At a meeting of the PCS union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) on 25th 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 26th 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.
PCS Broad Left Network 