Month: Jul 2020

The union’s National Executive Committee met on Wednesday 8^th July. The NEC was scheduled for only 3.5 hours. Such scheduling reflects the desire by the Left Unity majority on the NEC to limit debate on their utterly inadequate approach to important questions facing members, such as on pay and Covid-19 but now also on the future of PCS itself.

As a result of this limit on time the question posed by the General Secretary at the meeting two weeks before, of merger or restructuring, including potential redundancies for PCS staff, has not been properly addressed yet. Also not taken was a motion addressing the union’s response to the Tory decision not to pursue serious reform of the Gender Recognition Act, and on the question of support for Black Lives Matters demonstrations.

Wasting time

Of the things actually discussed at the NEC, an hour and a half was spent on a paper which had only one action for agreement. This was to amend the timetable of work around the PCS pay petition. Every second speaker from the NEC majority, based in ex-left faction Left Unity, found time to repeatedly urge their fellow LU colleagues to make a five-minute contribution to the debate covering exactly the same ground as other speakers.

Elections cancelled

One of the far-reaching decisions taken at this NEC was to cancel the elections for 2020. 

Elections were first suspended back in March by General Secretary Mark Serwotka and the NEC majority of Left Unity and the PCS Democrats. It is telling that when the question was first raised, the term “cancelled” was exactly what the LU majority had in mind. But under pressure from BLN members they were only suspended.

Officially, the decision in March to suspend elections was on the grounds of the Covid-19 crisis. Though the General Secretary explicitly indicated that both he and the company employed by the union to independently run the elections agreed that they were “technically deliverable”.  Broad Left Network supporters opposed suspending the elections on the basis that difficulties could be sufficiently mitigated to run elections, to ensure that democracy prevails in PCS.

Since then other trade unions who suspended their elections, including Unite, one the largest in the UK, have reinstated their elections. Broad Left Network supporters argued that PCS should follow suit. At this NEC the LU majority rejected a BLN proposal to restart the PCS elections even though conceding there is no obstacle to doing so.

Why we have elections

Arguing in favour of elections is not simply demanding elections for the sake of elections. It is about ensuring that members are given a choice over who they want to lead their union. The actions of the current leadership are so far outside the union’s policies as set by Annual Delegate Conference, and are so detrimental to members, especially on questions of pay, that members need to be offered that choice of leadership at national and group level.

The decision by the LU majority on the NEC to abandon the 10% demand agreed by PCS Annual Delegate Conference in 2019, in favour of an “interim” pay demand for an “above inflation” pay rise, has completely demolished the union’s national pay campaign. The government’s offer of 1.5-2.5%, on which the top rate of 2.5% is being imposed on different government departments even at the time of writing, all but meets their “interim” pay demand given the low level of inflation.

Such utter ineptitude when it comes to negotiations with the Tory government, of demanding a ridiculously low pay award, was compounded by the union’s public announcement that it could not run a ballot during the Covid-19 crisis. The government were therefore faced by negotiators who had already announced that they couldn’t organise industrial action demanding a pay award that completely sold out the demands of union members to fix a decade of pay austerity.

No wonder Lord Agnew and the other negotiators for the Tory government refused to take the union seriously.

Without a change of leadership the union’s pay campaign will continue to be mired in the mud. No serious action has been taken since April 2019 and none seems likely this year – despite a pledge for a ballot given by LU to Conference 2019. Elections are required to put these questions before the membership for decision now not deferred until May 2021.

Left Unity’s contemptuous attitude

Scandalously, the justification Left Unity repeatedly put forward, and have now published on their website, is that there is no membership demand for elections.

The leaders of Left Unity have short memories. This was exactly the same argument put forward by the right-wing leadership of PCS under Marion Chambers and Barry Reamsbottom, when PCS was first created in the late 1990s. In opposition to annual elections, biennial elections were initially enshrined into the joint union’s constitution in 1998.

