The civil service union PCS is undertaking a critical national consultative ballot of members to find out whether they support the executive council’s strategy in the national dispute over jobs, pay, privatisation and other issues.
In strict legal terms the union does not need the ballot as it secured a legal mandate for discontinuous strike action when it balloted members late last year. Indeed, even if the ballot is lost, that would not nullify the existing legal strike mandate.
Nevertheless, it is vital that there is a large turnout for the ballot and that members vote “yes”. Anything less than a “yes” vote on at least something approaching the level of turnout with which the national dispute was launched will cast a serious doubt over whether there is sufficient support to win the dispute — a dispute about big, civil service wide, issues.
Once again pay awards this year for many PCS members will be below inflation. Pay rates for the same level jobs continue to vary wildly throughout the civil service as the government persists with the policy of dividing the service into a huge number of “bargaining units”. Jobs continue to be cut, piling the pressure on those who remain, compulsory redundancy notices have been issued in a number of areas and more are likely - at a time when the Government is planning cuts to the Civil Service Compensation Scheme. It is vital that the ballot is won and won well.
Nevertheless, activists and members are questioning, and do need to question, the Executive’s “strategy”. We should not be deterred from doing so by fear of being labelled “defeatist” or “pessimistic” or we thereby give up the right to democratic debate and control in PCS .
Having carried out a large number of membership meetings (involving, they say, 25,000 PCS members), the leadership has concluded that there is no mandate for escalating the national action. (There is a serious issue here as to the way the Executive prepared the dispute. For years the Executive rejected proposals to prepare carefully amongst members for a national pay and jobs campaign, and then found themselves bounced into it in December of last with minimal prior preparation, no clear industrial strategy. Since then have given virtually precious little feedback on the national negotiations to members).
The Executive is therefore now describing national action as being “designed to have a political impact. It should be taken on a particularly important day…[such as] the opening of Parliament or the Queen’s Speech…Or it might be coordinated with other unions, or as a quick response to a specific attack - like compulsory redundancies.”
By definition, the leadership are saying, such days will be few. Yet it is hard to see them being fewer than they already are — a one day strike on 31 January 2007, another on 1st May, and the next planned for some time in November.
Even the most loyal Executive supporter should realise that Brown is not about to concede major national demands on the basis of a one day strike every five months or so. Thus, despite the national action so far, and the November 2004 one day strike was also about jobs and pay, not just pensions as some people later tried to claim, the civil service jobs cull has deepened. Indeed tens of thousands of jobs were lost before the Executive relaunched the industrial action over pay and jobs last January.
Similarly Brown will not concede the demand for a “fair and equal national pay system”, radically overhauling the current divide and rule structure of some 200 so-called “bargaining units”, and “eradicating the huge pay gaps” between members of the same grade and granting inflation proof pay increases, on the basis of sporadic one day strikes.
The difficulty for the Executive is that it rightly does not believe that members are willing to take the level of all out national action required to shift the Government, it also rightly recognises that many activists and members are not persuaded by its previous “strategy” of national one day strikes, but it has for years set its face like flint against even investigating the possibility of centrally planned selective action, designed to hit the government in key services and infilling between the national strikes along with demos and other political action.
The Executive has therefore fallen back on the claim that the national campaign will be escalated by “targeted action” which it explains as “…intended to have a serious industrial impact by causing disruption to work. The timing, the type of action and duration will be chosen to have maximum effect on the employer. Designed at group or branch level, this will take up members’ issues which are part of the national campaign. So they might relate to departmental pay, job cuts, office relocations, privatisation or redundancies…”
It is good that the Executive will encourage branch and group fightbacks. The problem is that a Group or branch fightback against a local attack, albeit driven by Brown’s centrally dictated policy, is at best capable of resulting in a group or branch solution (although many Groups and branches do not believe they have the industrial muscle, on their own, to force their management to force Treasury to give them the funding they need to protect living standards and jobs).
“Local” (Group or Branch based) action cannot and will not result in a national agreement that addresses the problems caused by the Government’s national policies. We have had years of the Executive being willing to one degree or another to back members who want to take action without denting the government’s national drive to cut pay, jobs and services.
Moreover the Executive is not in fact “targeting” anything — if we understand that to mean somebody centrally determines what action and where will best support the fight for our national demands as part of an Executive planned national campaign. If the Executive was targeting in this true sense then the “targeting” would in fact be selective action by another name.
In truth it will be for the Groups and branches to determine whether, on their own, they have the muscle and membership support to defeat their local management on policies largely driven by central decisions (on pay remit levels and job funding for instance). For its part the Executive hopes that there will be sufficient such local actions to make the Brown and the Treasury believe that they should radically overhaul their anti-public service, anti-worker policies. I share the hope, but hope is not a national strategy.
Back in August a PCS activist wrote in these pages, “If selective action is not to be allowed then the PCS campaign will need a great deal more national action, and more frequently, to win our just demands on jobs, pay and services. However the leadership does not believe it is capable of delivering that level of national action. Such a judgement is not unreasonable — it has to be based on the feedback from membership meetings. But dogmatically ruling out selective action is a mistake members should call on the Executive to rectify.” That analysis was spot on. The consequence is that the Executive is now boxing the union back into the bargaining units, Brown’s divide and rule bargaining units, which the national dispute was supposed to be releasing us from
