Enable is one of Scotland’s largest social care providers and is currently undergoing the first national care strike for over a decade. 600 UNISON members are demanding an immediate injection of funding into the sector, a minimum rate of £15 per hour, and collective bargaining rights thereafter. We’re determined to fix the crisis in social care by winning a sustainable settlement for workers and the people we care for.

The Job

Enable is typical of many community adult social care providers. It’s a charity provider, with front-line staff dispersed all over the country, usually providing support in family or individuals’ homes. This often requires lone working with little contact with colleagues, being managed remotely through a phone. Other workers support people to access education or employment. Social care staff are at work in high street shops and banks, on public transport, at home, on holidays, at weddings and funerals, in colleges and universities, in workplaces and community centres, in every community in Scotland. Our work is vital to the people we support and extremely varied, as unique as the wants and needs of every individual we care for.

Front line care staff at Enable are referred to as personal assistants (PAs). We have responsibilities for maintaining tenancies, ensuring people are in receipt of their financial entitlements, enabling access to friends, family and community groups, administering medication, supporting healthy lifestyles, and providing intimate and personal care. We might support multiple people in various settings. Many of us regularly face violence at work, have physically demanding responsibilities, and manage intense behaviours and emotions. Despite the varied nature of the work, personal assistants are on a flat rate of pay which takes no account of our experience, qualifications, or individual job requirements.

Enable PAs are unlike almost any other publicly funded, regulated, and qualified public service workers; we have no recourse to collective bargaining. Instead, the Scottish Government hands down the funding for social care to local authorities, with ministers declaring that they’re proud to fund the Real Living Wage, currently £12.60 per hour, as a minimum. The reality is that this benevolent diktat, delivered without consultation or negotiation, has for many care workers become not a minimum but a ceiling. Enable PAs to know that we are not properly valued for our work. Not just because we see how essential it is to the people we support on a daily basis, but because when we look across to our care worker colleagues in local government who do have access to a bargaining table, we see the difference in terms and conditions. There are no care workers in local government in Scotland who get less than £15 per hour. Many get substantially more and the local government living wage in Scotland is significantly more than the ‘Real Living Wage’.

In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, public opinion recognised the importance of carers and the injustice of our situation. In 2021, the Scottish Government finally increased pay for frontline social care workers beyond the living wage and into line with NHS Band 2. This is now equivalent to the pay of health care assistants and domestic support workers. Unfortunately, however, in the years since, the pay of third sector and independent care workers has not kept up with that of their colleagues in the NHS or local government. For a full-time PA at Enable, over £5,500 of pay has been withheld since 2022 when politicians stopped maintaining that parity with NHS Band 2. This is a life changing amount. Our value to society has not changed, but our cause has once again receded into the shadows.

The sector

The Scottish Government review of equality in social care 2021 states,

The vast majority of the social care workforce are women and in lower paid positions. In 2020, 80% of adult social care staff were female. In their 2019 report on ‘Fair Work in Scotland’s Social Care Sector’, the Fair Work Convention proposed that the undervaluing of care work is associated with perceptions of care work as being ‘women’s work’, and with the prevalence of women employed in the sector. This report also highlighted the contribution of the social care sector to the gender pay gap in Scotland, which disadvantages women.

All social care workers are victims of gender pay inequality and the impact of low pay on the livelihoods of carers should not be understated. This year, in UNISON’s pay survey of Enable staff, 50% of respondents said they had used credit cards to pay bills. 71% have considered finding a new job for better pay. Staff turnover rates at Enable, in line with other providers, are high. In the past few years, between 25% and 37% of personal assistants have left, and vacancies in supervisor and management roles are persistent. This has a significant impact on the service that people receive. PAs provide care for many people with autism who struggle with change to their routines and plans. Many of the people we support take months or even years to become accustomed to new staff and constant change or gaps in service can have long term negative effects. Those who develop that life-enriching professional bond with the people they support find themselves pulled between staying in a job, which can be rewarding even if very challenging, and finding work which gives them a greater work/life balance and better pay.

