Re-building the Broad Left in PCS in 2021:
Collective struggle and socialist ideas are needed
As we write, Scotland and England have both returned to the national lockdown conditions that were first implemented in April 2020 and Wales has extended their lockdown. A lot of noise is being made about the new variant of Covid-19 and about the massive spike in hospital admissions justifying the new lockdown, but both had been a feature of the situation for several weeks while the government dithered. What changed?
400,000 workers in England and Wales took part in a national meeting on Zoom on January 3rd. Called by the National Education Union (NEU), the meeting advised teachers across the UK on how to collectively and simultaneously exercise their right not to be put in serious and imminent danger by their employer. The NEU even provided a form letter for teachers to email in, all at the same time.
Faced with the prospect of a mass struggle by teachers over safety, the UK government finally called a national lockdown in England. In Scotland, where pressure amongst teachers has been gradually mounting, with individual EIS branches submitting notices of trade disputes to their corresponding local authorities, the Scottish Government acted scant hours ahead of the decision by the UK government covering England. Under similar pressure, the Welsh government also u-turned, delaying the re-opening of schools.
SAGE and other government bodies have been recording the huge spike in cases for some time. We knew about the variant before Christmas. What finally forced the governments to act was collective struggle by workers. In the case of the NEU it was collective struggle under the cover provided by Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act 1996, which grants workers the right to refuse to put themselves in serious and imminent danger.
In PCS, this has been the argument and position of the Broad Left Network since the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis. Supporters on the NEC have repeatedly put forward the view that Section 44 allows us the cover to struggle collectively – not just workplace by workplace, as our supporters across the union have been doing, but across entire areas of work, across departments and private sector contractors and across the civil service.
The current NEC majority, have not once but repeatedly tried to smack down this view. Every possible argument has been used, from denouncing us all as “posturing” to citing legal advice (which is never shared) that Section 44 can’t be used in this way. As the NEU have shown, there is no need to wait for a test case to prove the value of S.44 when workers are willing to fight, and teachers were clearly ready to fight.
The PCS NEC should build on this success with revised advice to Branches and Groups, backed up by national negotiations with the Cabinet Office and other employers. This is particularly important for the members in areas where there has been substantial attendance at workplaces throughout the pandemic. The government have walked across line after line drawn by the union’s National Executive and it’s “five tests” to ensure member safety. The government have repeatedly refused to come to agreements with the union. The NEC must learn from the successful NEU action and act now.
Unfolding economic and social catastrophe: they say cut back, we say fight back
Public services, including housing and the NHS, have faced constant attacks through austerity since the crisis of 2007-8. While the UK government are handing out contracts to the private sector, resulting in a profits bonanza for the bosses, nowhere close to enough is being done to dramatically improve NHS staffing levels, to fill the tens of thousands of jobs that remain unfilled even by the government’s own estimates. The most obvious lever for this is a serious pay rise, to correct for years of underinvestment.
Local authorities have endured punishing cuts to the block grant they are paid either by Westminster or the devolved nations, yet even while they oversee areas crucial to a comprehensive Covid-19 response, such as homelessness, adult social care and social housing, they are being faced with further cuts. Some councils had sought to make investments in airports and property, to reduce the impact of cuts, but of course they have now been hit too. Thousands of jobs are threatened, and years of pay cuts loom.
Civil servants and their privatised brothers and sisters face exactly the same thing. Job cuts have already been announced in areas as diverse as the British Council and the Tate London. Swingeing pay cuts are being imposed on workers in the Commonwealth and War Graves Commission. Nationally, the Chancellor has already announced a general 1-year pay freeze, and everything we know so far suggests this is going to last for three years, one year longer than George Osborne’s 2-year freeze of 2010-12. Austerity is back with a vengeance.
While some departments, notably the Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC, have added thousands of jobs to cover the additional work involved in maintaining a benefit system that’s now supporting double the previous number of workers, there’s already a clear indication that this is temporary. Some staff have been brought in as agency staff, others as fixed term contracts. The writing is already on the wall, unless there is a concerted battle to prevent the further running down of, and privatisation of, chunks of public services.
