Gerry Mooney
The Open University
Tricia McCafferty
University of Strathclyde / The Open University
Abstract
During March and April 2004 5,000 local authority employed nursery nurses in Scotland were involved in a national all-out strike. A two and a half year dispute over pay was transformed into a struggle to maintain national bargaining in the face of employer attempts to impose local pay deals. Drawing on interviews with striking nursery nurses, this paper seeks to explore the factors that led to the largest all-out strike in Scotland since the Miners’ Strike in the mid 1980s. It is argued that the experiences of these nursery nurses highlight particular ways in which New Labour’s welfare reforms, and its approach to pay and conditions in the public sector, are impacting on some of the most poorly paid groups of public sector workers, and in doing so suggest that this dispute has a much wider resonance beyond Scotland and beyond the nursery nurses’ fght.
Key words: childcare, industrial relations, New Labour, Scotland, welfare reform
Introduction
Historically, nursery nurses have enjoyed little reputation as a group of workers prepared to take the ultimate steps in the fght for improved pay and conditions. As other groups of public sector employees have discovered in recent years, however, nurses, social workers and librarians among them, past reputations count for little.
In February 2004, following a pay dispute originating in 2001/2002, in a ballot of almost 5,000 Unison members across Scotland, council employed nursery nurses voted by 81 per cent to 19 per cent for indefnite strike action (source: Unison Scotland, 2004). At the heart of this dispute was the nursery nurses’ demand for a signifcant improvement in pay and conditions, including a new career structure to replace a regime that had been introduced in 1988 and which had operated unaltered since. The reasons for the strike were, on the one hand, simple. The nursery nurses had not had a pay increase for 15 years and they argued that their pay and conditions were increasingly out of line with their enhanced role as the key workers in the provision of ‘early years’ education. In short, they found themselves at the forefront in the delivery of fagship New Labour policies without any improvements in their working lives. On the other hand, this latter point alludes to further complexity behind this dispute that has played a key part in helping to strengthen the nursery nurses’ resolve. In common with many of the public sector strikes that have occurred under New Labour, alongside simple, face-value reasoning, this dispute involved ‘taking on’ central New Labour assumptions and confronting the ideological underpinning of the government’s programme of public sector ‘reform’. This paper briefy explores some central features of this, namely: the government’s antipathy towards national collective bargaining in the public sector, despite large scale national programmes of ‘reform’ and national ‘modernisation’ strategies that impose national standards on work effort and the mandatory development of improved human capital without increased reward.
During the strike, interviews were held with 20 nursery nurses. All of them were women and some were in their early 20s and had been employed in this role for only a few years. Others had many years’ experience. We interviewed strikers from different parts of Scotland, including the largest local authority, Glasgow. Among those whose views are recorded here are several who worked in council-run nurseries, some in pre-school centres and one who worked in a primary school. They were all asked similar questions relating to the background to the strike, how they perceived recent changes in childcare policy and practice and their views regarding the national pay demand. Throughout this paper we have endeavoured to let the voices of these strikers, all too often hidden voices, speak for themselves.
Childcare under New Labour: more than ‘just looking after the weans’?
The 2004 Scottish nursery nurses’ strike lasted for 8 weeks (14 to 15 weeks in Glasgow, the Borders and the Orkneys), received widespread media and public attention across Scotland but attracted relatively little notice in the rest of the United Kingdom. However, this was no simple local dispute but a national strike over the pay and conditions of around 5,000 relatively low paid workers in an overwhelmingly female workforce. As with other groups of public sector workers in recent years, nursery nurses have been expected to undertake a wide range of signifcant additional duties and more responsibilities without enhanced pay to refect these. As Scott, Brown and Campbell (2000, 2002) and Lister (2003) among others have noted, childcare provision has come to take on a new signifcance under New Labour. In part this refects the growing demand for childcare resulting from increased female participation in the formal labour market. It also refects a range of work-centred social reforms introduced by the government that have sought to promote employment as the route out of social exclusion and poverty (see Fergusson, 2004). In different ways other New Labour policies such as the National Childcare Strategy (see Lister, 2003; Scottish Offce, 1998) and tax credits have also stimulated demand for childcare provision. Childcare is pivotal in New Labour’s welfare reforms, particularly the fagship welfare to work programme. The government’s strategy is to ‘grow’ childcare, thereby allowing many working class women to enter formal employment – including in childcare itself.
