Action for Children staff to vote on strike action

Unions Unite and Unison said negotiations with Action for Children in relation to pay awards for the current financial year 2015/16 have been ongoing for more than a year, with staff refusing to accept an offer of a one per cent increase. They said staff are unhappy with the offer in light of the fact they have not had a pay rise for six years.

Unison said that many employees are being forced into extreme hardship due to financial pressures, with some even having to use the same food banks as the families they are trying to help.

The unions claim that in the last three years Action for Children has made an average profit of £5.4m each year, well in excess of the £2m a year it would have cost to have given each member of staff a cost of living pay rise in line with inflation. They also said Action for Children has refused to involve the conciliation service Acas to resolve the dispute.

Around 5,000 people work for Action for Children, and around 1,000 are members of either Unison or Unite.

Unison's national voluntary sector officer, Simon Watson, said that although Action for Children "claims that it is strapped for cash", it has managed to find the money to increase the number of its highest paid managers.

"The decision to move to a ballot for action is always a reluctant one, but despite over a year of negotiations, the charity still refuses to see sense.

"It's still not too late to prevent action, and we hope the charity uses the coming weeks to think carefully about its next steps."

Unite national officer for the not-for-profit sector, Sally Kosky, said: “What we have here is an all too common case of a profitable organisation, with highly paid executives, unwilling to give a decent pay rise to our members. Average pay of the workforce has fallen in real terms by 52 per cent since 2010/11.

“The management is behaving in a high-handed manner trying to bulldoze a wholly inadequate pay offer onto our members and point blank refusing to involve Acas in the dispute. Just because people work for a charity they don’t deserve the prospect of poverty wages.

“The organisation has a healthy surplus and some of these reserves should be used to fairly reward its hard-working staff.”

Both unions will ballot members on industrial action short of a strike and/or strike action. The ballots open on Tuesday 26 January and close on Tuesday 16 February.

Sir Tony Hawkhead, chief executive at Action for Children, said every effort to reach an agreement has been made.
 
“In the current operating climate, Action for Children has considered the various affordable possibilities available to it," he added.

"The board and senior management agreed that the best way forward, with the limited budget available, was to use it for those members of staff who would otherwise receive almost nothing.

"Other staff would still receive their standard increment as they progress within their salary band.”