Unison members hope that parents and children will join in as they assemble in the city's Blythswood Square at 12.30 and march to George Square to launch the nursery nurses' national regrading claim. The rally is to be addressed by Margaret Jamieson, the Labour MSP for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, a Unison member whose daughter is training to be a nursery nurse.
Unison wants nursery nurses working in social services daycare centres to receive between 16,000 and 20,000 for a 35-hour week and 52-week year. They are currently paid between 11,000 and 14,800.
Nursery nurses in Scotland's schools now earn between 10,000 and Pounds 12,000 for a 32.5-hour week. Unison wants to see this increase to Pounds 13,000-16,800.
Carol Ball, chair of Unison's national nursery nurse working party and the union's convenor of education for Glasgow, said, 'Nursery nurses have to carry out the Government's national policies such as the literacy and numeracy strategies, so they should have a national job remit.'
Unison had decided to press ahead with the national pay claim now rather than waiting for individual councils to regrade nursery nurses' jobs as part of the single status agreement, which involves re-evaluating all local authority jobs, she added.
'Already in Glasgow they are putting the dates for single status back to 2004 and it should have been 2002. We are not prepared to wait,' she said. 'I don't think we will lose under single status but we won't gain. There is no money attached to single status. If we do nothing now, we're lost.' Ms Ball said that in her personal view it was likely that nursery nurses would have to take some kind of action to push the pay claim through, although they wanted to keep parents' support and would only cause severe disruption to services as a last resort. 'We are saying to parents, come and help us, write letters supporting us. If we withdrew our goodwill and worked to rule, that would probably be enough. In terms of closing nurseries, it would be the end of a long line.'
Unison wants the Scottish Executive to set up a review of the nursery nurse role, career structure and salary similar to the McCrone review of teaching. However, deputy education minister Nicol Stephen told the Scottish Parliament last month that there were no plans for a review.
Matt Smith, Unison's Scottish secretary, recently wrote to education minister Jack McConnell saying, 'Nursery nurses have not been regraded for 12 years and our members feel undervalued and underpaid. They are committed to early years education and childcare and are well-trained individuals who want to develop within a career structure which reflects their expertise.' Low pay, low status and poor career progression emerged as the main barriers to expansion of the childcare workforce in a survey commissioned by the Scottish Executive and referred to in the Executive's guidance to partnerships for 2001-2004.