The increased demand for childcare places is refected in the expansion of jobs in the childcare sector. In 2002 some 32,000 workers were employed in this sector in Scotland, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, often providing care on a casualized or informal basis and/or as a part-time occupation (Scottish Executive, 2002a). Of these, 22,000 were employed in pre-school centres. Scotland’s 32 local authorities employ around 5,500 nursery nurses. Childcare work takes place in a diverse range of settings, in highly visible nursery schools and in more informal and hidden locations, often the home of either those purchasing care or those providing it. As has been forcefully argued elsewhere (see Scott et al., 2000, 2002), the greater emphasis placed on the importance of ‘quality’ childcare provision and the role that it plays in educational development, in addition to the more explicit employment generating role highlighted above, has not been matched by improvements in working conditions or in rates of pay. Childcare work is generally perceived as a low status occupation, something that is recognized only too well by the Scottish Executive (see for example, Scottish Executive, 1999). It is important to acknowledge that the pattern of employment and the conditions and wages that dominate in the private and informal sectors contrast sharply with those that prevail in the public sector. However, the wage levels that prevail in the private and informal sectors are so low that the pay of local authority nursery nurses looks much better by comparison even if it can be itself considered to be relatively poorly paid work. Therefore, as we will see below, council employed nursery nurses also feel that their work is undervalued and underpaid. Work that is often dismissed, to borrow a term from Scott et al., as ‘looking after the weans’. Childcare is assumed to be work that ‘anyone’ can do:
Lots of people think that all we do all day is change nappies, sing nursery rhymes and paint pictures of cows or hills or the like. They don’t see the physical and emotional demands that go with the job, or the extra-unpaid work we often do, often with kids from very poor and disadvantaged backgrounds. And what they don’t see either is that we are providing an education service, and an important service that helps to shape a child’s future. (Susan, 24, nursery nurse, Glasgow, with 4 years’ experience)
What is often hidden from public view is the educational and social work aspects of nursery nursing. These were always there – but more so now. Being a nursery nurse is rewarding in some ways, less so now as a result of recent changes perhaps, but also emotionally and physically draining. (Mary, 52, pre-school worker, Glasgow, of 26 years)
During the dispute nursery nurses were forceful in rejecting claims that their work was ‘simply’ about ‘playing with children’. We frst spotted on a picket line at a Glasgow nursery centre, placards proudly stating ‘we don’t just change nappies, we change lives’. Derivations of this were soon evident elsewhere. Such statements also refect the nursery nurses’ views that they are now playing a larger role in education provision. Their argument was that the government’s agenda to develop national standards of childcare means increasing responsibilities for them in other ways. Under the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001 national childcare standards equally apply in the public, private and voluntary sectors. ‘Child-centredness’ is at the core of this strategy, underpinned by a language that constructs the child, parent or carer as consumers of care (Scottish Executive, 2003). Even a cursory glance at the Scottish Executive website will quickly show how active governments (across the UK) have been in this feld, refecting wider New Labour priorities. In their foreword to the Scottish Executive’s Early Years Strategy Report, for example, the Ministers for Education and Young People, for Health and Community Care and for Social Justice, comment that more service ‘integration’ and ‘joined up working’ between different agencies will ensure the delivery of ‘effective universal services’ (Scottish Executive, 2002b: paras 1 and 5). In documents such as these, childcare workers are simultaneously central but marginal fgures: central in the role that they perform, and are increasingly expected to fulfl, in providing a ‘quality’ childcare service. This is crucial for the government in addressing a range of social policy objectives from, as we have seen, the increasing employability of socially excluded groups, through to other strategies promoting social inclusion in other ways. But these workers are marginal when it comes to government recognition that their pay and conditions need addressing (the national minimum wage aside). Indeed the National Childcare Strategy is notable in this respect for completely failing to address such matters. Instead it places increasing demands on nursery nurses to become more highly qualifed, with greater emphasis on their acquisition of training and qualifcations and on standardization of care provision. As one nursery nurse observed:
