PCS

Public & Commercial Services Union - trade union for civil servants

Building for September (John Moloney's column)

Several PCS branches are reporting increases in membership since the RMT announced its strikes. Having a major national strike taking place and being spoken about, in the media but also in workplaces and communities, makes the labour movement visible and reminds people what unions are fundamentally for. We want to take advantage of that atmosphere to build for our strike ballot in September. On 6 July, lay reps and officials will meet with full-time officials to agree a plan for a series of campaign meetings. Those meetings will help organise the effort to mobilise the vote in the ballot, but...

Eye on the left: Two views on PCS

Since they parted ways in the 1990s, the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal, both descended from the 1960s-80s Militant, have mutated in different directions. In civil service union PCS they take very different stances, as their reports on its 24-26 May conference show. Socialist Appeal (SA) is not very numerous in PCS. The Socialist Party (SP), which for almost two decades, until 2018, led the governing “Left Unity” (LU) bloc with the current leadership of general secretary Mark Serwotka, are more numerous. The SP is now highly critical of LU, even though LU now acts not very differently...

An uptick in struggle (John Moloney's column)

I visited the picket line of our members at the British Council, who struck for three days from 15-17 June, in a dispute over job cuts. The employer wants to restructure the organisation; the demands of the dispute are for transparency in the restructure process, no compulsory redundancies, and no outsourcing or privatisation of jobs. The strikers have been boosted by the support they’ve received via social media, and from several MPs. I’ve also been meeting recently with officials from the Government Property Agency, a body which is responsible for overseeing government buildings. It will...

Jobcentre workers demonstrate against fixed-term sackings

On Friday 10 June jobcentre workers in Lewisham (South London) demonstrated against the sacking of fixed-term staff taken on early in the pandemic, with the support of other local trade unionists, Labour Party activists and Labour councillors. They also received a statement of solidarity from Lewisham Deptford MP Vicky Foxcroft, which was read out at the protest at Lewisham town hall. The background is the sluggishness of their union PCS nationally in doing anything to help these mainly young workers oppose thousands of job losses across the country. One of the Lewisham reps, Tom Harris...

Rwanda: it's state trafficking

The Tories’ plan to send refugees to Rwanda is a “cash-for-deportations policy... akin to state-sponsored trafficking and transportation” (as SNP home affairs spokesperson Stuart McDonald puts it). It must be defeated. Two initial legal challenges to the policy — organised by campaign groups Care4Calais and Detention Action and civil service union PCS — have been rejected, so the first flight to Rwanda was due to leave as we went to press on 14 June. Challenges on individual cases have reduced the numbers so drastically that there’s speculation it might be cancelled anyway. On the afternoon of...

Preparing for the pay ballot (John Moloney's column)

The National Executive Committee of our union, PCS, will meet on Thursday 16 June to discuss arrangements for our national ballot for industrial action on cost-of-living issues, which will begin in September. Part of that discussion will be around how to organise the ballot, which I’ve discussed in previous columns. There’s important administrative and auditing work that needs to happen well in advance of launching the ballot, to ensure membership lists are up to date. Key to winning the ballot will be mobilising the activist base. Of course the national leadership needs to lead, and there’ll...

PCS pay ballot will start 1 September

Civil service union PCS held its national delegate conference in Brighton 24-26 May, preceded by sectoral group conferences. Perhaps four hundred delegates were in Brighton, with some attending online but numbers overall well down since the last physical conference in 2019. The conference voted for a national strike ballot on “cost of living” issues, including pay, pensions and redundancy compensation, to begin 1 September. Whether this should be a single national ballot or disaggregated in some form was remitted to the National Executive Committee. The conference also voted to campaign...

PCS conference rejects "Stop the War" argument, votes for strong Ukraine solidarity

Yuliya Yurchenko addresses the Ukraine Solidarity fringe meeting at PCS conference. On the platform: John McDonnell, Chris Ford, Fran Heathcote, Mark Serwotka The national conference of civil service trade union PCS (24-26 May, Brighton) voted overwhelmingly for a strong stand in solidarity with Ukraine and its labour movement, and to affiliate to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (USC). It rejected a Stop the War Coalition-supporting motion attempting to present the war as a “proxy conflict between Nato and Russia”. Workers’ Liberty supporters in PCS, organising alongside others in PCS...

PCS meets in conference

As I write, our union, PCS, is holding its group conferences and national conference (23-26 May). The main debates at the national conference will be around our plan for a national industrial action ballot over cost-of-living issues. Two contested issues are when the ballot should take place, and whether it should be a single aggregated ballot, or disaggregated by department. On the former issue, the two proposals are to begin in July, or to begin in September. I favour the latter position, which is also the National Executive Committe (NEC) majority position, simply because I don’t think we...

A wild move for job cuts in civil service (John Moloney's column)

The announcement that the government plans to cut 91,000 civil service jobs is overtly political. Senior managers in the civil service weren’t even aware of it until the Cabinet decided on it. It’s part of an agitation by right-wing politicians who think that cutting the civil service staffing budget will free up funds for tax cuts, and, more widely, it’s part of an ideological drive by people who want to physically reduce the size of the state. On its own terms, it is an irrational decision that will massively backfire. You can’t get rid of one-fifth of an organisation with any meaningful...

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