Broad lefts and rank-and-file groups

Nominations for the General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary of the PCS civil service union closed on 16 October, and voting is 9 November to 14 December. Solidarity calls on readers to vote for Marion Lloyd and John Moloney. They are standing for a democratic fighting union and for rebuilding the national pay campaign, de facto trashed by the incumbent Left Unity faction. If elected they will take no more than their civil service workers’ pay, and return the rest of the bloated official salary to the union, as John Moloney already does. More here

Having killed the national campaign for cost of living pay awards backdated to 2022, the Left Unity (LU) faction leadership in the civil service union PCS is now presiding over below-inflation civil service pay awards for 2023. Yet they are keeping up the pretence that they have merely “paused” the campaign. It is a tactic they hope will help them win the elections for General Secretary (GS) and Assistant General Secretary (AGS) later this year: facing both ways to win the support of members who wanted the campaign to continue and members who did not want to strike. In doing so, LU is leaning...

Many firebrands who have no political foundations drift or accelerate to the right as they get older or get power. Such is the case with Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS civil service union. When young, he genuinely was a militant, leading strikes. He was an inspiring speaker and a good organiser. That said, he never had a solid political foundation in Marxism or even social democracy or any other form of organised socialist thought. Workers' Liberty supported Serwotka in his 2000 bid to become the General Secretary. It was a breakthrough that a rank-and-file activist got the top...

The past few months have seen a flurry of "rank-and-file" conferences in the British labour movement. "How to Fight, How to Win", initiated by activists around Counterfire, took place in June, and launched the Rank-and-File Combine . The Troublemakers' Conference was held in Manchester in July, with sponsorship from several union branches and left groups, including Workers' Liberty. A post-conference committee has met twice. Activists from rs21 are heavily involved; the Notes from Below group was also prominent at the conference itself. On 12 September, a rally alongside the TUC Congress will...

I share E. M. Johns’ positive assessment of the “Troublemakers’ Conference”. What comes out of the event is still largely yet to be determined

The leadership of the PCS civil service union is continuing its effort to close down the national dispute

The strike wave is reviving. Why did it sag in early 2023? One big lesson is about the role of union officialdom. After almost 35 years of low strike levels, a strike wave started in June 2022, with workers striving to match wages to prices, especially of food and energy, rising much faster than at any time since the early 1990s. Unemployment was and is low, with bosses hiring anew for post-lockdown expansion, so workers have also sought to reverse the decline since 2008 in real median weekly wages, especially in public services. On the rail, on the Tube, and in Royal Mail, workers have also...

A fringe meeting on pay, organised by “Time for Real Change”, on the first day of this year’s Unison Health sector conference, attracted 40 delegates (17 April). It decided that we needed an ongoing network of health activists to continue organising on pay restoration. On 18 April the conference passed emergency motion 1 from the top table which noted the vote to accept the offer and which said the union will seek implementation. Speeches have been made against the Service Group Exec’s ballot recommendation to accept the offer, but we have been unable to get a vote on any wording about that...

Unison National Executive (NEC) elections run from 17 April to 19 May against a backdrop of a ballot on whether to accept a poor offer in health, industrial action ballots in local government, and the failure so far since 2021 to transform members’ anger at real-wage cuts into large enough ballot turnouts to bring the majority of our members into action. The left won the NEC for the first time in 2021, but it was bound to take more than 18 months to turn round this large union with its entrenched bureaucracy. The right of the union, working with the Labour right, manufactured expulsions of...

After the votes (announced 20 March) to accept poor offers on Network Rail and by RCN in Scotland, there is still potential to remobilise and turn the tide. But workers need independent rank-and-file organisation to develop alternative strategies in disputes. RCN (Royal College of Nursing) in Scotland has announced that among its members in Scotland. 53.3% voted to accept the offer, 46.6% voted to reject, on a turnout of just over 50%. The offer is a 6.5% rise in 2023-4 (or for some, fractionally more) for all staff up to and inclusive of Band 8a, plus a one-off pro rata payment of between...