During the past few years all we have heard from management is that we need to get more qualifcations, more training, go on more courses and the like, but when we ask will we get more pay for this there is silence. And the rich experience many of us have built up for years and years seems to count for nothing. (Jean, 46, nursery nurse, Renfrewshire, of 20 years)
Other nursery nurses were keen to stress the increasing role that they have had to play in pre-school education, both with children and in supporting a new generation of childcare workers. Here’s how Claire, a nursery nurse in Paisley, Renfrewshire, for 16 years, understood this:
It’s a professional service. We’ve taken on a social work edge now. More and more we have these responsibilities. We act as a central contact for all the different agencies like psychological services, education and social work. We are part of that system of dealing with all the social problems but this isn’t recognised. There are a lot of issues to do with drug abuse, poor housing and poverty – it’s us that deal with that. We are responsible when people seem to have given up their responsibilities. . . . We are the people who need to deal with the kid as a whole. Educate them, counsel them, brush their teeth, and make sure they eat, even cut hair. It’s us the agencies turn to. Sometimes it’s our job to make sure they have all their immunisations. Parenting responsibilities have been pushed on to us. We bear the brunt of all that and they don’t pay the price for it.
The issues highlighted by Claire relate in direct ways to the social inclusion projects and ‘modernisation’ reforms of New Labour, in particular to ideas of ‘integrated’ and ‘joined-up’ services. In addition the uneven impact of New Labour’s reforms on different groups of workers is also evident here. In other ways the parenting experience highlighted by Claire is seen also by the government as a route to employment:
Many parents frst become involved in childcare as volunteers in activities with their own children . . . After a period of training, supervised experience and confdence building, this can lead to employment opportunities, full or part time, in childcare . . . This can be particularly appropriate for groups of lone parents wishing to enter the labour market, through childcare responsibilities amongst themselves and increasing opportunities to take up part-time work. (Scottish Offce, 1998: p. 2, para. 23)
For us two main issues arise from this: childcare is frequently the linchpin in the welfare to work pathway; but secondly, childcare is also seen as suitable work for ‘the socially excluded’ to undertake. That there are tensions between these policy objectives and how they play out on the ground is also refected in a further comment from Claire:
Initiatives like Sure Start and the New Deal mean pushing people into childcare as a job to get them into work but a lot of them aren’t ready for it and they don’t know the responsibility that they’re letting themselves in for. They have serious problems of their own and this means more responsibility for us.
A recurring theme among our interviewees was the increasing demands brought about by recent developments in childcare policy:
We’re responsible for all sorts of work now. It was always about education but we need to provide lots of different reports. We have to provide detailed reports for professionals like social workers, key workers and forms for schools and parents. These are important but there’s no extra pay for this sort of thing, like transfer information when kids are going to school. This extra work comes from the [Scottish] Executive but the Council has also placed increasing demands on us. We always were involved in planning but it’s all about recording and reporting now. Our paperwork is used to support the professionals in reviews of individual kids but this isn’t recognised in terms of wages. There seems less emphasis on the kids now – it’s all paperwork. (Gillian, 32, Fife, primary school worker, 11 years’ service)
Together then with the increasing emphasis on upskilling and standards, there is a pervasive bureaucratization of nursery education, resulting in much additional, often hidden and unpaid work. The Scottish Executive stresses the ‘educative’ and ‘caring’ elements of such work, not the stresses and pressures that it creates for those delivering it.
While the government in Edinburgh recognizes that ‘securing a competent, qualifed and well-regarded workforce’ involves reviewing pay levels and working conditions, these are quickly dismissed as a ‘matter for employers’ (Scottish Executive, 2002b: para. 54). As in other areas of welfare reform, ostensibly the primary goal of the childcare strategy is about constructing children (and their parents/ carers) as ’customers’, able to choose between a range of providers, all subject to national standards of care and inspection. The fagship policy in Scotland makes claims to the provision of nursery care to all three and four year olds (which equates to 2.5 hours per day, 5 days per week) underpinned by the development of a more decentralized system of provision, responsive to local needs and demands, but centrally controlled and regulated.
