Demands for levelling-up (John Moloney's column)

Submitted by AWL on 14 December, 2021 - 4:08 Author: John Moloney
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Our union’s (PCS) National Executive Committee met on 9 December, and agreed to conduct a consultative ballot of our entire civil service membership for industrial action over pay and pensions. This is wrapped up into our Cost of Living campaign. The ballot will cover the UK Civil Service and those of Scotland and Wales. The same NEC agreed our pay claim for next year. Those demands will include such things as the levelling-up of pay rates for all our members.

As part of the campaign we are also demanding a decrease in employer contributions to the pension schemes. We know from the government’s own calculations that workers are paying more into the schemes than they are getting out. PCS wants contributions reduced, plus the excess contributions over payments reimbursed as back pay.

The timetable for the ballot is yet to be agreed, but it should be in the first quarter of 2022. It’s been some years since the union has had a coordinated national campaign of this type, so it’s both a test of our organisation and a means by which we can aim to rebuild/strengthen it.

We’re not just taking the temperature of the membership; we want to develop union organisation on the ground. We’ve got thousands of members who’ve signed up to be “union advocates”; we need to use this ballot campaign to convert as many of them as possible into reps and branch officers. And, of course, we need to use the ballot to recruit non-members.

Something I’m pushing very strongly is the need to develop separate but parallel campaigns for members in the other sectors of our union who won’t be covered by this campaign. There’s a campaign meeting on 20 December and I’ll be making that point in my contribution there.

A good start will be getting the basics of communication right; in the past, non-civil-service members, for example in the culture sector, or in privatised sectors, have received communication from the union trying to engage them in civil service campaigns. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with information being shared but if members are getting messages from the union trying to get them involved in a campaign that isn’t actually about their sector that creates the impression that the union is a “civil servants’ only union”, and could lead to those other members feeling marginalised or excluded. There’s a consensus around the need to develop parallel national campaigns for other sectors, but we need to put flesh on those bones.

Another important target for 2022 is continuing the dispute over workplace safety in the DVLA complex in Swansea. The Department for Transport has not re-engaged with us as yet. If they don’t, we will need to go for a new ballot, probably on a disaggregated basis, in the New Year.

• John Moloney is assistant general secretary of the civil service workers’ union PCS, writing here in a personal capacity

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