Fair Pay, Terms and Conditions for Residential Child Care workers can be enacted now.

Fair Pay terms and conditions is in the interests of children, their Residential Child Care workers and the public interest.

It is also congruent with theory and practice of Residential Child Care.

A Fair Pay agreement is an agreement that applies to all workers across entire industries or occupations. It provides minimum terms and conditions of employment across a whole sector, regardless of specific employers, for between 3 and 5 years.

The current preoccupation of government and providers is on the profits made by Residential Child Care providers.

Reading the reports, research, blogs, comments, no one is speaking from about Pay, Terms and Conditions

It is the Residential Child Care workers, not the providers, who care for the children. Providers create the conditions for care.

It is the work of the Residential Child Care workers that makes the profits.

It is established the profits are being made.

If not: Why not?

There are 3 organisational ways that Fair Pay could be made to happen right now.

1. Residential Child Care workers setting up as Residential Child Care Co-operatives or Employee Owned Trusts.
2. Local authorities’ procurement asserting in their contract that Fair Pay, Terms and Conditions are essential to be provided by any provider with whom they place a child. With all local authorities doing this there would be a sector wide entitlement applying to all ownership types.
3. Providers elect to implement Fair Pay, Terms and Conditions as a sector, and their representative organisation(s) make it incumbent for membership.

These actions would be to prefigure moves that may well occur after the coming election. Then methodology has been tried and tested in Europe and elsewhere.

Fair Pay is established in other countries through Sector Partnerships stating the pay rates, terms, and conditions to which a Residential Child Care worker has an entitlement. In these countries pay, terms and conditions can be higher, but everyone knows the foundation.