As we noted earlier, the work of local authority nursery nurses is much more visible than casualized care provided in someone’s home. However, crossing the entire childcare sector, the labour process of childcare is also all too often rendered invisible, partly as a result of its marginalization as ‘playing with kids’, but also through the gendered nature of childcare and through the failure of policy-makers to recognize the many different demands that childcare work generates for groups such as the nursery nurses. Taken together these factors contributed to the Scotland-wide nursery nurses’ strike in 2004 but before exploring this we need to consider another factor that prompted strike action and which became a central issue during the strike before engaging further with the nurses’ dialogue.
New Labour and public sector industrial relations
Arguably a defning feature of New Labour’s reign in relation to industrial relations has been the recurrence of public sector militancy (New Labour’s bˆete noire), refected in a series of well-publicized national disputes, often involving female workers. Together with less-well-known localized disputes, renewed industrial action at a national level has raised important questions about New Labour’s attitude towards public sector workers. Across the public sector there have been a series of changes that have impacted on workers in many adverse ways, most notably through the widespread use of PPP/PFI (public–private partnerships/private fnance initiatives) and other forms of privatization. There is also growing pressure from central government on general levels of expenditure that has been refected in tighter controls on public sector wage levels. Elsewhere there are the now well-known shifts towards the application of newer forms of managerialism and organizational restructuring, often though not always/everywhere imported from the private sector (Kessler et al., 2000). One of the key aspects of public sector employment that has been under threat from the government and employers is the ‘traditional’ national bargaining system. However, it is important to recognize that this has been highly uneven between different areas of the public sector (see Duncan, 2001; Williams, 2004). It is also uneven geographically. In some sectors, for example in the National Health Service, it has remained robust, while in others such as in further education colleges or in parts of the civil service national pay bargaining has been largely eroded. As Williams notes, highlighting an issue that was to become central in the nursery nurses’ dispute, successive governments have attempted to make pay and conditions ‘more sensitive’ to local conditions and to organizational and individual performance as well as in relation to private sector wage levels (Williams, 2004: 235–6). Having dismissed public sector unions as among the most notable ‘conservative’ elements hindering public sector ‘modernisation’, Tony Blair now sees in the abolition of national bargaining another key plank in New Labour’s wider strategy of ‘fexibilising’ the British workforce.
That pay bargaining remains resilient in key areas of the welfare sector is in no small part due to the resistance and opposition of key groups of public sector workers. In Scotland teachers were able to maintain a national pay award system as part of the ‘McCrone deal’ on teachers’ salary and conditions in the early 2000s (Scottish Executive, 2001). More recently in 2003 and again in 2004 fre fghters across the UK have also been involved in action to resist the dilution of national pay bargaining. In one sense the Scottish nursery nurses were the next in line to face, and to oppose, such measures.
