Unions warned that Birmingham City Council’s plans to offshore 100 IT roles to India were only the “tip of the iceberg” as members began voting on strike action over job cuts and changes to pay and conditions.

In what the Local Government Association said was the first move by a local authority to outsource any part of their direct workforce overseas, Service Birmingham, indicated that it had already served 70 personnel with redundancy notices.

Service Birmingham, a joint venture between the council and outsourcing provider Capita Business Services, confirmed that 17 back office IT support roles had already been moved to Pune and a further 38 would go by the end of the summer. Some 45 more jobs will also follow at a later date if the first two phases of the transfer go well.

But unions reacted angrily to the move, complaining bitterly that they had not been consulted. They were also particularly unhappy that new staff had already been recruited in India and were scheduled to be brought over to the UK for employees in Birmingham to train them in how to take over their roles.

Unite’s national officer Peter Allenson said: “This is an outrageous decision and Unite will fight tooth and nail to stop this Tory-led council from exporting these valuable jobs overseas. Unite is demanding that Birmingham city council halts its plans. We fear this could be just the tip of the iceberg and other councils could follow suit.”

The union plans to meet with council leaders today to demand that they stop the move and consult properly. But Glyn Evans, assistant to the chief executive on transformation and newly elected president of Socitm, did nothing to pour oil on troubled waters.

He told tech magazine Computerworld that the council’s role was to protect services, not jobs and he refused to rule out further offshoring activity. “What is important is we are delivering good value for money to the taxpayer. We don’t exist to protect jobs,” he said. “In the current financial climate, we have got to continue looking at options to deliver value for money. I don’t think anything is off the table.”

At the same time, however, Unison also began balloting its members against a proposed new ‘Birmingham contract’. The contract does not conform to nationally-agreed terms and conditions, abolishes payments for weekend and out-of-hours working, means that personnel could be moved without regard to their personal circumstances and weakens their rights during grievance and disciplinary proceedings, the union claimed.

Unison also said that the proposed new arrangements would have a disproportionate impact on low-paid female staff.

But the council, which is the largest in the country and employs 10,000 staff, attested that the new contracts would make the local authority “fit for the challenges facing the public sector” and help it make a required £300 million in budget cuts by 2015.

The organisation has already indicated that 7,000 jobs, or one third of the total, will be axed or transferred to co-operatives within that time-scale.

Alan Rudge, Birmingham’s cabinet member for equalities and HR, told the Guardian: “There’s a clear need to bring our organisation into line with other leading employers, and the new Birmingham contract will make the council more resilient to future pressures through the reduction in costs and the introduction of broad job groups.”