6th October 2026
For several weeks Glasgow City Council has been at the centre of one of Scotland's most serious local-government employment disputes.
Thousands of council workers faced the possibility of being dismissed and then offered their jobs back on new terms and conditions.
It was an extraordinary prospect for a public-sector employer.
But on Monday 5 October 2026 the immediate crisis appeared to have been defused.
Glasgow City Council and Unison reached an improved agreement which includes three years of pay protection for workers who would otherwise face reductions. Unison is now to ballot its members on the revised offer, while the council has agreed that dismissal notices will not be issued while that process takes place.
So the immediate fire-and-rehire threat may be over.
But the bigger question remains.
Could other Scottish councils eventually find themselves facing similar financial pressures?
Glasgow is not simply a story about saving money
There is an important complication.
Glasgow's dispute has its roots in a very particular problem: the city's historic equal-pay settlement and the attempt to introduce a new pay and grading system.
The council has already paid more than £500 million to settle historic equal-pay claims.
Under the proposed new system, around 11% of employees faced the prospect of losing pay, which was at the heart of the dispute with the unions. Around 23,000 non-teaching employees were caught up in the wider fire-and-rehire threat.
That makes Glasgow unusual.
Other councils don't automatically have the same equal-pay problem.
But they do have something else in common with Glasgow.
They are all under financial pressure.
Scotland's councils are facing a difficult financial future
Audit Scotland reported in June that funding for Scottish councils was failing to keep pace with rising costs and demand, despite a small real-terms increase in funding.
The Accounts Commission has warned that councils face a very substantial financial challenge over the coming years.
This isn't simply about finding money for one year's budget.
Councils have to pay for employees, social care, schools, roads, waste collection, housing, transport and a long list of other services at a time when costs are increasing and demand for some services is also rising.
There are only so many ways of closing the gap.
Raise more money.
Cut services.
Become more efficient.
Use reserves.
Change the way services are delivered.
Or reduce the cost of employing people.
And eventually councils may have to use several of those options at the same time.
Highland Council is already dealing with the same basic problem
This is where the Glasgow story becomes particularly relevant to people in Caithness and the Highlands.
Highland Council says it is forecasting budget gaps of £16.3 million in 2026/27, £16.2 million in 2027/28 and £14.2 million in 2028/29.
The council says it has already delivered £217 million of savings over the past 12 years.
Its 2026/27 budget involved a package of savings, income generation and financial measures worth £61 million over three years to help close a £46.7 million gap.
That included a 7% council-tax increase and changes intended to generate additional income.
Highland is therefore not sitting back waiting for a financial crisis.
It is already trying to change how the council operates.
That is an important distinction.
The question is how far councils can keep going
Councils have been finding savings for years.
But there is a limit to what can be achieved simply by becoming more efficient.
If a council closes an underused building, reduces management costs or moves more services online, it can make a permanent saving.
But if the cost of employing staff rises while the amount of work remains the same, efficiency savings become much harder.
Eventually the argument can become about the actual terms and conditions of employment.
That is where things become much more difficult.
Pay.
Working hours.
Overtime.
Holiday arrangements.
Pensions.
Allowances.
Flexible working.
Shift patterns.
Location of work.
Job responsibilities.
Individually, some changes may appear relatively small.
Across thousands of employees, they can amount to millions of pounds.
And that is where unions become involved.
Could another council try fire and rehire?
It would be wrong to suggest that other Scottish councils are currently preparing to copy Glasgow.
There is no evidence of a nationwide move towards fire and rehire among Scotland's councils.
Indeed, Glasgow's particular circumstances make it a poor template for predicting what another council will do.
There is also a major legal change approaching.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 is due to introduce stronger restrictions on fire and rehire from January 2027.
The legislation is designed to make dismissal and re-engagement to impose changes to core employment terms automatically unfair in most circumstances, although there is an exception where an employer is experiencing financial difficulties.
That exception is important.
It means that financial difficulty will remain relevant.
So the new law may make fire and rehire much harder, but it does not mean that the underlying financial argument disappears.
The real danger may be something less dramatic
Perhaps the most important lesson from Glasgow is that councils don't necessarily have to reach the point of saying:
"Accept these terms or lose your job."
There are many steps before that.
Posts can disappear when employees leave.
Recruitment can be frozen.
Departments can be reorganised.
Services can be outsourced.
Buildings can close.
Opening hours can be reduced.
Overtime can be restricted.
Vacancies can remain unfilled.
Technology can replace some administrative work.
Services can be merged with those of another organisation.
And councils can ask employees to change the way they work.
From the council's point of view these may be perfectly reasonable attempts to balance the books.
From the employee's point of view, however, the cumulative effect can feel very different.
There is a bigger question for Scotland
This raises an uncomfortable question about the way local government is financed.
If councils are expected to deliver essentially the same services while facing rising costs, how much can efficiency alone achieve?
The Scottish Government's 2026/27 local-government settlement is worth almost £15.7 billion and includes additional General Revenue Grant funding and other measures.
The Government therefore has a strong argument that significant additional funding has been provided.
But councils can still argue that the money does not fully match the pressures they face.
Both statements can be true.
The Government can increase funding.
And councils can still have difficult financial problems.
That is the awkward mathematics of local government.
What happens if the pressure continues?
The danger isn't necessarily that 32 Scottish councils suddenly start threatening their employees with fire and rehire.
It is that the Glasgow dispute becomes an early warning of a much wider problem.
If council budgets remain under pressure year after year, eventually there may be fewer easy savings left.
Then councils will have to make increasingly difficult choices about:
jobs, pay, services, council tax and the way services are delivered.
And those choices will inevitably affect the people who work for councils as well as the people who use their services.
For Highland Council, the issue deserves watching even though there is currently no suggestion that it intends to follow Glasgow's route.
Highland has already acknowledged that its budgets are being squeezed by rising costs and increasing demand.
The council's response so far has included higher council tax, savings, income generation, investment and changes to the way services are delivered.
The question is how much further that approach can go.
Glasgow may have avoided a confrontation, but the financial problem hasn't gone away
The immediate Glasgow dispute now moves into a different phase.
Workers will have their say on the revised deal.
If they accept it, the threat of fire and rehire should disappear.
But the underlying reason Glasgow was considering such drastic action remains.
The council needs a sustainable pay and grading system while dealing with the financial consequences of its past equal-pay commitments.
And Glasgow isn't the only Scottish council trying to reconcile rising costs with limited resources.
Perhaps that is the real story.
The Glasgow fire-and-rehire row may be over, but Scotland's local-government financial squeeze isn't.
The question for every council, including Highland, is how long it can continue finding savings without eventually reaching decisions that are much more difficult for employees, unions and the public.
And that may be the debate worth having now, rather than waiting until another council reaches the Glasgow stage.