Month: Jun 2023

Whilst the Left Unity-led NEC maintains its efforts to destroy PCS’ pay campaign, it is clear that the arguments being put forward by PCS’ Broad Left Network (BLN) to escalate the campaign are resonating with members throughout PCS. This was particularly evident in PCS’s recent Facebook livestream, a farcical affair which saw the President & General Secretary repeatedly trot out their line about canvassing members’ views, whilst completely ignoring the views of members commenting during the livestream – the vast majority of who were calling for the campaign to continue.

Evidently, members’ anger during the livestream was fuelled not just by the NEC’s obvious (if not directly stated) desire to abandon PCS’ pay campaign, but also by the speakers’ notes the NEC issued to branches ahead of branch members’ meetings. Activists throughout PCS not only saw through the NEC’s blatant attempt to control the narrative of the members’ meetings, but roundly condemned the NEC for producing a document so defeatist that it could have been written by the Cabinet Office.

In response to BLN calls for branches to ignore the NEC speakers’ notes and conduct open & honest members’ meetings, the Left Unity-led GEC within Revenue & Customs went even further than their NEC overlords. R&C Branch Briefing 026-23 saw the GEC patronisingly claim that it would be far too difficult for R&C branches to organise their own members’ meetings and instead undermined every branch within the group by organising these meetings instead of branches.

The format of these meetings consists of…

• 30 minutes of GEC members talking.
• PCS members being forcibly muted so they cannot speak during the meeting.
• PCS members being unable to communicate with each other via the chat function – instead only being able to send messages to a PCS administrator account.

Let’s be clear – these are not members’ meetings, but simply GEC talking shops which represent nothing more than Left Unity’s desperation to ensure that it remains in total control of the narrative. And if this wasn’t bad enough, by asking members to consider whether they believe we are in now in a position to settle, the GEC is falsely implying that members have to decide between accepting the Cabinet Office’s position or continue the fight. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What the GEC neglected to say is that the Cabinet Office hasn’t made a pay offer to settle the dispute – the Cabinet Office is unconditionally imposing the pay award & Cost of Living payment. In short, receipt of the pay award is not contingent upon PCS abandoning its pay campaign and were members to be informed of this, it would quite clearly have a massive impact on their views as to how we proceed.

Clearly – and as is now widely understood with the PACR agreement – the Left Unity-led R&C GEC cannot be trusted to tell members the whole truth – a lie by omission is still a lie. This is why all branches in R&C must organise their own members’ meetings. As democratically elected reps in R&C, we are obliged to represent the best interests of our members and given that the GEC has proven itself unwilling to do so, we must do this ourselves. The BLN calls on all branches within R&C to organise their own members’ meetings, tell their members everything the GEC withheld and let the NEC know what our members actually think of their desire to capitulate.

Let’s reject Left Unity defeatism and win the pay rise that our members deserve!

Following a meeting on Monday 5 th June, the union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has moved rapidly to demobilise the PCS national campaign, in flagrant defiance of a mandate granted just weeks earlier by the union’s Annual Delegate Conference, which met in Brighton from 23 rd to 25 th May.

It is clear from written materials published by the NEC, including an all-members e-mail issued on Wednesday 7 th and a branch bulletin issued to PCS branch secretaries on Thursday 8 th June, that the NEC has decided to abandon the fight for our claims on pay, pensions, redundancy rights and jobs.

These events follow a meeting between General Secretary Mark Serwotka and the government’s Paymaster General, Tory MP Jeremy Quin, last Friday, 2 nd June. At that meeting, the government offered a one-off non-consolidated (i.e. not pensionable) payment of £1,500 and little else to settle the union’s dispute in the civil service.

Departmental intranets and union social media have exploded with members furious at being fobbed off and asking questions Serwotka and his political allies in “PCS Left Unity” don’t seem to have bothered to ask – like what about our pensions.

Low-wage members in receipt of Universal Credit have pointed out that they will get very little extra money, as the £1,500 will simply cancel out their Universal Credit. Part-time staff have queried whether the money is pro-rata.

Members have pointed out that this lump sum, which the NEC are claiming is to address pay for 2022-23 (although the government has amended pay for 2023-24, not 22-23) doesn’t come close to matching 2 years of 10-14% inflation.

Last year’s award was 2-3%, this year’s award must live within a cap to average increases of 4.5%, and now there is this £1,500 lump sum. This must be set against 2 years of inflation totalling around 24% – so even with this lump sum, it’s a 10% pay cut for most.

