Why would socialists oppose union leaders getting only a worker's wage?

Submitted by AWL on 5 July, 2010 - 2:25 Author: Sacha Ismail

At this year's PCS civil service union conference, the Department of Communities and Local Government HQ and Department of Work and Pensions East London branches proposed the following motion:

Conference notes that:

• In 2008 gross annual median earnings for a full-time permanent employee in the Civil Service in 2008 were £22,520 and 60% of permanent full time civil servants earned less than £25,000 pa;
• The highest PCS full time salary is over £80,500 and within the top 2% of earners in the UK.

Conference instructs the NEC to immediately commence negotiations with the GMB with the aim of ensuring that full time officer pay rates in PCS are much closer to the pay received by the majority of PCS members.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka was elected on a pledge to take only a worker's wage, yet now keeps more than £70,000 of his salary. (At a Left Field event at Glastonbury in June this year, he responded to a question by saying that he has donated £80,000 to the union's strike fund - over ten years!)

The conference motion was deliberately worded quite vaguely in order to avoid spurious objections. Nonetheless, the Left Unity majority on the PCS national executive, including the Socialist Party, successfully opposed it. Their basic argument was that as a union PCS should not be seeking to reduce anyone's pay! How this is compatible with the demand which the Socialist Party raises elsewhere for officials to receive only a worker's wage, I don't know.

At this year's Marxism 2010 event, organised by the SWP, I challenged a group of SP members, who told me that their comrades had opposed the motion only because it was "badly worded" and that they would bring back their own motion next year. I asked why no action had been taken on this when Left Unity has run PCS for eight years. Apparently "these things take time".

So let's put down a marker now: will the Socialist Party in PCS seek to take action on this issue in the coming year, or won't it?

Comments

Submitted by AWL on Wed, 17/10/2012 - 12:15

On 16 October 2012, I bumped into a Socialist Party member active in PCS, and in the course of our conversation asked him about this.

He said the reason nothing had been done was because it's an "HR nightmare", ie that seeking to sort this out would pitch PCS into conflict with many of its full-time staff. Wouldn't that be true to some extent in pretty much every union, I asked? In which case, if it's an insuperable barrier, why does the SP make the demand (in the where we stand column on the back of its paper, no less)? He didn't really answer, I don't think.

I also asked what SP members who are PCS full-timers do with their wages, when these are above something like a worker's wage? Firstly, the comrade said that some SP members who work for PCS are "loose members" - certainly much looser than any AWL member, as opposed to sympathiser, is - and that they keep the big bulk of their wages. Those who integrated SP members give a large chunk of their wage "to the organisation", reducing their actual income to something more like a worker's wage.

Which organisation? Not PCS, but the SP. So, in other words, the Socialist Party is allowing PCS full-timers' wages to remain inflated, but siphoning off part of this money to their own organisation. (Why don't you tell your members to give money back to the union, I asked? That would not be adequate, but at least something. "We can't do that... that's now how our relationship with our members works.")

It's now two and a half years since the conference motion discussed above was defeated. Left Unity, dominated by the SP, has been in control of PCS for more than a decade. This is getting farcical...

Sacha Ismail

Submitted by Matthew on Thu, 18/10/2012 - 21:19

There are two main objections I think to full-time union officials getting wages many times that of the members.

The first one is the gap it creates between their lifestyle and that of members. If SP members who are PCS full-time officials "give a large chunk of their wage "to the organisation", reducing their actual income to something more like a worker's wage" that would deal with this objection. But from my own experience in the union, I'd guess that rather than "some SP members who work for PCS" being "loose members" it's pretty much all of them.

The other objection is that a large percentage of members' hard-earned subs are going not into organising, campaigning etc. but into the pockets of officials, or alternatively the SP's coffers (the case is different I think with Militant's MP's in the 80's being on a workers' wage and giving most of their parliamentary salary to the organisation). Someeone in PCS once told me that a lot of the effort the union was putting into recruitment was in order to increase subs income to cover the full-time officials' expanding wage bill, i.e. running to keep still.

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