The nursery nurses’ strike 2004
The strike by Scotland’s council employed nursery nurses in March and April 2004, followed 11 months of demonstrations and selective strikes in pursuit of improved pay and regrading. But the dispute has a longer history that originates in late 2001 and early 2002 when demands for regrading became more vociferous. The dispute also refected growing fears among nursery nurses that as a consequence of government reforms, together with the Childcare Strategy and national standards of care, they were being asked to do, in the words of several of our interviewees, ‘more and more for less and less’. The strike of council employed nursery nurses commenced on Monday March 1, 2004 and was to last for nearly 9 weeks, though strikers in six council areas were to continue on strike for up to 6 more weeks after Unison had abandoned the demand for a national pay settlement at the end of April. As we have seen, at the heart of the dispute were nursery nurses’ demands for better pay and a new pay scale. However, this soon became a battle for an across the board national pay agreement, refecting nurses’ arguments that they were being pushed to meet national standards of care. Unison’s initial claim was for £9.53 per hour for those new to nursery nursing, raising the annual salary for new starts from £10,000 to £14,000. And for those with 8 years’ or more experience the demand was for an increase from £13,800 to £18,000, or £11.94 per hour at the top of the grade. The offer made by employers was £7.35 per hour rising to £9.33. By the start of the national strike eight (mainly small) local authorities had agreed local deals with Unison but around 5,000 of the 5,500 local authority nursery workforce went on strike, affecting 50,000 children across Scotland. This was a hard decision for many nurses to take:
I didn’t want to go on strike . . . you become attached to the kids you work with and some of them have major learning and other problems so when you vote for strike you do so after a long soul searching, believe me. But we had no alternative. In fghting for better pay and conditions for ourselves we are also fghting to ensure that nurseries across Scotland are properly resourced. (Betty, 54, nursery nurse with 20 years’ experience, Renfrewshire)
We had been in dispute for over two years. . . . not far from three Ithink . . . but the one-day stoppages and other action were getting us nowhere. . . . we were forced to take this next step and all of us herein my nursery felt that the employers were pushing us to take action, almost daring us to go on strike. (Janice, 29, pre-school worker with 9 years’ experience, Glasgow)
Initially this was a dispute between the New Labour dominated Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) on the management side and the public sector trade union Unison who represented the bulk of council nursery staff on the other, over pay and conditions. However, COSLA’s rejection of demands for a national settlement, arguing that this was a matter for individual local authorities to resolve, soon became a pivotal issue in the dispute. Again many of our interviewees saw this as a key factor that generated anger, resentment and a willingness to fght among the nurses:
At frst this was a dispute over pay and recognition but it soon became much more than that. The employers were quite happy to have a national deal when it thought that nursery nurses would accept what it was offering. But when we rejected it they moved the goalposts back to local settlements. We were really angry about this and I know that this made lots of people really determined to fght on and win the dispute. (Gillian, Fife)
For the striking nurses COSLA was determined to break national pay bargaining, allowing different councils to introduce different rates of pay depending on supply and demand in different parts of Scotland:
What we don’t understand is why we cannot arrive at a situation where the wage for a nursery nurse in Glasgow is the same as in the Highlands or in Fife. A nursery nurse is a nursery nurse no matter where they work and their duties are almost identical thanks to the national standards introduced by the Government. Wage parity will not be achieved by local bargaining which is why we wanted a national agreement. (Mairi, 25, nursery nurse, Glasgow, 4 years’ experience)
It’s absolute nonsense that a nursery nurse is paid differently from another doing the same work in a neighbouring council. All we get is stuff about national this, national that, national care standards, national training and the like. Well what about national pay? (Agnes, 34, nursery worker, Glasgow, 8 years’ service)
I live next door to a woman who is a nursery nurse like me but in Renfrewshire. We are being told that we should have different pay scales and pay rises when we do the same job for different councils. There’s something wrong here as they want us to abide by national standards of childcare. So that’s why we are saying to COSLA if you want national standards then you have to pay nationally agreed pay. (Morag, 21, nursery nurse, Glasgow, 1 years’ service)
The existence of COLSA works to insulate the Scottish Executive from the demands of public sector workers, allowing Ministers to hide behind a smokescreen that disputes such as with the nursery nurses were ‘nothing to do with it’. While COSLA was often the main focal point of the nurses’ grievances, many of them also criticized the Scottish Executive for failing to intervene to produce a settlement. While he was widely quoted as referring to the dispute as a ‘national disgrace’ (quoted in the Herald, 31 March 2004), the First Minister in the Scottish Parliament, Jack McConnell, stopped well short of calling for a national settlement. While acknowledging that the nursery nurses had a ‘case’ for a pay review, he also argued that this would not be considered until the current dispute had ended (source: the Herald, 19 March 2004).