All the pretty words promising no further cuts to the Civil Service Compensation Scheme until 2025 (even though the public consultation on cuts continues) and reiterating already existing protections included in the 2016 Jobs Protocol are hardly worth a brass farthing.

PCS Left Unity-led NEC takes concrete steps to demobilise PCS

Despite members’ anger, the NEC majority, allies of Serwotka and President Fran Heathcote, who call themselves “PCS Left Unity”, have decided to dump the national campaign.

Re-ballots have been suspended in key areas like the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). DWP covers 45,000 of the 65,000 members who didn’t get a strike mandate in our last ballot in May. Re-balloting was ordered by the union’s Conference and this has been disregarded by the NEC majority.

Departmental pay bargaining, previously suspended by PCS to make it clear to the government that we wanted our pay demands to be met at a national level by additional Treasury funding, has now been authorised so long as epartments sign up to pay the one-off £1,500.

This is the NEC signalling that they’re happy to live within the Treasury pay remit published in March 2023. This imposed a cap of 4.5% on average pay rises in civil service areas (5% for the low paid), so long as the one-off lump sum of £1,500 is paid. Yet this £1,500 is unfunded by Treasury.

Departments will have to find this themselves, meaning cuts in other areas.
Under the NEC’s approach, negotiators at Departmental level will go into potentially months of protracted talks about 23/24 pay, not about 22/23 pay, wasting time in talks that cannot produce anything but a pay cut when compared to inflation, and delaying action under the six-month strike mandate won by tens of thousands of union members in May.

Further evidence of the NEC’s determination to wind down the campaign came with publication of Speaker’s Notes to branch secretaries on 8th June.

Realising its error and under fire from all sides, the NEC has now urged all branches to hold members’ meetings to determine feedback from members. The briefing provided to branches does not offer options, such as escalating the campaign. It implies the offer is the best we can hope for, to get branch reps to do the Tory government’s dirty work of talking up the offer. To this we reply, “Not a chance!”

Escalate the PCS national campaign to win

At every executive committee of the union, from branches to the national executive, BLN supporters have made the argument that we are far from having exhausted the options open to us in prosecuting our dispute with the government.

If the NEC is now trying to talk down its own campaign of targeted, paid strike action, we say significant targeted action is still possible. Further, we can ballot for action short of strike action, to ramp up the pressure on the government. We can move to calling serious national strike action, not just paid, targeted action – as has every other major union involved in a dispute in the past year.

Every Department and agency of the civil service and related public services have pressure points, both in how services are set up and at particular times of year, which we can exploit through rolling strike action. This limits strike-related loss of pay for each individual member while maximising pressure on the various employers.

BLN supporters on the NEC have raised this and been shouted down, yet at Conference in May, many of those who supported the NEC’s motion (A290) indicated in their speeches that they supported further national action and the use of action short of strike action.

If we accept the first concession offered by the government, we fail to understand the significance of their offer. Civil servants have traditionally been the poor relations of the public sector. That the government has moved at all is an indication that they are weak and they are under pressure to come to a resolution.

Good. If Tory backbenchers are worried that they’re losing votes because the public sees the incompetence with which the government has managed the civil service, all the more reason to come to a settlement on terms that redress the fair grievances of PCS members. A general election is around the corner and this can focus minds; it is time to step up our campaign.

Branches must organise to assert lay-control of PCS

If the NEC is unable or unwilling to do its duty and lead the union’s democratically agreed campaign, it should convene a Special Delegate Conference to decide our next steps.

The pathetic half-measure of asking branches to consult members while providing no alternative to the current offer whatsoever is such an obvious failure that if the NEC members who voted for it had any self-respect, they’d resign in disgrace.

Compare this to unions that are far from militant, like the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which timidly recommended a poor government offer to its members, balloted on it and received a resounding rejection. Members demanded the RCN leadership get on with the fight. The current PCS NEC won’t even call a ballot to put this before the members.

It is members who have sacrificed in the campaign so far, by paying the levy and by taking action – it is ultimately members who should decide what happens to the campaign. The job of the NEC is to be the voice of members both to the employer and inside the machine of the union, but the current NEC are not capable of this.

Our NEC, dominated by Left Unity and the Democrats, has ceased to exercise any independent control of the union, entirely ceding control to General Secretary Mark Serwotka.

This is how the Speakers’ Notes referred to above and contained in PCS bulletin BB-55-23, which talk up the recent offer from the government, while stressing how alone we are if we decide to fight on, can be issued without every having been seen by the National Executive Committee.

It was Serwotka himself who took the lead at PCS Conference this year in promoting current national president Fran Heathcote as his successor, since he retires later this year.

