‘Only looking after the weans’? The Scottish nursery nurses’ strike, 2004
- 1 May 2005
- journal article
- other
- Published by SAGE Publications in Critical Social Policy
- Vol. 25 (2) , 223-239
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0261018305051327
Abstract
During March and April 2004 5,000 local authority employed nursery nurses in Scotland were involved in a national all-out strike. A two and a half year dispute over pay was transformed into a struggle to maintain national bargaining in the face of employer attempts to impose local pay deals. Drawing on interviews with striking nursery nurses, this paper seeks to explore the factors that led to the largest all-out strike in Scotland since the Miners’ Strike in the mid 1980s. It is argued that the experiences of these nursery nurses highlight particular ways in which New Labour’s welfare reforms, and its approach to pay and conditions in the public sector, are impacting on some of the most poorly paid groups of public sector workers, and in doing so suggest that this dispute has a much wider resonance beyond Scotland and beyond the nursery nurses’ fight.Keywords
This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
- Accounting for change in public sector industrial relations: the erosion of national bargaining in further education in England and WalesIndustrial Relations Journal, 2004
- Investing in the Citizen‐workers of the Future: Transformations in Citizenship and the State under New LabourSocial Policy & Administration, 2003
- Child care, social inclusion and urban regenerationCritical Social Policy, 2002
- The Impact of Two Decades of Reform of British Public Sector Industrial RelationsPublic Money and Management, 2001
- New forms of employment relations in the public services: the limits of strategic choiceIndustrial Relations Journal, 2000