The LU majority doubled-down on this ludicrous defence by adding that they don’t think reps should be taking time off from their rep duties in order to tell members how great they are and why members should elect them. If nothing else the whole debate was instructive as to the utter contempt in which senior Left Unity figures hold union members, union democracy and the important role elections play. 

Frankly, forcing leading members of the union to walk desk to desk engaging with members is a dose of reality that the NEC majority could do with.

To re-build a fighting, democratic leadership of PCS, and winning support for socialist policies – such as a pay campaign that isn’t centred around a petition and a union organising strategy that isn’t based around unaccountable decisions taken in London – are worthy tasks and elections are central to them.

No rescheduled Conference

BLN members also put forward comprehensive proposals as the basis on which an Annual Delegate Conference should be considered. This involved looking at options like a virtual or hybrid virtual/socially-distanced conference as well as the potential for a scaled-down conference organised in the same way that Special Delegate Conferences are organised, i.e. one delegate per branch.

The LU majority voted this down on the basis that they didn’t think having a Conference should be the NEC’s default position. Speaker after speaker called into question the need for a Conference and made the case for an “event”, i.e. a gathering of some kind that would not be able to make decisions binding on the leadership of the union.

TUC Motions

In the remaining 25 minutes available to the NEC, discussion turned to motions being proposed by the NEC to the Trade Union Congress, which is holding a scaled back Congress in the autumn this year.

Broad Left Network supporters proposed amendments here as well. On the motion on pay, yet again the leadership of the union put forward the demand for an “above inflation pay rise”. This rather makes a mockery of the oft-repeated view of President, Deputy President and other senior LU figures that the demand for an “above inflation pay rise” was only an “interim” demand. There was no question that the motion proposed by the NEC was calling for a coordinated campaign around an “above inflation pay rise”. 

Such utter weakness, when even Unison is demanding 10% for local government workers, when Tesco has actually coughed up a 10% pay rise and when petition after petition is calling for nurses to get a 10% pay rise squanders the opportunity to build on the huge support that exists for a substantial, austerity-cancelling pay rise for key workers. All of us have faced the same attacks over the last ten years; all of us can fight to reverse these attacks. 

Our specific proposal to unite unions behind the demand for a 10% was voted down, but it did force the General Secretary to agree to add “significantly” to the motion before it was submitted to the TUC, so that the demand was for a “significantly above inflation pay rise”.

The other motion being considered was on the post-Covid-19 recovery plan. On this Broad Left Network supporters on the NEC proposed an additional line that called for the taking of companies threatening redundancies or office closures into public ownership. Amusingly none of the NEC speakers who opposed the proposal could think of a serious reason to oppose it; “I’m just not minded to support it” was one penetrating contribution.

The result of this is that an opportunity to call for concrete measures which could help out British Airways workers and the many tens of thousands of others facing unemployment was lost.

Broad Left Network supporters don’t overstate the importance of this. The TUC is not going to suddenly transform into a bastion of support for workers in struggle against vicious employers and a vindictive, anti-union government based on a few motions. Every socialist, however, and LU still at least claim to be socialists, should be taking the opportunity to put pressure on the tops of the trade union movement, for them to do what they are well paid to do: to mobilise and fight for gains for the working class.

We urge all reps and members of PCS to join the Broad Left Network; it is clear in meeting after meeting that the leadership of the union do not have a plan and lack the political understanding necessary to see how our union’s fight on pay, Covid-19 and a stack of other issues must be organised. It is time for socialist change in PCS.

Today, 8^th July, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that £2bn will be set aside to fund jobs for six months, paid at the level of the national minimum wage, for people aged 16 to 24 who are in receipt of Universal Credit and “at risk” of long-term unemployment.

Staff in Jobcentres up and down the UK remember the programmes introduced when the Coalition government came to power in 2010, and the further programmes unveiled after the 2012 welfare reforms, which increased the number of punitive benefit sanctions and extended their duration.

Programmes such as sector-based work academies and the mandatory work activity were not paid, except that people received their benefits, so it amounted to free labour for some employers with little guaranteed benefit for those who participated.

