Barnet and Doncaster careworkers on strike this week. Doncaster careworkers want to be returned to the NHS (their service was outsourced to Care UK). Barnet careworkers want to work for the council again (their service was outsourced to a trading company) Photo from Barnet Unison.

Update 14 September 2014:

Your Choice Barnet careworkers will be lobbying Barnet council outside Hendon town hall from 6pm to 7pm tomorrow, as councillors meet to discuss further privatisation of services. It is testimony to Barnet council’s joke status that it can discuss further outsourcing – apparently in all seriousness – at exactly the moment that the council’s already-outsourced Your Choice careworkers take strike action in protest at the the effects privatisation have had on services for disabled people and staff working conditions. Their fight is discussed in this post below.

The careworkers will also take tomorrow night’s lobby as a chance to make known their feelings about Your Choice Barnet chief executive Tracey Lees. Lees implied last week that the workers who took strike action last week were disloyal to service users, and not committed to their jobs – for all the world as though already-low-paid workers take strike action without a second thought. No matter that those careworkers are trying to protect staff-to-service-user-ratios and the whole service generally from the cuts that will put services for disabled adults in Barnet in the danger zone. No matter that they risk their own jobs and incomes to do that.

Your Choice Barnet careworkers’ lobby and strikes to defend careworkers and services for disabled adults this week:

Monday 15 September 2014 lobby outside Hendon Town Hall 6 – 7 pm

Wednesday 17 September 2014 Strike action, picket lines at Flower lane, Rosa Morrison, Community Space, start 7.30 am.

Thursday 18 September 2014 Strike action, picket lines at Flower lane, Rosa Morrison, Community Space, start 7.30 am.

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Original post – striking Your Choice Barnet careworkers speak:

By total coincidence, one of the people Your Choice Barnet careworkers met this week when they were in Mill Hill handing out leaflets about their strike action was an agency careworker. He was incensed about his own pay and working conditions, to say the very least. He stopped to take a leaflet and he really let fly.

He had trouble with his housing benefit, I think – it sounded like a miscalculation and overpayments problem.

Anyway – Nigel Farage will be the beneficiary of this man’s experience. “I’m going to vote UKIP,” this careworker said furiously. Everyone other politician was useless as far as this man was concerned. He had a point. Nobody would help him. His pay was so low and his costs were so high that he wasn’t sure he could stay in his home. “I earn £102 a week. It’s about 15 hours a week at £7 an hour. Barnet council say I’m earning too much for them to pay my £300 rent. They’ve given me £58 a week and they’ve stopped me £15 week on top of that, because they say that they’ve been overpaying me since March. So, I’m living on £42 a week. I went to spoke to my MP – the Conservative Finchley MP. He had a look at the letters and he said “there’s nothing I can do. That’s the rules. I’m living on £42 a week. ”

So.

The YCB strikers I was with had some sympathy for this bloke, as well they might. Their situation is dire too.

Two years ago, the support and day services they provide for disabled people were moved from the council into Your Choice Barnet, part of the Barnet Group trading company which the council seemed to think should and would make large profits (out of disabled people and their support funds).

This hope was built on sand, of course. The promised Your Choice profits never came to pass. About a year after its glorious launch, Your Choice Barnet management began to bleat about debt and to claim that the only way to make the business “competitive” was to cut careworkers’ wages and staff numbers.

The company duly set about a very unpopular restructure, with predictable results. Staff left, or were made redundant, and the rest are still fighting to hang onto their jobs and already-small wages. Barnet Unison says that about 145 full time equivalent staff were transferred from adult services to the trading company in 2012. After the “restructure” last year and cuts to shift allowance pay, only about 105 FTE staff are in place now – a 30% cut in staffing levels.

Now, careworkers are trying to make Your Choice Barnet management to overturn a 9.5% wage cut which was imposed on them (on the careworkers, that is) in April this year. Careworkers report wage cuts between £100 and £250 a month. That’s why they took two days’ strike action this and why next week, they’re taking more. They want the service to be taken back inhouse by the council. Meanwhile, Andrew Travers, Barnet council’s amazingly crass chief executive, has been turning out on twitter to brag about the opportunities the Barnet Group offer for growth – even as careworkers at the company prepared to strike. Brilliant. I guess was can expect that Travers will restore the careworkers’ lost wages and jobs if that growth transpires. Very big If there, of course.

Anyway. Here are two transcripts from interviews I did with Your Choice Barnet careworkers this week as they took their first two days of strike action in this round. They describe their worries about low staff-to-client ratios, the problems presented at places that are increasingly staffed with low-paid, inexperienced agency workers and how it feels to lose a couple of hundred quid a month when you’ve got a mortgage or rent to pay, and you’ve given more than ten years to a job and have acquired a great deal of experience. This is the world of care and support work. You’re on low pay and you know that it will just keep getting lower unless you fight hard.

And just btw – if Your Choice Barnet doesn’t like any of this – tough shit. That company can let me come in for a couple of weeks to see how things are working out in these services. Transparency around the issues raised by these struggling careworkers would be useful. The last time I saw members of that company’s board, they were running out of a meeting to avoid Your Choice Barnet service users and their families who were furious about YCB’s proposed staff and wage cuts. You can see that action here.

Celia* (name changed). Has been working as a Barnet careworker for 13 years. Now a support worker for adults with autism.

