Council helps itself to employees' pay

Now, tempting as I am sure it will be to some to write this post off as the special pleadings of a featherbedded public sector worker, do please stick with it. Any worker could potentially find themselves in a similar position.

At the end of last month, we finally got the pay award that was due from April, the delay being due to some very protracted negotiations (well actually some protracted stalling from the national employers).

Only several hundred employees didn't - the reason supposedly being that they had previously been overpaid a year previously when last year's pay award was applied. The Council took it upon itself to simply withhold people's pay on the basis of a "maybe" People weren't told this until they enquired - no explanation, no justification.

Now people are starting to have deductions made from their pay for these supposed overpayments, but still no explanation of these overpayments has been forthcoming. People have been given no opportunity to challenge the decision that an overpayment has occurred, nor to challenge the decision that there is a legal right to recover.

Needless to say, the union is on the case. We are disputing the Council's right to act in this arrogant and high-handed manner, and we are demanding that employees are given the right to challenge these decisions before money which they have earned and are relying on is snatched away from them. Now that they are being challenged they are starting to back down.

John Barradell, the new Council CEO, places a high premium on good customer service. But of course, if any user of council services were to be treated like this, there would be hell to pay.

Expecting council workers to show respect for service users starts with some respect being shown to them. Over this issue, Brighton and Hove City Council has shown its employees no respect whatsoever.


PS - if you find your pay packet suddenly "light" because of an alleged overpayment, challenge it quickly. Demand an explanation, and demand the right to negotiate around whether and how it should be recovered. Use your employer's grievance procedure and get the union involved if you've got one. What the employer won't tell you is that they may not have the legal right to recover the money at all, if you received it in good faith and had no reason to believe it was wrong.

Make sure you get advice quickly!

Respect Conference

Reports of conference are available on various blogs which I link to. For example here and here.

The official report is here.

I just wanted to give a few impressions as a delegate.

The positives are that Respect is on the up, growing in membership and hopeful that we can increase our Parliamentary representation, by adding Salma Yaqoob and Abjol Miah to George Galloway. Respect remains the strongest left current electorally (the Greens have more councillors but as yet no-one in Parliament).

On the downside we remain small and active in a comparitively small number of places. This really brings us to the nub of the biggest and most controversial questions facing us - if we can only win in a few places, who do we work with on the rest of the left and on what basis?

There were a number of motions about this at Conference, none of which were mutually exclusive and all of which were passed. But this paper unanimity does mask sharp disagreements about what the words really mean for different people

One group, which supported No2EU at the Euro-elections and is sceptical about the Greens, want to see Respect orient towards the new coalition which has just been announced between the Socialist Party and Communist Party of Britain.

Another group, around the leadership, is dismissive of No2EU and the latest coalition and sees co-operation with the Greens as a bigger priority. In Birmingham this has borne fruit with the Greens deciding not to stand against Salma Yaqoob after she supported the Greens at the Euro-elections, and a possibility of a similar deal in Manchester.

Socialist Resistance does not see the approaches as needing to be counterposed. We want to see votes for credible candidates to the left of New Labour in as many places as possible, be it left Greens, explicit socialists or indeed Labour lefts like McDonnell and Corbyn.

The left's priority must be to mount as big a challenge as possible at the general election to counter the swing to the right (and the far right) which is currently a very real prospect.

We cannot afford the luxury of bickering.

Hove Park School - the new blackboard jungle?

Last week, there was a distressing incident in which a boy was stabbed by another boy at Hove Park School, which my own child attends.

I do not claim to know all of the circumstances of this incident - I expect all of those to come out in the investigation which will follow.

What I do want to comment on is how this incident has been seized upon by the local media to sensationalise the incident and to try to paint this school as some den of iniquity. The Argus has also implicitly attacked the management of the school as having failed to act appropriately, as having not treated the incident seriously, and as trying to sweep it under the carpet. In fact nothing could be further from the truth.

The school suspended the alleged perpetrator, called the police and, remarkably, printed a letter which was taken home by every pupil on the very day of the incident in order that parents would know what had happened and that the safety of nearly all the other pupils was in no way compromised. So much for "sweeping it under the carpet". Of course, this measure was not good enough for one parent, who bemoaned "having to find out about it through a letter", though his suggestions as to what the school could have done to get the information to all parents that quickly is not recorded.

Another implied sin according to the Argus was that, horror of horrors, lessons carried on normally while this happened. Again no indication is forthcoming as to what would have been a sensible alternative course of action

Of course, the Argus could also not resist throwing in another mention of HPS's exam results (which they had covered previously), to complete the exercise in dog-whistle politics.

