Scottish Water employees to strike for 2 days as pay standoff continues | Utilities

Scottish Water employees will strike for 2 days from the early hours of Tuesday as a standoff over pay continues on the state-owned firm.

The hanging employees’ union warned that emergency repairs and high quality checks to water provided to five million individuals throughout Scotland wouldn’t be carried out in the course of the motion on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Greater than 1,000 employees within the Unison union will go on strike for the second time in a month within the pay dispute, after rejecting a deal that the union stated was 2.6% and adopted years of real-terms cuts to wages.

The Unison Scottish Water department secretary, Tricia McArthur, stated: “Scottish Water employees are merely asking to be paid pretty for the important providers upon which everybody in Scotland depends.

“Issues are supposed to be completely different in a publicly owned service like this. However senior managers are behaving no in another way to these operating non-public water corporations south of the border.”

Scottish Water stated it “didn’t recognise” the figures cited by Unison and stated that the supply of three.4% with a assured improve of £1,400 would spell a 5.5% rise for the lowest-paid.

It stated contingency plans have been in place to allow it to take care of regular providers in the course of the strikes and suggested prospects to report any issues with the water as standard.

Peter Farrer, Scottish Water’s chief working officer, stated the supply was “honest and progressive”, including: “Nobody advantages from industrial motion, and our focus is on persevering with to ship for our thousands and thousands of consumers throughout Scotland. We urge the unions to get again around the negotiating desk as quickly as attainable.”

In contrast to in England, the water boards in Scotland have been by no means privatised, and Scottish Water has stated that it reinvests all earnings, at the moment about £800m a 12 months, immediately again into its infrastructure, a community of 30,000 miles of pipes and about 2,000 remedy works.

Though Scotland has not skilled the scandals round monetary and environmental mismanagement seen at English privatised water corporations corresponding to Thames Water, companies have nonetheless warned that its sewage air pollution might be way more widespread than realised.

Environmental Requirements Scotland final 12 months stated that there had been 1000’s of sewage overflow incidents within the earlier 12 months, with some Scottish storm overflows releasing sewage greater than 500 occasions. The company stated that websites have been spilling extra continuously than must be anticipated, with dangers to well being and the surroundings, and that solely a fraction have been totally monitored.