“Our service is for adults with autism. We have people who have one-to-one support and two-to-one support as well. We have a daycentre with inhouse activities and computer sessions, sensory activities, lots of activities in the community. I work 36 hours a week.

“The [9.5%] pay cut started off this year with a consultation period. But when we were moved from Barnet council to the Your Choice Barnet [company in 2012], we were told that [our wages and conditions] were going to be safe. A couple of years ago, we were told that we were going to be safe. Then a year later, they came back and said that they were running the business at a loss. They said they need to make cuts to make savings – 400k. That’s a lot of wages. Continue reading →

Update 9 September:

The Barnet careworkers continue their strike in protest at pay cuts today. There will be a rally outside Barnet House at 1pm: 1255 High Road, London N20 0EJ.

Update 7 September:

The Barnet careworkers who work for the private care company about which useless Barnet Council CE Andrew Travers boasts in the report below are on strike tomorrow. The careworkers’ jobs – all provide support services for disabled people – were outsourced to a now-famously-failed, profit-focused organisation called Your Choice Barnet in 2012. Over the next few weeks, the careworkers will take action in protest at a near-ten-percent pay cut, redundancies, Your Choice Barnet’s failed business model and management’s insistence that Your Choice Barnet will only become competitive if careworkers work for almost nothing in dangerously understaffed circumstances.

Details for the next two days’ pickets and strike action are:

Monday 8 September 2014 strike action, picket lines at Flower lane, Rosa Morrison, Community Space, start 7.30am onwards.

Tuesday 9 September 2014 strike action, picket lines at Flower lane, Rosa Morrison, Community Space, start 7.30 am onwards.

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Original post 3 September 2014:

Early days I know, but I’m calling it: Barnet Council chief executive Andrew Travers has sent September 2014’s twattiest and most disingenuous CE tweet.

Yesterday, Travers tweeted a picture of a group of people watching a Barnet worthy give a presentation.

Travers’ tweet: “Staff briefing to the Barnet Group sets out opportunities for growth.”

Staff briefing to the Barnet Group sets out opportunities for growth pic.twitter.com/M3cfzMwzRo

— Andrew Travers (@atravers60) September 2, 2014

That tweet implied very strongly that there were and are opportunities for growth at the Barnet Group. Unfortunately, Travers’ tweet neglected to mention a key part of the picture: that growth at this Group comes at the expense of careworkers and disabled people, and that the Group’s attacks on already low-paid careworkers’ wages and conditions have been so severe that careworkers will start strike action on Monday September 8. Travers’ timeline has been very quiet on that bit. I’ve been watching his feed for redress on this point, but so far – none.

The Barnet Group is parent company to Your Choice Barnet, a part of the profit-driven Group local authority trading company to which Barnet Council services for people with physical and learning difficulties were outsourced in 2012.

That outsourcing was presented to the public on a very big pile of marketing horseshit: the council claimed that the trading company would return mighty profits and that disabled people from all over would abandon their own local services and pay good money to travel absolute miles in the rain, etc, to participate in Barnet’s.

It was clear to anyone who thought about it for even two minutes that this “concept” was a complete non-starter. I’ve read a lot of council bollocks in my time, but the so-called business plan for Your Choice Barnet really took the biscuit. John Sullivan, the father of a Barnet woman who uses those services, described the whole notion to me as “mental masturbation.” It’s still hard to think of a better description.

The council business case was full of utterly unsubstantiated claims about profit opportunities and possible markets. In a report for Barnet Unison at the time, the academic and outsourcing expert Dexter Whitfield observed that there was “no assurance provided on the quality or reliability of data and assumptions used,” in the council’s business plan. He also noted that “ethical and moral issues concerning why adult services should be expected to have such high level of profitability are absent from the business case and the report to cabinet.” He wondered, in other words, why a company should be looking to make big money out of disabled people and why the council didn’t want to discuss that. It really is priceless stuff, this council business planning for the care sector. Basically, it involves sitting round in a boardroom and pulling random numbers out of your arse. Then you tell experienced careworkers that £7 an hour or whatever is reasonable money – for them, that is – and that they can live without weekend enhancement pay and decent sick leave. You do that sort of thing for a bit and then tweet about upcoming management triumphs. Brilliant.

Needless to say, the promised Your Choice profits never came to pass. Disabled people did not descend on Barnet in their masses to pay for and participate in Barnet services for disabled people. A year ago, the company resurfaced to bleat about debt and claim that the only way to claw money back was to cut careworkers’ wages and staff numbers. That has hit the services, all right. Barnet Unison says that about 145 full time equivalent staff were transferred from adult services to the trading company in 2012. After the “restructure” last year and cuts to shift allowance pay, only about 105 FTE staff are in place now – a 30% cut in staffing levels.

On Monday and Tuesday next week, those careworkers begin strike action against a 9.5% pay cut. They plan to meet up on Tuesday with the striking Doncaster careworkers too. This is an interesting and important point. The Doncaster careworkers, who were recently transferred from the NHS to the private company CareUK, have been striking for weeks in protest at CareUK’s cuts to their pay and conditions. They can’t live on that money and have already had to give up their homes. That fight has started to generate a lot of mainstream publicity. People are beginning to understand that careworkers are at the front of a battle for wages that people can actually live on. They are beginning to understand that these private companies make money by paying their workers almost nothing. If careworkers from different parts of the country are meeting up to join forces – well, that will give Andrew Travers something to tweet about all right. And if he can’t manage it, I certainly will. Monday and Tuesday next week, comrades. See you there.