Advancement in social care is also unattractive. Pay differentials between PAs and management roles have been eroded over time. The prospect of being on the hook for emergency shift cover and picking up the slack of vacant positions makes those better paid roles unattractive to most and impossible for many. Experienced, compassionate staff who know the people that rely on their services, who understand the needs and responsibilities of PAs, should be in these positions and incentivised to stay. Many people who work in social care do so because they have direct experience of caring for elderly or disabled family members. Many have health conditions themselves and cannot work the hours required to make the pay meet their needs. Their experience is valuable for a sector which relies on compassion and sensitivity. The Real Living Wage is not really a living wage if you cannot work full time. Enable workers, although in the charity sector, enjoy certain benefits that come along with union recognition in the workplace. For most care workers outside local government or the NHS, the conditions are much worse.

Enable is the second largest employer in social care in Scotland, yet makes up less than 2% of the sector as a whole. This demonstrates the incredible and almost comical fragmentation of Scottish social care. There are literally hundreds of organisations, hundreds of high-paid CEOs, chief finance officers, boards of directors, hundreds of sets of policies. Across the sector, your management, work expectations, training, pay, and conditions will differ, despite this being an essential service, publicly funded, and highly regulated. After the closure in the 1990s of large residential institutions for people with learning disabilities and with the growing need for elderly care, a fragmented and dysfunctional patchwork system has flourished on the back of low pay and the exploitation of migrant workers. Millions of pounds of public money is wasted by the inefficiency of this system and millions more is extracted as private profit.

Enable, for its part, has lobbied the government for better pay. Enable employees receive sick pay from day one (partly in recognition of the importance of infection control in social care), as well as enhanced maternity and paternity pay. These are enhancements argued for by the Scottish National Party government’s Fair Work agenda. But the government, despite encouraging employers to sign up to these principles, despite promising funding to implement these enhancements, and despite making promises to implement sectoral bargaining, has reallocated money assigned to fair work away from social care - £38 million in 2023. Now they have indefinitely delayed sectoral bargaining.

This is to say nothing of their failed National Care Service (NCS) proposals, which never lived up to the name, and have now lost the support of unions, employers, local authorities, and opposition Members of the Scottish Parliament. The NCS has since been dropped with no allusions to meaningful reform to replace it. This results in employers, even better ones such as Enable, only being funded to pay the Real Living Wage. The fair work enhancements are not funded, meaning employers are incentivised to provide worse conditions to make savings, while more scrupulous providers can be undercut on pay. Private employers who have built financial reserves, many of which are aggressively anti-union, can lure workers away from organisations like Enable by offering slightly more on the hourly rate. Shamefully, the government has presided over a situation where public bodies and charity employers are losing workers to private providers, the fastest growing part of the social care system. The Scottish Government’s promise of sectoral bargaining in social care will likely be overtaken by the UK Government’s Employment Rights Bill. By the time this might be implemented, there will have been a delay of a decade since the Scottish Government first promised it. A failure of government and a shameful shirking of responsibility.

Who can say why this dysfunctional system is being maintained? The political will and the funding required to reform the sector is obviously great but the public know the value of care workers. We all understand that in order to have a functioning and secure health service we need a real public care service. The public sees the work of carers in their communities, in their homes, and the homes of their loved ones. The case has been made, understood, and accepted by politicians; the opportunity to act has emerged and re-emerged. For better or worse, various public services in Scotland have been overhauled and reimagined, the Scottish Government has had strong majorities in the parliament for years, the public have shown their support for care workers throughout the pandemic, and the block grant to the Scottish Government has hit £50 billion after the largest ever increase. Yet, despite care workers now having to be accredited by a national regulatory body, sign up to national codes of practice, commit to vocational qualifications, and have a responsibility to undertake continual professional development, we are still waiting for real action on pay.

