Choice of eating or heating faces low-paid workers

It’s time for action on low pay, says UNISON Cymru Wales regional secretary, Karen Loughlin.

Heating or eating? That’s the troubling question thousands of low-paid Welsh workers have been asking themselves. Trapped by precarious contracts, they are forced to make some uncomfortable choices for their families.

The exploitative contracts of those delivering fast food or online purchases might be well-known, but do you know unfair and unstable employment contracts trap thousands of mainly female public service workers in in-work poverty? 

These are people delivering key public services that benefit your local community, I’m talking about school support staff and care workers.  These two groups of workers are amongst those represented by my union, UNISON Cymru Wales, and I want to describe how the way they are employed leads to anxiety about paying the bills and how they can be lifted out of poverty forever.  

Social care

Most of Wales’ 80,000 care workers are employed by the private or voluntary sector. They don’t have the protection of local authority or NHS collective agreements on employment conditions, so many exist on exploitative wages.  Many are not paid for all hours on duty, including ‘sleep ins’ and travel time between clients. Until Welsh government’s intervention during the pandemic, an absence of sick pay too often meant they could not afford to miss work to safely recover in their own home.

Welsh government’s implementation of the real living wage from April is a good start, but it’s still not paying care workers fairly.  Nor will it make a dent in the huge number of care vacancies which impact on the quality of care. Not surprisingly, the sector is reliant on agency workers. High staff turnover further affects care provision for clients.

In the private sector, corners are cut to improve profits. Staff must rush care when allocated too many clients and many are not paid for travel time between appointments. Vulnerable people therefore often receive only 15 minutes of a care worker’s time when they should be receiving 30 minutes.

UNISON’s campaigning for a National Care Service which puts client-centred care and the care workforce at its heart. It should eliminate the commissioning process and profit motive which causes so much money to be lost from the sector. All-Wales sector level collective bargaining would set fair wages and employment conditions and training and development. Partnership working and union representation would be enshrined within its terms.

School staff

School support staff are the unsung heroes of our schools, which couldn’t function without them. Unlike teachers, school support workers suffer low pay, a lack of career opportunities and institutional discrimination that belittles their role. Part-time, casual and term-time working dominate.

Every year, hundreds go through the uncertainty of whether the school and local authority will fund their job or whether their hours will be reduced. If you support a child with additional learning needs and they move school, funding disappears.  

An annual fear of redundancy heightens anxiety and makes planning your family’s future difficult.  Many UNISON schools members say they’d have better job security working for a supermarket, sometimes for better money. It’s common for them to have to take a second job to supplement income.

The Education Minister’s commitment last month to improve training for teaching assistants and action to ensure they are appropriately deployed is significant.  We’d like to work with him to examine how the pay structure can properly reward the responsibilities of these dedicated professionals and tackle the glaring injustice of term-time pay.

They are paid for 39 – 43 weeks of the year disguised by being paid over 12 equal monthly payments and accrue annual leave over that time which is taken in school holidays. Support staff are not paid for the summer six weeks, but are bound to the school and can’t ‘sign on’ or get another job during this period. Heads and teachers though are paid for a full working year of 52 weeks.  The summer months are the most expensive, not to mention the detrimental effect this has on pensions later in life.

As we emerge from Covid, it’s important to re-evaluate what’s important to society and how we can improve public services. Better investment in this workforce is crucial.