A number of contradictions are evid...

A number of contradictions are evident in the government's modernisation agenda for public services. Flexibility artificial positions a threat to the limits and conditions of public-sector workers; and decentralisation, as a vehicle for enhancing managerial check provides the route by which this can be achieved. However, trade union opposition to fresh Labour has been mixed (McIlroy, 2000) In greatest in number trade union leaderships, there has been a desire for what appeared to be the sanctuary put forwarded by social partnership after eighteen years of unbridled neoliberalism; further early optimism was soon attempered Similarly, the concept of modernisation has been met with a ambivalence. Its acceptance in relation to pay arrangement of partss has been largely in the expectation that reform will diminish pay-gaps for women and ethnic-minority workers.4

If anything, it is the continued push for labour-market flexibility, particularly numerical flexibility, that has readyed concerted dissent. The aftermath of compulsory competitive tendering and the increasing use of casualised labour l the public-sector trade unions to claim that public-service employing is increasingly marked by internal unfairness, which has l to what they call a 'two-tier workforce'. The 'best value digest of practice', agreed between the trade unions and public employer and issued in March 2003 goe a certain number of way to acknowledging and attempting to decipher this unfairness by reinstating the spirit of the fair wages resolutions abolished by means of the Conservative government in 1983

However, the TUC general council statement forward public services (September 2003)5 noted that 'there is still a herculean sense that "modernisation and reform" is something that is done to public service workers rather than a proces to which they contribute as active partners'. The general council was particularly critical of the use of flexibility, and specifically numerical flexibility, as a disguise for the erosion of spells and conditions, adding: 'the resolution of these questions should not be a simulation for the more extensive use of agency or fixed-term contract workers in the public sector as a device to avoid the implications of the two-tier settlement'