PCS

A recent decision by the leadership of the Unite union’s health section to “aim for” another strike over pensions on 10 May offers a glimmer of hope in the battle to revive a national industrial campaign on the issue. NHS workers in Unite voted by 94% to reject the government’s pensions deal, but Unite officials mobilised against left-wingers on its National Industrial Sector Committees (NISCs) to prevent the union giving a lead on, or participating in, strike action since 30 November. According to Gill George, a Socialist Workers’ Party member on the health NISC, there has been a “change of...

The PCS union Executive’s statement on why it was overruling the 73% vote from PCS members for a further strike on 28 March against the Government’s pension changes promised instead a hope of “industrial action... before the end of April”. Leave aside, for now, the substance of the matter, and consider only the language. We know that the PCS leaders are promising, or suggesting, that PCS members will strike for one day in late April. Yet the statement never uses the verb “strike”. Instead it speaks always of “taking strike action”, or “taking industrial action”. This usage has become common in...

The leaders of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) have voted not to call national strike action on 28 March. PCS leaders claim that, since the government’s policy has been applied across the whole public sector, only nationally-coordinated action by as many unions as possible can win any concessions. Of course, we are not let into the secret of exactly how many unions are need to win concessions. Only the National Union of Teachers and the University and College Union were even “in the market” to take action alongside PCS on 28 March; after the NUT’s retreat and refusal to call...

To turn round the public sector pensions campaign now will need not much less than a miracle. Activists will work for that near-miracle: to make the London strike by teachers and lecturers on 28 March so strong that it bounces the National Union of Teachers (NUT), at its 6-10 April conference, into organising an escalating series of regional strikes, and forces the leaders of the PCS civil service union, at last, after three months of prevarication, into calling strikes. Even if the London teachers’ and lecturers’ strike cannot rise above the scale of a token protest, still, a token protest is...

Members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) in Merseyside struck for three hours on Monday 5 March. The strike was part of an attempt to stop the transfer of 100 workers from local job centres to centralised call centres. 29 job centres and two existing call centres were affected by the action. Carillion workers launch more strikes Carillion workers at Great Western Hospital in Swindon will take a further five days of strike action from 8 March, followed by another 7 days from 17 March. The strikes involve porters and auxiliary workers working on a PFI contract. They are part of...

The Executives of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and of the civil service union PCS, meeting on 9 February, decided to call for a new strike to defend public sector pensions on 28 March. The unions will survey all members, asking them to endorse rejecting the Government’s so-called “final offer” from December and to support further action “beginning with” a strike on 28 March. The Exec of the lecturers’ union on Friday 10th “unanimously agreed to join with our sister trade unions the NUT and the PCS in co-ordinated strike action on 28 March”. The Exec rejected a call from UCU general...

The Executive of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), meeting on 9 February, decided to call for a new strike to defend public sector pensions on 28 March. The union will survey all members, asking them to endorse rejecting the Government's so-called "final offer" from December and to support further action "beginning with" a strike on 28 March. It is reliably reported that the civil service union PCS has decided to consult its members for a strike on the same day. The lecturers' union UCU had called for a strike of its members covered by the Teachers' Pension Scheme (in further education...

Over the past months there have been persistent rumours of a merger between the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) and Unite, Britain’s largest union. Nothing has been said to members about this possibility, yet the rumours persist. Possibly one reason for the persistence is the realisation that PCS will be broke in the next few years if nothing fundamentally changes. PCS currently has a “cost structure” (i.e. the number of full-time officers [FTOs] and officials and their salary levels) for a union of 320,000 members when it has closer to 250,000 members. The recent national strikes...

It looks as if the civil service union PCS may move for a further strike on public-sector pensions around 28 March. Since PCS was the only big union to reject the Government’s December “final offer” on pensions clearly and immediately, a continuing campaign for public-sector pensions hangs heavily on PCS initiative. The lecturers’ union UCU set a strike for 1 March, but PCS has not come in on that date. The UCU Executive on 10 February is likely to debate whether UCU goes for a later date which PCS might back, or UCU general secretary Sally Hunt succeeds in her efforts to reverse the strike...

3 – 5 February marked the seventh annual PCS Young Members Forum, a delegated event that although constitutionally an AGM for the Young Members Network, is effectively a training and networking event for young activists. I’ve been to the last four Forums now, and in and of itself it is positive, however, it is not a policy-making conference, and therefore despite it being considered one of PCS’ “Equality Strands”, it has no way of defining its own policy. As usual, the speakers were all either Socialist Party members or people from affiliated SP front groups like Youth Fight for Jobs...