local government workers in England and Wales ("the Green Book") sets a pretty low and basic floor in terms of our core conditions of service. I voted against it in 1997 because I thought it made many of the concessions against which one of our "former partner unions" had taken successful strike action in 1989 - and the big achievement of 1997 (single status) took more than a decade to make progress.



However, national conditions of service in local government were an important achievement of our movement in the twentieth century and we need to preserve a national framework if we are to maximise our collective strength.



I shall be interested to see what is said about this in Bournemouth next week.

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