Unison leader tells Labour “the only way to deal with the cost of living crisis is to give people a pay increase”

Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis threw down the gauntlet to the Labour leadership on pay today, pushing the party to stop opposing pay increases for public sector workers. Prentis told delegates to the union’s conference:

“When we fight on pay, we don’t expect Labour to oppose us – opposition means opposing the Government, not us. We want policy, to understand how local authorities will be funded, how we’ll build houses, get our kids back to work. We want a Labour party that is recognisable by its responsibility to Labour.”

Prentis gave an indication of what his union will be looking for from Labour’s upcoming National Policy Forum in Milton Keynes next month:

“Let’s let Labour know there is no equivocation about our demands this year – a moratorium on job cuts in our public services, a reversal of the bedroom tax, a rise in child benefit, greater freedoms for local councils, a review of social care, a real living wage, and scrapping of the Health and Social Care Act.”

Fundamentally though, Prentis wants to see Labour change tack on pay:

“Labour doesn’t seem to realise that the only way to deal with the cost of living crisis is to give people a pay increase”.

So far the party leadership have made a public sector pay freeze a cornerstone of the party’s economic plans – today Prentis served notice that’s a red line for his union in the run up to the election.

The Unison leader also predicted walkouts that could be bigger than the 1926 General Strike – warning the government that they could face “a wave of action never witnessed before”:

“The aim is to make it an autumn for this coalition to remember, a wave of action never witnessed before, an autumn with plans afoot to ballot our health members, our police staff, our food agency staff.”