On Monday 31 st July, a 7-page speakers brief enclosed in National Branch Bulletin BB-69-23 was emailed to all branch secretaries and all union reps across PCS. Officially from Mark Serwotka, the brief summarises the view of the majority of the union’s National Executive Committee’s (NEC) as to why people should vote yes in the ballot.
It is a staggering piece of sophistry and dishonesty. It misrepresents what the NEC have done. It misrepresents what those of us who oppose the NEC have said. It misrepresents how delegated pay bargaining works. It misrepresents what happens next in the campaign. In consequence, Broad Left Network are arguing that we must vote NO in the ballot.
So, what has the NEC done?
While the NEC seek to emphasise that “we have won significant concessions but the campaign must continue”.
First, we disagree that the concessions are as significant as the current NEC majority (a group called Democracy Alliance, made up of two factions, PCS Left Unity and PCS Democrats) are making out.
A £1,500 one-time, non-consolidated payment gets thinned down substantially by tax, national insurance contributions and for those in receipt of Universal Credit – estimated at tens of thousands across the UK civil service – will reduce any benefit entitlement.
Then we have the question of part-time staff; in the vast majority of civil service areas, the payment is being pro-rated, which means even before tax or anything else, some people are getting less, even though they’re unlikely to have a smaller mortgage or fewer bills.
Moreover, it is simply not enough when compared to inflation. Inflated prices are cumulative, adding up further and further year on year, whereas the £1,500 is one-off, paid and then forgotten, as prices continue to rise.
For most members this remains true even once Departmental pay awards are announced.
We aimed for a fully funded, 10% consolidated pay rise, with a minimum pay rate of £15 per hour, to eliminate the ridiculous situation of civil servants on the minimum wage, and a guaranteed, inflation proof increase for 2023/24. What has been gained falls dramatically short.
Second, and just as importantly, however, the NEC speakers’ brief declaring “the campaign must continue” is the kind of dishonesty we expect from Johnson, Sunak or Starmer – but not from the leadership of the union.
The campaign must continue, but we’re calling off the strikes.
The campaign must continue, but we’re calling off the re-ballots ordered by Conference.
The campaign must continue, but we’re cancelling the levy that feeds our strike fund.
The campaign must continue, but we didn’t bother submitting a revised pay claim for 2023/24 and simply relied on the previous claims, now outdated by cumulative inflation.
The campaign must continue, but they have told groups to enter departmental negotiations for 2023/4 pay within the limit imposed by Treasury but rejected by PCS Conference of 4.5- 5%.
Once all that is done, any rep is forced to ask, what campaign is left?
Reps should be aware that this stance from the NEC is utterly counterposed to the pompous and self-aggrandising manner in which Mark Serwotka moved his paper on 5th June, three days after receipt of the £1,500 offer, a paper which called off all campaigning activities.
At that meeting, Serwotka assumed the mantle of a wannabe hero, delivering from on high all that members could want. He openly spoke about the possibility of a ballot to settle the dispute, i.e., to accept the government’s offer as sufficient to end the national campaign.
Broad Left Network, Independent Left and even a small number of normally quiescent Left Unity supporters on the NEC bridled somewhat at this, and raised concerns that it was not enough and that the campaign should continue.
Nevertheless, all Left Unity supporters on the NEC voted for Serwotka’s paper, with a tiny number voting against a specific recommendation on the re-ballot in DWP, but all voting to suspend strike action. This demobilised the national campaign at a stroke.
The line that “the campaign must continue” is a recognition by the NEC majority that their position is precarious – they are at once trying to demobilise the campaign while posing as the leaders of the campaign. It is a trick stolen entirely from Napoleon in Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Cleverly, if utterly disingenuously, the NEC have recognised that “support the NEC strategy” is a line likely to be mocked in any room where the reps have a handle on what’s actually happening in the union. “Continue the national campaign” is different altogether, so they have married the two up and are utilising the mechanisms of the union to bludgeon their view through in a membership ballot, while blocking the democratic bodies of the union,
including branches and groups, from expressing legitimate dissent from the strategy.
Our hope is that all members will see clearly that you can’t “continue the campaign” by calling it off, which is what the NEC has done. We must vote AGAINST endorsing the NEC strategy. We must vote no.
What about delegated pay bargaining?
Central to the argument in the national bulletin is the view that we must pause our strikes while delegated pay bargaining begin. Essentially the NEC majority view is that it is nonsensical to be carrying out strike action when your negotiators are working out a pay deal with the employers.
Yet this ignores a crucial fact – one that is not mentioned by the national bulletin at all, almost like the NEC want reps to forget about it:
The Treasury Pay Remit cap of 4.5% (or 5% for low-waged) is still in place! Average pay rise across civil service areas must be contained under this figure.