Today’s announcement is in a different direction and reflects memories, amongst the Tory elite, of the seemingly endless headlines about their ruthless handling of vulnerable and desperate people claiming benefits.

As well as community campaigns to bring shame on employers who benefitted from the free schemes, in order to force them to withdraw, trade unions such as the PCS played a role by raising questions in parliament and presenting evidence that these schemes didn’t work and that staff in Jobcentres were being given quotas to fill, with sanctions for claimants who refused.

Insofar as that is the case, today’s announcement represents a small victory for those trade unions, community campaigns and socialists who fought bitterly against sanctions and “workfare”, i.e. welfare that was tied to working for someone else for free.

However this should not obscure what is really happening. The announcement is a subsidy to the bosses. Employers will be seeking to maximise the amount of labour they receive (and therefore profits they can make) whilst minimising costs. We should also not ignore the fact that the national minimum wage is not sufficient to live on.

Included within the announcement of the £2bn is also an indication that employers who participate in the scheme and agree to create a minimum wage job funded by the state will also be able to top up the wages of the workers who get jobs out of it. So the opportunity is there for unions to organise these new workers through a targeted, high profile campaign.

Such a campaign must unite workers brought in for six months on the minimum wage with those workers around them. If previous programmes can be used as a yardstick, it is likely that the new jobs will be created in workplaces where workers are already clustered around the national minimum wage. There is a clear chance to fight to raise all wages.

Stop redundancies and closures: nationalise to stop job losses

Campaigns as described above will almost certainly be multi-union campaigns. In truth they should involve the Trades Union Congress (TUC) as well, as a way to coordinate between different unions. Rishi Sunak’s announcements today highlight a difficulty here.

Alongside the national minimum wage jobs announced, Sunak also announced 30,000 traineeships. Socialists in PCS remember the creation of traineeships in 2014 and the joint statement between the TUC and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which welcomed them.

In order to unite in such an opportunist manner with the representatives of the bosses, the TUC had to ignore its own conference policy and the long-standing opposition of young trade unionists to unpaid work, which is what traineeships amounted to.

Only through the utter weakness of the trade union leaderships have traineeships survived since 2014. They are now being tripled in number.

Workers are now being faced with mass redundancies. The announcements in airline after airline, including more than 10,000 job losses in British Airways, show that the bosses will act ruthlessly to protect their profits. Many of the areas facing redundancies are highly unionised and have fought protracted industrial campaigns to defend pay and conditions.

These redundancies will not be halted by Sunak’s announcements and they certainly won’t be halted by a supine TUC left to its own devices. Socialists who hold leading positions in the trade union movement must work together to put maximum pressure on the TUC to organise and coordinate campaigns that could defeat such redundancies.

One of the key demands has to be for the taking of companies threatening redundancies, or threatening closures likely to devastate communities, into public ownership. Broad Left Network supporters are pushing for the PCS leadership to adopt this position, and to take it to the TUC Congress, in whatever socially-distanced or online form that this will meet.

Potential for a serious campaign in Universal Credit: socialist leadership needed

Alongside campaigns of solidarity to those areas facing massive redundancies, and continuing campaigns against Tory abuses of the unemployed – which means revisiting the arguments against sanctions with our brothers and sisters in DWP, we cannot be blind to the huge potential for recruitment to and organising of the union in the civil service.

Sunak has recently announced an additional 13,000 new work coaches in Jobcentres. Welcome though this is, it is not being announced out of the kindness of the Chancellor’s heart. The government are applying a plaster to the gaping sore that is Universal Credit because of the tsunami of redundancies they fear from August onwards.

From August, employers will have to make a contribution towards the 80% of wages being paid to furloughed workers by the government. This is likely to provoke layoffs, as the bosses yet again seek to preserve their profits.

Additional work coaches will increase the support available to claimants. In ordinary times this would have been face to face support, but we continue to fight for workers and claimants to be protected from the Covid-19 pandemic by allowing for interaction to be online or by telephone, and only face to face where there is no alternative.

