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?