Serwotka’s unelected clique at the top of the union know she won’t disrupt their control. BLN calls on all branches to organise all-members meetings and to put the following proposals:

 That the National Executive Committee organise an urgent Special Delegate
Conference to consider next steps in the union’s national campaign, so that all
alternatives can be fully explored and debated.

 That the NEC immediately write back to Paymaster General Jeremy Quin to outline further changes to the Treasury Pay Remit 2023/24 that would achieve our central demands of a consolidated 10% pay rise for 2022/23 and an above-inflation pay rise for 2023/24.

 That the NEC urgently serve notice for a two-day all-member strike at a time most likely to maximise disruption to the government, and announce further all-member action to make it clear that our campaign continues til the government gets serious.

 That the NEC persist in the paid, targeted strike action already agreed, regardless of whether Departments and agencies pay the £1,500.

 That the NEC draws up further plans for paid, targeted strike action, and for unpaid rolling action that would serve to maximise dislocation of government functions while minimising the loss of pay to any individual member.

 That the NEC proceeds with all re-ballots authorised by PCS Annual Delegate
Conference and asked for by PCS Group Conferences as a matter of urgency, all of these to include action short of strike action.

 That the NEC considers the best time to re-ballot all other members to gain a
mandate for action short of strike action in addition to the strike mandate awarded by members.

The BLN is very clear that the non-consolidated £1500 “offer” from the Cabinet Office is not good enough and should be rejected.

The NEC are clearly in favour of it, they are afraid to come out and say so and so instead are simply winding down the campaign.

We urge all reps and members to act now to extend democratic control over our national campaign and where we go from here by asking your BEC, Regional Committee, Group Executive and individual members to write to the General Secretary demanding a special conference which they have the power call under Supplementary Rules 6.6 and 7.1(j).

Our union’s democracy is under attack, with campaigns ordered just weeks ago at a full Conference being scrapped before our eyes. A Special Delegate Conference must be summoned to oppose this attack. We call for all workplaces, branches, regions and groups of the union to help us organise it, and for PCS members and activists to join the Broad Left Network and to help us rebuild a member-led union.

On Friday 2nd June 2023, the Cabinet Office, which oversees matters that affect the entire Civil Service, not just individual Departments or agencies, published an addendum to the Treasury Pay Remit. This remit was originally published in March and outlined a cap on average pay rises of between 4.5 and 5%. The new addendum now adds the flexibility to make a one-off £1,500 payment. We await further details of the offer and what it means for PCS members. It appears that the £1,500 per full-time member of staff regardless of grade that the Cabinet Office has announced, is not new money. It is money that will have to be found within existing budgets. This amounts to tens of millions of pounds being cut from other areas even in medium sized departments.

Even if it is new money, however, and even if the £1,500 is an additional payment on top of average pay awards of up to 5%, this still does not meet the most basic demand of the PCS campaign for a 10% pay award. This pay claim was designed to cover the rising cost of living in 2022-23, which was over 10% at a time when many areas only received a 2-3% pay rise. Our pay ultimately fell by around 10% up to June 2022, taking into account the pay rise we received compared to rising prices averaging 13.7%. Forecast inflation for the year up to June 2023 is above 11%. The total fall in our salaries over two years, relative to price rises, is approximately 22%. An AO receiving a 5% pay award plus £1,500 would only win back 12.5%, just over half what they’ve lost. For an EO it would be worse; only 9.5% won back against 22% lost. In addition, we are still paying more for our pensions than we should be (to the value of about 2% of our salary every year), getting less from our pensions and retiring later than ever. The £1,500 lump some being put forward by the government will not affect our pension values either; this amount will be non-consolidated, i.e., not included in the pay that is reckonable when calculating pensions.

While the government are often indifferent to the needs of civil servants and to the needs of users of the public services we provide, they are not stupid. This is an attempt to split off the lowest paid, many of whom will also have had a wage lift of around 5% when the national living wage rose – still not reaching the value of what they’ve lost through price rises, from the union’s national campaign.

Interestingly, this offer appears to fall some way short of information leaked to union pay negotiators earlier in 2023, that the government were considering a pay remit of 7% in addition to a one-off payment. This is likely to reflect the unwillingness of the leadership of PCS to mount serious national strike action and action short of strikes in addition to their preferred tactic of paid, targeted action. A National Executive Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday 5th June and we await what further news this brings.

At this stage, however, our view is that the campaign must continue – the actions instructed by PCS Conference, including re-ballots in big areas like DWP, must be undertaken. The leadership of the union must not duck out of a serious campaign based on this offer.