The employers' organisation, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), called the union to the meeting in an attempt to put an end to the strike action which has involved thousands of nursery nurses and is now in its fourth week.
Joe Di Paola, Unison's Scottish organiser for local government, said that COSLA had made 'substantially the same offer' as that of 25 April, which Unison's members had rejected. Although he would report back to the membership he thought it 'unlikely' they would accept it.
He said, 'Unison made it very clear that it would require a significant move towards the nursery nurses' claim to enable us to resolve the problem.
We are bitterly disappointed that, despite their continual calls for us to resume talks, when we did, they made us no new offer.'
But COSLA president Pat Watters said COSLA was 'not only surprised but extremely disappointed' at Unison's reaction and had been under the impression that the union would clarify COSLA's position to its membership prior to announcing any rejection.
He said COSLA had offered the union 'an extremely speedy pay review exercise to be carried out jointly'. This would have involved setting up a 'short-term task group' to look at developing a core job profile for nursery nurses. This could then be evaluated by the Scottish Joint Council, which includes representatives of trade unions and local authority employers, using the job evaluation scheme that has been developed to implement the Single Status Agreement, a re-grading of all local authority jobs.
A COSLA spokesperson said that although implementing the Single Status Agreement on a council-by-council basis had been a relatively slow process, dealing with nursery nurses as a distinct group of employees would mean that the job could be evaluated within 'a matter of weeks'.
However, Mr Di Paola said, 'We will continue talking to COSLA, but it will be difficult to make progress unless there is going to be recognition that nursery nurses need a fair deal, and they cannot wait for some prospective job evaluation scheme.'
Carol Ball, chair of Unison's nursery nurse working party, said, 'Everybody from the First Minister down agrees that this dispute has gone on long enough. However, our employers are still failing to appreciate the valuable role that nursery nurses carry out and to offer tangible recognition of that.'
Unison nursery nurse members in Fife have suspended strike action to allow negotiations to take place between the union and the council's education service.
Elsewhere, action will continue with two-day strikes planned for Wednesday and Thursday this week (11 and 12 June) in Glasgow, Renfrewshire, East Renfrewshire, West Dumbarton- shire, East Dumbartonshire, North Lanarkshire, Highland, and Dumfries and Galloway.
Ms Ball said that having been involved in the first week of action, Unison members in these regions will have been out on strike for a total of four days. She expected that more than 2,500 nursery nurses would be on strike this week.
Strikes also took place last Tuesday and Wednesday (3 and 4 June) in Inverclyde, East, North and South Ayrshire, Orkney and Shetland.
If the situation remains unresolved, Ms Ball said, there would be an all-out nationwide strike by Unison nursery nurse members before the end of June.
ends