Striking IT workers accused of holding council to ransom

Swansea Council has accused striking IT workers and their trade union of holding the authority to ransom and using the city's residents as pawns in a wider fight to block improvements to public services.

Over 100 IT workers at the council have now been on all-out indefinite strike for four weeks in protest at plans to outsource Swansea's IT to the private sector in a £100m project called service@swansea.

In the latest developments, trade union Unison is to ballot all 5,000 of its members in Swansea for further strike action in support of the IT staff, while around 1,000 attended a march and rally for the strikers in the city centre earlier this week.

But Swansea Council has hit back and turned up the heat on IT staff by claiming Unison is holding the authority to ransom and "playing with people's lives".

Gerald Clement, deputy leader of Swansea Council, said in a statement: "Unison clearly has a hidden agenda. It does not want to improve services for the public. What it wants is an industrial dispute that uses the people of Swansea as pawns in a wider fight that opposes modern public services."

Clement went on to accuse Unison of trying to scaremonger staff and the public and said the union keeps shifting the goalposts in the dispute and is refusing to negotiate.

IT workers at the council are furious with Clement's comments, however. One told silicon.com: "Since when has the notion of employees exercising their legal right to be in dispute with their employer been seen as holding the employer to ransom? Our wish to see TUPE transfer removed has been a consistent one due to our distrust of the way the whole thing has been handled from the start and distrust of those driving the project."

The employee added that there have now been no talks between the council and Unison for almost two weeks and accused the council of using delaying tactics to "try and wait us out".

With the dispute in deadlock, the only certainty is that the row has become a public relations disaster for Swansea, according to the National Outsourcing Association (NOA).

The NOA said in a statement: "The tension and speculation that was allowed to build up over the outsourcing deal was a pot waiting to boil over. The unions were evidently left out until too late a stage by which point the staff were enraged and the damage done. The council may well have done irreparable damage to its reputation in terms of its other employees and its citizens."