Social care in Scotland has been in crisis for years. It is undoubtedly unfit for current needs, let alone the care needs of the future. The current model is embedding in-work poverty and perpetuating the gender pay gap. However, it is lucrative for profiteers and well-connected charity executives, and socially valuable to any retired business owner or politician seeking to build a collection of charity trusteeships. As it is, the system disperses and atomises care workers. It enforces barriers between us and our efforts to organise must be innovative; we must be supported by our unions in bespoke ways. The change must come from below. All trade unionists know the interests of workers will not be catered to by those in power without pressure. The power of workers to change the conditions in social care has been structurally repressed. But we are organising, building power, strength in numbers, and knowledge. After the failures and broken promises of politicians, workers ourselves will force the changes we all need.

The Union

Becoming actively involved in the union has often felt impossible for many members. They face lone working, high staff turnover, and regular overtime. For a long time, many workers would have never even spoken to an active member. Part of this is simply due to Enable delivering a lot of their training online, PAs being managed through a smartphone, and many workers never having met their teammates in real life. For migrant workers on sponsored visas, agitating at work or complaining of racism, unsafe conditions, or anything at all carries the additional risk of becoming a target. When your right to stay in the country is linked to your employer, many see this as too great a risk.¹ The challenges of organising in social care mean considered strategies and additional resources must be applied, but the need and potential are great.

To try and address these challenges, a dedicated UNISON social care team in Scotland have developed a specialised training course for stewards in the sector. The training is delivered flexibly with hybrid and remote sessions to fit around shift work and personal caring responsibilities. UNISON’s Scottish care workers are spread across more than twenty branches, so this training also provides an opportunity for workers to meet each other from different organisations across the country. The training is specifically tailored to the demands of organising and representing members in care. These adaptations have led to a steady growth in the number of accredited stewards. A new ‘active member’ position is also helping branches to identify members who’re willing to get stuck into organising their workplaces, but without the additional responsibilities of becoming a steward.

Opportunities for workers to come together and share their own experiences, anger, and demands are rare but essential. In 2024, UNISON Scotland held their first Care Workers’ Conference. Around 50 members attended, some from recognised workplaces, but the majority from organisations which are resisting union access and lobbying hard against sectoral bargaining. Together, we received training on workplace mapping, building participation, winning ballots, and communicating our demands. We also heard from experienced organisers, including those involved in the 2018 Glasgow City Council equal pay campaign. Perhaps most importantly, we shared our experiences with each other. The testimony of workers on sponsored visas, in particular, had a powerful effect on the group, as some of whom, in a highly fragmented and atomised sector, had not realised the pressure and discrimination their coworkers faced. We came away with a series of demands:

1. No less than £15 an hour.
2. Collective bargaining.
3. A sectoral skills evaluation to inform pay.
4. An end to privatisation.

To combat the atomisation of care workers, we’ve also engaged members in social media and online campaigns. We have recorded live Q&A sessions with union stewards and officers, which members could then watch on demand. These sessions then informed FAQ graphics, which we shared in our closed Facebook and WhatsApp groups. We’ve also created time-limited WhatsApp groups for each picket, where members have shared their enthusiasm and trepidation, coordinated placard-making sessions, and arranged transportation to the picket lines. Using the Facebook group, members have shared common issues at work, which have informed the union of concerns and priorities. From this, we’ve instigated campaigns on PPE supply to workplaces and communication expectations when not at work. When balloting, members shared photos of themselves at the post box, a helpful prompt for many people’s first-ever industrial ballot. Together, we’ve sent thousands of emails to our representatives in Holyrood. Careful tracking of engagement by union officers has helped to prevent new members from losing interest or slipping through the cracks.

Through all these efforts and more, an understanding has grown among the workforce - not just that we deserve better, which has always been clear, but that taking action on pay, raising our voice, and increasing our profile is how we defend the entitlements of the people we support. Pay parity with local government care workers or similar roles in the NHS is essential to safeguard quality and sustainability in the community sector. We have shown that funding cuts and low pay have been disastrous for the sector. The service is disintegrating, and we have to act. Since an Enable stewards committee was established two years ago, for the first time, an effective voice for members has made itself heard.

