Thousands of Bradford Council workers are expected to go on strike in a dispute over their employment terms and conditions.

Public services union Unison - which has 7,000 members among the 23,000 Council workforce - says there has been an "overwhelming vote" in favour of industrial action.

Unison joint branch chairman, Liz Devlin, said Council bosses had been told of the decision and would be informed when a strike date was agreed.

She said there would be a daytime rally in about a fortnight's time to be attended by Unison general secretary Dave Prentis.

Miss Devlin said: "We have been forced into this situation but our aim is not to hit the general public."

She added that 37 per cent of members had taken part in the postal ballot and 78.5 per cent had voted in favour of a strike.

The Council and Unison have been locked in talks for months over conditions relating to redundancy and re-deployment.

But the ballot followed a decision by the Council to serve notice on the existing terms. The notice ends in January and the Council said in the meantime talks would continue to try to resolve the dispute.

The industrial action would not affect education workers, who have separate deals, however.

The union says the Council should set an example as the district's biggest employer and insist its requests are reasonable.

But the Council says it believes the union's demands would be against the law.

The Council says there must be a time limit on employees who remain on a re-deployment register before compulsory redundancy is considered. But Unison says there should be no limit.

Council bosses say voluntary redundancy would be considered after 12 weeks on the re-deployment register. But the union says staff should have an automatic entitlement to voluntary redundancy.

There is also a dispute over the length of time the salary of staff re-deployed to lower graded post should be protected.

No-one from the Council was available for comment today.