More than one in every 10 council posts in Dundee have been axed over the past two years the second-highest rate of local authority job losses in the country.
Statistics released by the GMB union reveal there was an 11% drop in the number of local authority employees in Dundee between 2010 and 2012. There are now 7,300 Dundee City Council employees, 900 fewer than there were two years ago.
Only Renfrewshire and Highland Council shed a greater proportion of its workforce over that period but Highland Council’s figures are skewed, as around 1,400 employees were transferred to the NHS as part of an overhaul of care services.
Renfrewshire axed 1,000 posts over the two years, reducing its workforce by 11.6% to 7,600.
Highland Council has reduced its workforce by 2,800 to 10,100 a staggering reduction of 21.7%. However, total job losses were only around half of this because of the transfer of staff to the NHS.
A spokeswoman for Highland Council said: ”The GMB should know better, as their members were fully involved in the integration process.”
Angus Council’s workforce has fallen by 200 or just 3.5% to 5,500 over the past two years, while Perth and Kinross’s has dropped by 3.3% to 5,900. Fife Council has axed 1,800 positions, 7.8% of its 2010 workforce.
Across Scotland the number of council employees fell by 7.3% to 282,000.
According to the GMB, there have been more than 650,000 public sector job losses across the UK since the 2010 General Election. Around 300,000 of these were in local government. The union is warning of further job losses because of the ongoing need to cut public spending.
Dundee City Council has to find more than £18 million of savings over the next two years but administration leader Ken Guild this week said these could be achieved without the need for voluntary redundancies or cuts to frontline services.
However, a voluntary redundancy scheme will continue to operate.
Harry Donaldson, secretary of GMB Scotland, said: ”Plainly, this government has engineered the most savage decimation of public services ever seen. The scale of the fall in public sector employees so far now outstrips the last two recessions in 1982-87 and 1992-97 to stand at a shocking 659,000.
”Almost 300,000 job losses are in local government, which is a considerably higher number than original estimates. Yet there is still more to come, as health authorities and councils are facing significant new budget challenges next year.”