 Nursery nurses have returned to work in most council areas |
Nursery nurses and their employers remain at loggerheads after staff in Glasgow rejected the city council's "final offer" to end strike action. Unison urged the local authority to get back round the table after members voted against the deal at a meeting.
Glasgow City Council said there would be no further talks unless they centred on the money already on offer.
It urged Unison to hold a secret ballot of all its members - a demand which has been rejected by the union.
More than 700 Glasgow nursery nurses attended the meeting at the city's Royal Concert Hall on Wednesday evening, where they rejected the pay offer by 445 votes to 287.
'Same job'
Branch secretary Angela Lynes said staff thought it was "extremely unfair" that the council was offering a figure which was less than 16 other authorities.
She said they had rejected an hourly rate of �9.83, while those other authorities had offered �10.13 an hour.
"We feel nursery nurses should be paid the same across the country because they do the same job," she said.
"Why should the Glasgow nursery nurses accept less than nursery nurses in surrounding authorities?"
However, Councillor Steven Purcell, the council's education convener, accused the union of moving the goalposts by getting "hung up on an hourly rate". He said Glasgow employed almost 1,200 nursery nurses, while a neighbouring authority paying �10.74 an hour employed just 70.
"A coupe of dozen of them are on that particular top rate," he told BBC Scotland.
"In our case we would be talking about several hundred and therefore the cost to the council tax payer in Glasgow would be another �1m.
"I don't have that in the education budget... I have had to beg, steal and borrow to maximise the offer on the table."
Consultation process
He called on Unison to hold a full postal ballot of its members to hear the voices of the 400 staff who did not attend the meeting.
However, Ms Lynes said a majority of its members had been present and that the union was happy with its consultation process.
"We will be going back to the city council today to ask them to reconsider their position and bring themselves back into the group of councils that are paying more than that," she said.
"If they do not do that we will have to consider our position, but in the meantime our industrial action will continue."
Mr Purcell said the council would also have to consider how to move things forward. But he stressed: "One thing is quite clear, and has been made quite clear to Unison in the last 72 hours.
"There will be no further talks at Glasgow City Council with Unison unless it is around the money on the table and how we move that about to try to find a way forward."
He added that the council was now planning to "reorganise our priorities".
This will involve offering an enhanced provision to four-year-olds who will start primary school in August.
"We do appreciate that they have lost out in valuable preparation work for their transition to primary school," he said.
Local agreements
The service will also be extended throughout the school holidays.
It follows an agreement between the council and staff who are working normally, including those who are not in a union and members of the EIS who have been providing cover in nurseries during the strike for health and safety reasons.
Ms Lynes said she hoped that the union's colleagues in the EIS "would not be used by Glasgow City Council to break this strike".
Glasgow, which employs a quarter of Scotland's nursery nurses, is one of the areas not to have reached local agreements with nursery nurses after three months of all-out strike action.
The others are Orkney, Renfrewshire, the Borders and Edinburgh, where the result of a ballot is expected to be known later this week.
Nursery nurses in Fife are due to go back to work on Monday as they are balloted on a new pay proposal.
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There will be no further talks at Glasgow City Council with Unison unless it is around the money on the table and how we move that about to try to find a way forward 