The Strike

After our members rejected a pay deal which offered no more than the living wage, the functional minimum, we entered into dispute with Enable for the first time in their 70-year history. In response to the threat of industrial action, Enable conceded an additional £900,000 for PA’s pay, representing an additional 10p per hour in 2023/24 and 20p per hour for 2024/25, with no further increase for other job roles. When put to a vote, members rejected the offer, and we pushed ahead for a strike. Enable then made a further offer worth £115,000 or 5p on the PA hourly rate for 2024/25, however, this was also rejected. Over the past two years, union density has increased from 19% to 33%, and engagement with ballots has improved from one to the next. A vote for industrial action returned a result of 93% in favour, thereby launching the first national social care strike in Scotland for over a decade. Enable have since paid out the initial £900,000 offer as a gesture of “good will”, however, we ultimately recognise that Enable does not have the power or the finances to pay us what we actually deserve.

For many who work in social care, the idea of striking is (or was) unthinkable. The nature of the work often requires dedication and selflessness, which leads people to believe that they could never abandon the people they care for to fight for their own interests. The most common reason given by staff who were reluctant to vote for a strike or to come out was fear of what it could mean for the people they work for — going without support, feeling abandoned, or being supported by a stranger. Workers were concerned about the potential negative impact the action might have on the well-being of the people they care for, their relationships with them, or their families. PAs do not do this work because it pays well, not for status or ambition, but for the people we care for.

But our activists have shown that our interests as workers and the interests of the people we care for are one and the same. To protect the people we care for and to give confidence to staff, we have designed our strike action to have as little impact as possible on the people we support, while applying maximum pressure on our real target, the Scottish Government. We recognise that our real target is not actually Enable, much less the people we work for or their families. Many staff are still angry at Enable. They see other care workers being paid more and may not appreciate the difference in fair work enhancements offered by Enable. But our messaging to members has always been clear: our fight in this dispute is with the Scottish Government. Not because of any partiality or sympathy for Enable executives, but because it is only the government that can resolve this dispute. It is only the government that can act on its own commitments to sectoral bargaining. It is only the government that can end the crisis in social care by meaningfully reforming this broken system and providing the funding we need.

So how did we design our strike? A lot of us take regular overtime and condense our hours to free up time for external caring responsibilities or training and education. So, losing one day’s pay is more like losing a week. We often work day shifts, followed by sleepover shifts, and then back onto day shifts. Working more than 24 hours is very typical. So, we decided to strike for single, non-consecutive shifts. This means one single day shift or one single waking night shift. This protected our earnings and reduced the disruption to the people we care for.

And it’s worked! The members have come out in force. On the picket lines, many of us have met each other in person for the first time. Together we’ve shared our stories, danced and sung songs of joy and resistance. Our pickets have had national media coverage and shut down the Enable HQ in North Lanarkshire, along with all their local college provision. Hundreds of us gathered in Edinburgh in June, with workers and supporters from other organisations, to march on the parliament to make our demands. It was a magnificent show of strength, but many who were there noted that this was not the climax, but only just the start.

The reality is that we know that Enable workers striking on our own are unlikely to win concessions from the government. This is because, despite Enable’s position as the second largest provider in the country, it is ultimately still just one of hundreds. But we believe that further action across the sector can force them to the table. The strike has not only strengthened the resolve of our own members and raised their self-esteem and expectations, but it’s also done this for workers all across the rest of the sector too. They’ve seen that we can and must strike. They’ve seen that well-meaning lobbying and political promises have got us nowhere. Further strike action at Enable is planned, and pay offers are being rejected across the sector, in at least four other companies we know of so far, and for the first time, there is a real prospect of coordinated action across employers to fight for our shared demands.

For a long time, Enable’s tagline and registered name was “ENABLE Scotland (leading the way)”. Well, now Enable’s workers have led the way, and care workers across the country are following.