00:00 Today we're at Shield Hall outside Scottish Water and we're here regarding industrial
00:15 action from GMB Scotland and the Joint Trade Unions. This industrial action is round about
00:21 this year's pay award which is now being tied to a pay and grading structure that quite
00:26 frankly there's been no negotiation, no consultation and our members are deeply concerned about
00:31 this. We've got picket lines all across Scotland today and people are really, really angry
00:36 about what's going on. This is not about money, it's not about over-inflated pay increases,
00:42 this is about a job evaluation and a pay structure that our members will be tied to within Scottish
00:48 Water for the next 15 to 20 years. People have a right to be worried and they have a
00:54 right to be concerned. It's regarding the pay and grading structure, as I said there's
00:58 been no negotiation, there's been no consultation. The trade unions have raised concerns around
01:03 the job evaluation and how that's been carried out. We have raised concerns around benchmarking
01:08 because as far as we're aware we've been told that our members in Scottish Water have been
01:12 benchmarked against employers like McDonald's and Amazon as opposed to other water and utility
01:17 companies across the UK. We have a real concern round about the appeals process of this and
01:23 what people would do if they were not happy with their outcome. Finally, we have people
01:29 at the bottom level of this pay structure who are absolutely paying for huge pay increases
01:34 for people at the top level of the structure. Today is the first day of industrial action,
01:39 this is a full weekend, Friday to Monday, of complete industrial action across Scottish
01:44 Water. Moving forward there will be a ban on voluntary overtime, that will be continuous
01:49 and then every Friday, Monday, for the foreseeable future, any type of standby, call out, there
01:56 will be a strike action on that. Which means for every member of the public, every business
02:01 across Scotland, any emergency response, any contact with our response teams within the
02:07 contact centres will not be available because these people will be on strike on an ongoing
02:11 basis. The workforce are angry, the workforce have a right to be angry. They have a senior
02:17 management committee who have sat in front of Scottish Parliament and were unable to
02:21 confirm their huge earnings and yet we have people here who are struggling to pay their
02:27 bills, who have been entered into a paying grading structure that has no clarity, that
02:32 has no transparency and to be quite frank, they don't know where they stand in it. With
02:36 the general public and it's everyone across Scotland that will affect, any response to
02:41 any type of emergencies regarding sewage, flooding, if there was any type of bad weather
02:46 the way we've had in the previous weekend, where Scottish Water were integral to resolving
02:50 those issues, that will not be there. People will be left wondering what Scottish Water
02:55 are actually doing to resolve this issue. This is the most avoidable industrial action
03:01 that any of our trade unions have been involved in for many, many years. There is a clear
03:06 solution to this. Decouple this year's pay structure with this year's pay award. Let's
03:12 give our members a pay award that they deserve and then let's have a look at the pay structure.
03:17 We absolutely are in agreement that that needs to be reviewed, it needs to be updated but
03:22 let's do it properly, let's do it jointly with the trade unions and let's get our members
03:26 back to work.
03:27 [Music]
03:32 (music)
03:34 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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