Burning Issue

Third Force News

14 March 2008

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Can strike action in the voluntary sector be effective? As Shelter staff continue to strike, we asked two experts whether there’s any point in voluntary sector staff taking to the streets?

Carol Young, Acting director, Scottish Low Pay Unit
YES

It’s a hard decision for voluntary sector staff to make – take strike action and disrupt the services they work so hard to provide, or accept management decisions with serious implications for the income and standard of living of themselves and their families. Hard decisions also have to be made by voluntary sector management committees, trying to find ways to deliver services in the face of ever decreasing budgets and ever increasing demands from funders. Unfortunately, paid staff are often the first to suffer when cuts are made. Pay freezes, changes to hours of work, redundancies and redeployments are common. It’s not unusual for workers to accept the unacceptable in order to continue doing the jobs they love. There’s a moral dilemma at work here. The voluntary sector ethos naturally focuses on maintaining the work we do with those who need us, our service users and client groups. What often goes unrecognised is the fact that paid staff are usually the backbone of that work – staff who can spend years amassing experience, innovating and going the extra mile only to become casualties of reorganisation and restructuring, or to be forced to look elsewhere when their terms and conditions become untenable. Management committees are at pains to point out that the money available to them will only stretch so far. This is true, but funding negotiations too often fail to ensure that the rights of staff are protected. It must be a priority to convince funding bodies to accept the fact that services simply cannot be delivered with inadequate resources and unhappy, overworked staff. There comes a time when workers in any sector are forced to say “enough is enough”. When negotiation fails, the disruption of services caused by strike action can be the only effective means of getting that message across.

Joe Saxton, Driver of ideas, NfpSynergy
NO

It’s hard to see how strike action benefits any aspect of a charity. Donors are unlikely to want to give to a charity whose staff strike. Funders are unlikely to be impressed by an organisation whose staff strike. Clients and beneficiaries are unlikely to benefit from strike action. The reputation of an organisation will almost certainly suffer. The only people who may benefit are staff but it is a hollow victory if redundancies are halted or working conditions kept if the end result is that a charity can no longer tender competitively for funds. But in the battle between the interests of clients and the interests of staff: clients should always come first. There is no doubt that it would be far better if any disputes in charities were sorted by negotiation or ironed out in the natural course of management of an organisation. However with a highly turbulent external climate for charities it is absolutely right that every charity should make sure it as cost-effective as possible. This means looking at pay structures, working hours, working conditions, and the whole of the rest of a workforce’s terms and conditions on a regular basis. It is for this reason that many companies and charities are closing final salary pension funds. Automatic salary increments, separate from inflation increases, are another area which increase costs that are not related to the skills, the productivity, or the expertise of the workforce or the cost of living. Every charity should look regularly at these kinds of expense so it can be sure that every pound of donors and funder’s money is as effectively spent as possible. In short, it’s easy to see who loses when staff in charities strike, its much harder to see who wins.

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