So far, so predictable. What is worse is that a local councillor, Amy Kennedy, has decided to go along with the wave of hysteria, and in fact has helped to make it worse. So far we've had Cllr Kennedy saying that the school should be put into special measures (huh??), unfounded claims that behaviour problems are not dealt with at the school, and wild comparisons to The Bronx!
(Such a comparison is of course soooh last century...the correct point of overblown comparison from the US is of course Baltimore, in these post-Wire days.)

Would it be too much to expect that the school should get some support and acknowledgement for the steps it is taking, rather than being undermined at every turn by people who seem determined to label it a failing school?

Hundreds protest against downland sell-off

Thanks to Dave Bangs for this report on the protest in Worthing which I mentioned last week.


STOP THE CISSBURY SELL-OFF PRESS RELEASE SATURDAY NOVEMBER 14

HUNDREDS of residents have protested in Worthing against controversial council plans to sell off downland next to Cissbury Ring.

250 to 300 people gathered at the Coombe Rise car park in Findon Valley last Saturday November 14th for a rally staged by campaign group Stop the Cissbury Sell-Off (SCSO).

They then filed up on to the land itself, waving banners and placards, and let off distress flares to draw attention to the threat.

Some then continued for a four-mile guided walk across the council’s for-sale land and the National Trust’s Cissbury Ring, despite intermittent squalls of gale force wind and lashing rain. The walk passed over one for-sale council-owned field next to Cissbury Ring which has had a statutory right of access for the last 5 years, but has never been opened to the public, as the law required it to be. This was the first time the public have ever properly used this land.

The event was hailed as a huge success by SCSO, which has already forced Worthing Borough Council to look again at its plans.

After the group alerted the public to the proposals, the local authority last week announced a review of its decision to sell agricultural land at Mount Carvey and Tenants Hill.

But speakers Dave Bangs and Chris Hare from SCSO, along with Kate Ashbrook from the Open Spaces Society, told the rally that this was not enough. Dave Bangs said: "The council failed to appreciate the public’s wish for this Downland to remain in council hands. We urge everyone to write to Cllr Steve Waight, the Worthing Council Cabinet Member for Resources, who will conduct the review, and express their opposition to any sales of Worthing council downland”.

Speakers urged Worthing council not only to definitively withdraw plans for the sale, but to work with bodies like the coming National Park authority and the National Trust to preserve and enhance the much-loved areas and to take advantage of available environmental funding.

Said SCSO spokesman Trevor Hodgson: "There was a very strong feeling amongst everyone there that we cannot assume the council will do the right thing, despite the massive turnout today.

"The speakers stressed today that it is important for everyone who cares about the future of this land to remain vigilant in the weeks and months ahead.

"There are now a huge number of people actively involved in this campaign and the council can be assured that we are not going away.

"We will fight on until we are completely satisfied that this crucial piece of Worthing 's environmental and historical heritage is fully protected and secure for generations to come."

Mr Hodgson added that there had been particular disbelief among residents that Worthing council was trying to sell off its downland at a time when the South Downs National Park was being given the official green light in recognition of the importance of this unique English landscape.

Further information on the campaign, including maps of the land in question, can be found on the SCSO website at www.scso.co.uk. To contact the group email info@scso.co.uk

ENDS

SCSO: Media contact. Trevor Hodgson. Email: info@scso.co.uk
Tel: 07968 042646

The tabloid, the letter and the Prime Minister

Well, The Sun in full retreat...never a bad thing, but what are the issues here?

It is quite clear that most people don't quite understand how a war which is killing Afghans by the thousand and British soldiers by the score can be reduced to the standard of one person's handwriting and spelling. Didn't we lose a certain amount of perspective here?

Brown's crime is to continue the criminal presence of UK troops in Afghanistan - against the wishes of a clear majority of the Afghan and British people - but The Sun and the Tories can't quite come out and say this. They have no different strategy to New Labour but still somehow need to make political capital out of the situation. So we have the unedifying spectacle of a particularly clumsy tabloid sting, aided by a bereaved mother whose grief has clearly overruled her better judgement. Brown's getting the best press he's had in over a year - how did that happen??

I don't want the UK troops to get more equipment - in order to kill yet more Afghans - I want them out.

Oh..and by the way...the Afghans?...remember them? They're the people whose dead we don't count and don't name, the people who we've reduced to bit part players in their own tragedy.

That, rather than the nonsense over "the letter", is what we should be focussing on.

It looks like victory

The Cityclean workers have suspended their action after appearing to win most of their demands. If that is the case it is a welcome victory. However the action is only suspended and it looks like there is weeks of negotiation ahead. Given the way the council's negotiating position constantly shifts over this issue, nothing should be taken for granted. We also don't know what the employer's expectations are around the issue of productivity.

But for now, it looks like the Council has backed down in the face of solid and determined action which had clear popular support.

Pictures from the picket lines - Hollingdean Depot yesterday