Workers across Universal Credit, both in the Jobcentres and the Service Centres, where the benefit is processed and put into payment, have been under huge pressure for years. This pressure led to a brief industrial campaign for 5,000 additional staff in the Service Centres alone, which saw strike action in Walsall, Wolverhampton and Stockport.

With no support from the leadership of PCS, the campaign ultimately withered; members in those sites gained concessions but judged that they could not win the overall demands around staffing, workloads and union rights without other Service Centres being organised to take action too. The union’s leadership, outside of the minority who support the Broad Left Network, did not put any work into developing that broader campaign.

Increase still further the number of claimants to Universal Credit, however, reinstitute the “claimant commitment”, increase the number of interactions required between claimants and DWP and even restore the sanctions regimes – as DWP is trying to do – and the pressure on UC staff will increase dramatically.

Moreover, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis, DWP moved thousands of workers from other areas such as Debt Management, Dispute Resolution and NINo sections to support Universal Credit and New Style JSA. That is not a long-term solution. Eventually the work done by those sections will need picking up. This too will increase pressure.

DWP have already shown they are quite prepared to resort en masse to agency jobs – that is, people brought in via agencies like Brook Street, who profit per person they send. They have announced an initial tranche of several thousand permanent work coach jobs, but they are also likely to try handling additional work via fixed term jobs. Almost inevitably, due to the intricacies of training and consolidating staff on UC, this will not stop pressure reaching boiling point at Jobcentres and Service Centres.

The leadership of the union must be ready for that. The old, lazy attitude that if any site approaches the leadership with a request for a strike ballot they will support it must be cast aside. The DWP Group Executive Committee, led by ex-left organisation PCS Left Unity, must either prepare a campaign to unite old and new staff behind demands for permanency, workload protections, sufficient staffing, limits to telephony and improved trade union rights or they should stand aside for those who will.

At a meeting of the PCS union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) on 25^th June, General Secretary Mark Serwotka moved a paper that suggested the union had two choices in order to survive: restructuring by reducing the costs of staffing or else merger.

This announcement comes barely six months after the union’s financial report for 2020 declared, “We have stabilised union finances and this will provide a foundation to grow again and achieve wins for our members.”

Although Serwotka’s proposals explicitly deny a crisis, and his meeting with the union’s staff on 26^th June began with a repeated declaration that there was no crisis, it is hard to see what else the situation can be called when he is openly touting future cuts to budgets, annual deficits of £2.5 million and potential redundancies of staff.

While other unions are growing, especially those which have been clear about protecting the safety of their members during the coronavirus crisis, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union has lost 4,000 members between January 2018 and the present.

For members of the PCS Broad Left Network, this is not coincidental. Where determined campaigns have won on issues of real importance to members, membership has risen. The link between the campaigning, bargaining and how we recruit union members is key.

Weak on Pay

The PCS response on key issues like pay, redundancy rights, pensions and office closures has been to offer angry words but little else. This is the inescapable view that faces civil servants and workers in related fields organised by the union.

Unhelpfully the current leadership of PCS, organised around “Socialist View” a faction inside “Left Unity”, has been at pains to prove that perception correct. When the coronavirus crisis broke, they wrote to civil service bosses meekly asking for an “above inflation” pay rise.

PCS President Fran Heathcote and her faction, Socialist View, have been the loudest proclaiming that this was merely an “interim” demand, in the hope that the Cabinet Office would agree it immediately, with talks on the rest to be postponed until after the coronavirus crisis.

No one with an ounce of experience in fighting the Tory government’s austerity of the last ten years would for a moment have believed that such a strategy would work. It was even less likely to work when the union openly proclaimed it was unable to hold a ballot during the coronavirus crisis.

The leaders of the union sat down with the bosses with no leverage whatsoever.

As pay offers begin to filter out across the different government departments, the result of such a cack-handed approach is an increase of 2.5% and nothing to address the 20% slashed from pay over the last decade.