For many of the nursery nurses the role of the Scottish Executive was, as one striker put it to us, ‘pulling COSLA’s strings when it suited but hiding when it came to pay and conditions’. As the strike entered April this was to become a growing issue among the strikers:
COSLA is saying that they cannot impose a national settlement because wages are a local matter. But this is rubbish. The job is the same. The Executive could step in – the money is there for a national deal. I think they’re scared that they will just open the foodgates for everybody wanting more pay like the civil servants in the PCS [Public and Commercial Services Union]. It doesn’t need to mean more spending and higher taxes. They can use the money they’ve got. Jack McConnell has promised a national review but our own MSP [Member of the Scottish Parliament] who is a Minister in the Executive has told us that wages will not be part of that. This will be a review of the service, not of pay or conditions. (Helen, 28, Renfrewshire, 3 years’ experience)
Unison’s Scottish leadership edged closer and closer to calling off the national dispute towards the end of April 2004, much to the annoyance of many of the strikers. While we do not have space to discuss this in depth here, it is important to acknowledge that for many of those who remained on strike this was nothing less than a ‘sell-out’:
I think that Unison should hang their heads in shame. Many of us made big sacrifces to go on strike but they pulled the rug from under us. We were committed to win but they gave in too easily. I don’t know why this happened but I do know that they were not at all happy when we voted to stay on strike in Glasgow. (Janice, Glasgow)
Nursery nurses were left with pay offers that differed widely between councils, with a gap as far apart as £8.76 and £10.46 per hour in some cases. In addition most of the offers made by local authorities were at the lower end of what was on offer. Strikes continued into early June in several council areas. In Glasgow, where over 1,000 nursery nurses are employed, two ballots in late April and in late May that rejected council pay offers and accepted staying on strike were viewed differently, depending on the standpoint adopted, either as putting ‘the lives of vulnerable children at risk’, to quote council spokespersons, or showing the ‘resolve of the strikers’:
Are children in Glasgow worth less than in East Dunbartonshire? That’s what Glasgow’s pay offer tells us. It is not simply about undervaluing the work that we do, it is also about saying that Glasgow kids are not as important as kids are elsewhere. That’s why we are determined to get a result. It is not just a result for us but it is to win a wider battle that nursery education is not something that can be done properly on the cheap. (Mhairi, 33, nursery nurse with 12 years’ experience, Glasgow)
By early June 2004, there had been a steady drift back to work and the strike had effectively ended. Many nursery nurses have claimed in the Scottish press and to us that they were ‘starved back’ to work, bullied by (Labour) councils who threatened to sack them. Others have commented that many employers were prepared to hold out until the summer holidays starting in late June when ‘term timers’, nursery nurses employed only during the school session, would be without full-time work, before imposing a deal. Now that the strike has ended, Scotland’s nursery nurses fnd themselves subject to different pay rates. Instead of a national pay settlement, there are different deals across the country, many of which are at the lower end of the nurses’ initial demands.
Concluding comments
Nursery nurses have become key players in driving through the expansion of childcare under New Labour. The 2004 strike directly refects some of the additional pressures that have been placed on nursery workers as a result of these policies. However, this strike was also about control over the labour process of nursery nursing. As we have seen, many nurses thought that they were being asked not only to do more work but increasingly to fulfl a wider range of, at times competing, responsibilities. Effectively what we have here, to deploy the language of labour process theory, is greater ‘fexploitation’. However, to take this further what is also apparent were the contradictory trends towards ‘professionalization’ and ‘degradation’ of work: professionalization in the sense that increasing pressures were being placed on nursery nurses to become more formally ‘skilled’ and qualifed; while simultaneously fnding that ‘more and more’ was required from them, but for ‘less and less’ reward. That there is a ‘frontier of control’ in the heartland areas of welfare delivery has been largely neglected (see also Newman and Mooney, 2004). Hopefully the qualitative evidence from the nursery nurses’ strike provided here and elsewhere will encourage more investigation of the struggles taking place at the frontline of welfare delivery.