There is a clear, objective basis for united industrial action on the question of pay, jobs and services – and, lest we forget, public sector pensions are still a burning issue. No doubt the Tories, the media and the right-wing leaders of the labour movement will chastise us for daring to demand pay rises, full restoration of our pension rights and job security at a time when private sector workers are being hammered by the capitalists, who are growing fat off billions in tax cuts in the last ten years and further billions in private sector contracts handed out with zero accountability by the Johnson government.
Regardless, a struggle must be built – and we must work to connect it to the same battles that are being fought in the private sector. It takes bosses the first few days of a year to earn as much as their employees earn in a whole year. Low pay, job insecurity and poor treatment of workers are endemic problems across the private sector. It is possible to get the other trade unions lined up behind us, however.
By organising a resolute response and mobilising teachers decisively, the NEU was able to force the hand of the other unions, both for teachers and for support staff. Even GMB, although still hiding behind legal advice that use of S.44 can’t be collective, was forced to give advice to members that collectivised their struggle in all but name. This is one model of how united struggle can be built.
The response of the NEC majority has been to launch the PCS petition. This was simply decreed by the NEC, in place of any kind of serious campaign on pay. The absence of any campaign was foreshadowed by the lead negotiators on behalf of the union throwing the pay demands agreed by Conference into the trash even before they met with Ministers. The NEC also issued a public declaration that the union couldn’t run a ballot during Covid-19. Rather than the 10% rise, General Secretary Mark Serwotka dangled the prospect of the union agreeing to “an above inflation pay rise” and, seeing a way to neutralise such a half-hearted trade union leader, this is exactly what the Tories offered. The 2020 pay rise was marginally above the Government’s preferred measure of inflation.
So, with a decision by the government that was seen by many members as at least giving them something, it isn’t much of a surprise that the union’s activists were facing a totally different direction when the NEC ordered the pay petition launched. It wasn’t until resource-intensive phone-banking and texting was employed that the number of signatures finally crossed 100,000, assisted at the last minute by the Tory decision to announce a year long pay freeze across swathes of the public sector.
The result? For an hour and twenty-one minutes, a grand total of 17 MPs debated civil service and keyworker pay. Two of the MPs were already amongst PCS’ strongest supporters in Parliament. This is eloquent testimony to the impact of the union’s pay campaign: even the trade unions of a century ago, whose tactics have been described as “humble petition”, were able to make a much larger impact than the PCS NEC.
For a member-led, fighting, democratic union with socialist policies
The PCS NEC majority cancelled the union’s elections in 2020, despite the fact that these postal ballots could be carried out safely. Other unions which also initially suspended their own elections have now proceeded to hold these elections.
The NEC have now removed the right of branches to determine the content and running order of the union’s Annual Delegate Conference. The new restrictions imposed by the NEC will allow them to manipulate the agenda. Even if they aren’t yet confident enough to try throwing out motions on topics like trans rights and the union’s political strategy, they will feel tempted to bury them lower down the agenda. Meanwhile, they will be able to control debate on the union’s national campaigns on pay and other matters.
Their defence, already heard on social media, is that it is not the NEC that will make these decisions but the National Standing Orders Committee. However the NEC have decided to restrict motions to one per branch in each of 5 sections determined by the NEC. And there seems to be no provision for reference back. Both these restrictions should be removed. Branches should be permitted to submit motions as normal, the SOC should construct the agenda, and Conference should have the usual reference back procedures. There should be no requirement to ask to speak in advance. This simply enables the President to hide from delegates who she is not calling in to speak. If delegates are required to state their name, gender, Group and Branch on their profile, it is actually easier at an online event to get a good balance of speakers.
PCS activists also need to prepare to resist proposals to reduce the number of Full Time Officers at work supporting our members and the proposals to restructure branches and the union’s employer groups, which form the backbone of how negotiations are handled and how members hold their elected negotiators to account. The PCS Revenue and Customs Group have already told the NEC that they oppose breaking up their branches into multi-employer branches, and that they want to maintain the current structure of their branches and their Group. The NEC consultation has ended, but BLN activists should be alerting other active members to this threat, and gearing up to oppose any motions at national conference that try to implement this.
There is much to do in 2021 and this is what will be debated by the Broad Left Network Conference that meets on 16th January this year. We call on you to join us.
PCS Broad Left Network 