Weak on Covid-19

Exactly the same weak approach is what has damned the union’s response on the Coronavirus.

Negotiators for the bosses mouthed platitudes about keeping people safe but refused any kind of binding agreement with the union.

Instead of organising mass pressure to force the employer to concede, the union’s leaders pointedly hid behind the anti-union laws in order to avoid giving advice to members and reps that could trigger walkouts in defence of staff safety.

Walkouts have been sporadically happening, as members reject the approach of their employers, which is often arbitrary, secretive and far from enough to allay very real concerns, especially from those staff who have vulnerable people at home.

Yet when employers make far reaching decisions to reopen or extend the opening of offices, as in Ministry of Justice, the union has simply put the decision on to members to decide individually if they are facing an imminent risk.

The union will now be further put to the test over the plan to increase the numbers of people attending face to face appointments in Jobcentres.

Poor on building the union

Meanwhile the union’s leadership are trumpeting their newest campaign idea; getting 100,000 people to sign a petition demanding a pay rise for civil servants. Even they admit this won’t deliver a pay rise, but they hope it will contribute to union “organising” efforts.

Organising is increasingly viewed by this group as a numbers-only game, where certain activities – especially centrally-run and professionally staffed, rather than based on the needs and views of reps and branches – will increase membership participation.

Yet participation is not viewed through the lens of political consciousness and confidence. Like the worst kind of civil service boss, the current leaders of the union have reduced everything to numbers.

Did the member vote in the ballot, did they open an email, did they look at the latest Zoom call? If yes, tick box; if no, must try harder. The current leadership are so intent upon this approach that they’re prepared to talk of union mergers or offering redundancies before they would consider changing course.

Undemocratic

Against this backdrop, worries over the procedures being followed at the NEC may seem insignificant but the total truncation of NEC business by the current leadership has reduced the NEC to a rubber stamp of the officers’ decisions.

Despite a decision by the NEC that it should meet every two weeks during the coronavirus emergency, President Fran Heathcote did not call a meeting for three weeks and then scheduled a 3.5 hour meeting, thereby dodging important business raised by NEC members.

Business not taken included a proposal that after weeks of prevarication the NEC should give full support to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations (amending the proposal from the union’s senior officers that the union should explicitly not support these demonstrations).

It also included an important motion following revelations in the Sunday Times that the government was dropping plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act to ease the many barriers facing transgender men and women trying to change their birth certificate.

The current leadership of PCS has been far behind its own members on the question of Trans rights, leading to a motion of censure passed by Annual Delegate Conference in 2019.

Such bureaucratic shenanigans are not new. At the last NEC meeting the National President refused to allow a motion on the union’s campaign strategy to be moved because it disagreed with the proposals put forward by the General Secretary!

Supporters of the Broad Left Network who sit on the NEC will continue to challenge these poor practices and to maximise discussion and debate on the key questions facing the members and reps of the union.

Organise the PCS Broad Left Network

At Annual Delegate Conference in 2019, a new organisation was launched by socialists, some in political parties but most who are independent of any party.

The purpose of this organisation was to rebuild the socialist campaigning ethos that once held sway in PCS: elected lay reps fighting for the implementation of socialist policies by their employer and in society, active at all levels of the union and accountable to members.

Far from mobilising the union, the approach of the current leadership has done nothing but bring to a grinding halt the very campaigns that could help us recruit tens of thousands of civil servants and privatised workers into the ranks of the union. That has to change.

We encourage all union members and reps to join the Broad Left Network. We are organising in every single employer group of the union. This includes all civil service departments, non-civil service public sector areas and in the private sector too.

The Government is pushing ahead to reopen Jobcentres to the public at a reckless pace. This drive is to get back to business as usual as quickly as possible and put our members including the security guards and cleaners as well as the public at risk by doing so.