From the arguments put forward by the nursery nurses during this dispute, refected in the comments from strikers included in this paper, we can but support the arguments of Scott et al. (2000: 4) ‘. . . that despite the fact that there is a widespread recognition of the benefts of good quality childcare . . . childcare work itself is still perceived as a low status occupation refected in relatively low rates of pay’. That the vast majority of Scotland’s nursery nurses were prepared to undertake indefnite strike action, in some areas lasting around 14 and 15 weeks, refects the growing unease that these workers feel about the erosion of their working conditions. Scotland’s public sector nursery nurses were faced with a two-pronged assault on their position: from above, in relation to government reforms and from below, in terms of the growing numbers of childcare workers seeking employment. That there are several labour markets for childcare workers is very clear from different studies of childcare. On the one hand there is regulated, public sector provision, in which nursery nurses are in a relatively powerful position (albeit one under attack). However, they are weakened by the existence of a labour market in the private childcare sector and alongside this exists a much more volatile and casualized labour market (the ‘granny’ or ‘next door neighbour’ sectors) comprising many thousands of childcare workers often employed informally and without the pay levels and conditions enjoyed by their public sector counterparts. The National Childcare Strategy and other policy developments in this area are increasingly operating to blur the already fuid boundaries between these labour markets and this is an underlying issue that helped to generate strike action in 2004.
Nursery nurses in Scotland are but the latest in an ever increasing list of public sector workers who in recent years have been forced to undertake action of some sort to maintain their pay and conditions. There are UK-wide issues here relating to the ways in which the costs of New Labour’s social policy reforms and public sector ‘modernisation’ are borne disproportionately by groups of workers at the lower end of the reward scale. The fact that many of these workers are women and that they are prepared to resist is also an increasingly important development. That the 2004 Scottish nursery nurses’ dispute is the most notable all-out strike in Scotland, if not in the UK, in the past two decades, refects the deep-seated resentment about the unwillingness of New Labour to improve the conditions of low paid public workers. ‘Scottish’ factors also intertwine with UK-wide developments in this story. This strike dispels the myth that labour relations in Scotland are in some way more ‘harmonious’ than elsewhere in the UK, as evidenced by the so-called ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ signed between the Scottish Trades Union Congress and the Scottish Executive in 2002 (see Boyle, 2004). It also shows that post-devolution, the welfare reform agenda and approach to public sector industrial relations in Scotland are similar to those pursued elsewhere in the UK. And as one nursery nurse commented to us this also raises important questions about the extent of New Labour’s commitment to ‘fairness at work’ and the ‘social justice’ strategy much heralded by the Scottish Executive:
In recent years we have seen a lot of talk about social inclusion and spreading opportunity. I have lost count of the number of reports where Ministers talk of the need to promote social justice. It’s a complete joke, how can we have social justice if the people delivering that justice are treated so shabbily? We wanted social justice over pay and working conditions. What we got instead was being starved back to work. (Kate, 29, Glasgow, 8 years’ experience)
The 2004 nursery nurses’ strike in Scotland, therefore, highlights in stark terms some of the ways in which welfare workers – across the UK – are contesting New Labour’s meaning of social justice.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all those striking nursery nurses who took time to be interviewed by us during the dispute. All names have been changed to maintain anonymity. Thanks also to Peter Kennedy, Alex Law and Gill Scott for their very helpful comments.
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Gerry Mooney is staff tutor in social sciences and senior lecturer in social policy in the faculty of social sciences at The Open University. He has written widely on issues relating to social policy and is the co-author of Rethinking Welfare (Sage, 2002), editor of Work: Personal Lives and Social Policy (Policy Press, 2004) and co-editor of Exploring Social Policy in the ‘New’ Scotland (Policy Press, 2005). Address: The Open University (Scotland), 10 Drumsheugh Gardens, Edinburgh EH3 7QJ, UK. email: G.C.Mooney@open.ac.uk
Tricia McCafferty has recently completed her doctoral thesis in the department of sociology at the University of Glasgow. She is currently teaching in the department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde and is also an associate lecturer with The Open University in Scotland. Her research has focused on all aspects of working life under New Labour. At present she is examining militancy in the public sector and the contours of resistance to New Labour’s programme of ‘modernisation’. email: pm898@tutor.open.ac.uk