This makes a mockery of some of the bulletin’s claims, such as how there are staff in the Home Office being offered 13%. This is true – but the bulletin doesn’t say how many relative to the entire 43,000 staff in the Home Office. The bulletin doesn’t admit that the overall Home Office pay offer will live under the Treasury cap: pay awards under this cap are robbing Peter to pay Paul, trading off inflation-proof pay rises for some against severe pay cuts for others.
When this Treasury Pay Remit was published in March 2023, the current leadership of the NEC railed against it. Now they are ordering Departmental pay negotiators into talks, and calling off strikes, without it being removed. What has changed?
The £1,500 one-time, non-consolidated, pro-rated payment is all that has changed. With this one change in place, the NEC have thrown out the demands posed by PCS Annual Delegate Conferences in 2022 and 2023.
Since the NEC have decided to use the Home Office pay award as a bit of a poster-child, it bears pointing out that thousands of PCS members’ pay awards in the Home Office will fall below the rate of inflation even when money made available under the 4.5% cap and the £1,500 one-time payment are added together.
Celebrating this as some kind of triumph is bizarre.
Our battle is not just with individual civil service employers. It is with the government, and their imposition of a Treasury Pay Remit that blocks a 10% pay rise for 2022-23 and an inflation proof pay rise for 2023/24.
We require the Treasury to be brought to the bargaining table, to cough up more money for all civil service employers. The consequences if we don’t are that, as announced recently in Ministry of Defence, job cuts will be imposed even to pay for a limited, sub-inflation pay award.
From the moment of the government’s offer, on 2 nd June, we should have called further strike action. We should have escalated by calling further national strike action. We should have re-balloted in DWP. And if the NEC had spent half the effort actually leading a determined campaign that they’ve spent trying to convince people that their naked emperor is lavishly dressed, we’d be in a vastly different position.
A strategy that can win!
The NEC argue in their bulletin that they have “made a careful analysis of the current position and considered in detail the tactical and strategic possibilities”.
Frankly we’re surprised that members of the NEC majority could spell all those big words but if you are attending a meeting, please ask them to produce this “careful analysis”.
It doesn’t exist.
Yet they have to claim this, to lend credence to their further claim that our call for the continuation of strike action “is made without any proposals on the tactics and strategy.”
Even this is dishonesty from the NEC – because we have quite clearly laid out what their strategy should have been, and what it should be now.
We must immediately launch a massive member-facing effort to whip discontent with the obvious problems with all delegated pay awards, many of which have been imposed during the months of NEC inactivity between June 5th and today. For some these awards might be sufficient – but for most they will fall significantly short.
The discontent over the pay awards, the discontent over the £1,500 one-time, non-consolidated, pro-rated payment, the discontent over the job cuts that are coming, the discontent over the continued refusal to move on our pensions and continued threat to our redundancy rights can be united with the battle over office closures into a coherent campaign based on demands already agreed by PCS Annual Delegate Conference.
We must put forward a coherent strategy that reflects genuine analysis about what is required to win our demand for a 10% pay rise for 2022/23, for an inflation proof pay rise for 2023/24 and for a £15 per hour pay floor to seriously tackle low pay in the UK civil service:
- National strike action, across all civil service employers with a mandate, at a faster pace than the three months of delay the NEC showed up until 1 st Feb 2023, and with sufficient determination to prove to members that their union is serious.
- Targeted strike action, across those areas where sustained action will resume
pressure on the government to come to the table to bargain, not to dismissively
throw us £1,500 and hope that this is sufficient to divide us. - Hardship support for all branches – analysis must be undertaken of all hardship expenditures at branch level to calculate the pace at which we are spending money, compared to what action this more targeted approach allows us to deliver.
- Re-ballots in all areas where the mandate has lapsed or is lapsing, including the
Department for Work and Pensions and Revenue and Customs Groups. - A serious discussion, primed by an informed bulletin to all branches, on the potential impact of action short of strike action, in magnifying the industrial impact of strikes.
More can be added, and plenty of nuances exist as to how serious, socialist, campaigning reps would continue our campaign – but the reality is, had we been put in charge of PCS in the May 2023 elections, we would already have accomplished all of these, while the PCS Left Unity NEC has mostly dithered and dissembled.
They must be ousted, their continued subversion of our national campaign and our union’s democracy must be terminated. A socialist General Secretary at the head of a campaigning, democratic union could dramatically open the union up to the activist and membership base once more – which is why we are calling for all branches to nominate Marion Lloyd for GS, and to re-nominate John Moloney for Assistant GS.
PCS Broad Left Network 