Ministers are clearly linking the public access to the jobcentres with the return to conditionality in the DWP that had been suspended from March because of the crisis and to focus all efforts on paying benefit to the millions of new claimants. 

We now have the spectacle of installation teams rushing around to all the jobcentre sites poorly putting in low screens before even beginning the risk assessment process. It is this process that should properly examine the control measures that would need to be put in place and what would be necessary and crucially whether it is even safe to open jobcentres to the public again.

 No regard is being paid to what should be the paramount concern which is the health, safety and wellbeing of all those who work in the jobcentres and the public who need to use DWP services. The re-imposing of the lockdown in Leicester shows that the pandemic is far from over. It is ironic that a jobcentre in Leicester was being targeted as one of the first to re-open!

A fighting lead by the GEC should include demanding that contracted out staff, such as security and cleaners who are being put in the front line of danger, are brought in-house.  Such a stance would attract a whole new layer of members in to PCS from all DWP staff areas.

Management’s haste to install screens is ironic given the bitter screens dispute a number of years ago when management were removing our screens to create the DWP.

The government want to get back to the normal DWP regime for claimants rather than just focussing on getting payments out to the public and support to try and find work. 

It is clear that a lead needs to be given from the Group leadership at national level.  We need to go back hard to senior management in the DWP to demand that the Jobcentre doors remain shut. The safety of our members and the public needs to be paramount. It is completely unnecessary to bring claimants back into jobcentres to deliver support to them.

We need to build and organise collective resistance at workplace level to back up these demands. We should take every opportunity to organise members’ meetings safely.  Every site should have an agreed muster point in the site risk assessment that is large enough for all staff to assemble safely using 2m social distancing so could be an ideal place close to the office to safely organise members meetings.

It is legitimate to request time to discuss health and safety plans with our members . Meetings can be held in the sites where there is room to do this safely in the workplace or do it by skype where there is not the room to physically gather everyone together.  The key thing is to have a collective discussion with our members to agree opposition to management plans in a united way across the membership in our jobcentre sites.

We have produced a motion for branches, regions and sites to use channel the anger in a systematic way to demonstrate the willingness to fight and put pressure on the DWP to halt their plans. At the same time we need to push the DWP GEC leadership to take a lead on this issue in resisting these changes collectively and giving full support to jobcentre members.

Not only can we campaign collectively to demonstrate the anger at these plans we also need to make it clear to management nationally that it is unacceptable for them to push to put our members into serious and imminent danger by planning to reopen jobcentres to the public.

We have legal protection under health and safety legislation, including using Section 44, to immediately stop work and proceed to a place of safety in the event of being exposed to serious and imminent and unavoidable danger. The risk can be removed simply by shutting the doors to protect everyone working in the jobcentre. But as we know, our best weapon is acting collectively and using our industrial power. We can use Section 44 to build our members’ confidence to act, showing them that it is management who are acting unsafely. 

The department should not be driving to penalise the public for not wanting to put themselves at risk by travelling to a jobcentre when they can access full support from experienced jobcentre staff over the phone to help them find work. We are in a recession so the emphasis of DWP work needs to be to fully pay benefits and help support claimants in this challenging economic climate.

It is unacceptable that ministers and senior management are looking at how pressure is brought back to bear on claimants to prove what efforts they are making to find work when we are in a recession and pandemic, 

There needs to be full recognition of how difficult it is for anyone to find work at the moment and the battle many workers across numerous sectors are having to remain in work and fighting the offensive from the bosses to make them pay for the coronavirus crisis.  

All the support that we need to give the public we could give over the phone and digitally and it is unnecessary to see anyone face to face apart from the most urgent cases who have no other means to get support, who we are already seeing.

We have an opportunity as a union to build further links with claimant organisations and unite the opposition to the Tory Government’s plans across claimants, communities and our members working in jobcentres. This is something we can also organise campaigning with the wider PCS membership and wider trade union movement.

There is a real opportunity here to mobilise members and show that it is the BLN supporters who have the ideas and strategy to work with branches to take on the DWP.