The ballot of UK civil service and other members of PCS for industrial action began on 26 September, with a closing date of 7 November. The reports I’m getting are very encouraging, and I feel we’ve gotten off to a good, solid start.
One objective measure of how we’re doing is that we’re recruiting new members at a much faster rate than we’ve done for years. We’ve gone through a period of sharp membership decline following the end of check off, followed by slow growth, but now, hundreds of new members are joining every week. That shows there’s an appetite to organise. People want to join the union at a time they can see that it’s fighting over the issues that matter to them.
We also know that we’re recruiting much higher levels of younger workers than previously. In many areas we’re seeing that translating into more young people getting involved in the union as reps, activists, and as branch officers. In fact one of the key tasks of the union is to consolidate these “new” people properly into the union
We’re planning meetings to discuss what kind of action we want to take if the ballots are successful. It’s important though that such meetings happen across the whole of PCS and not just at the National Executive Committee (NEC) level to discuss what sort of action can and needs to be taken. Members shouldn’t feel like they’re simply being told to vote for strikes and then wait for “the union” to tell them what to do, they should feel like they’re setting the direction.
Our National Executive Committee has already held discussions around strategy, and there’s a clear consensus that a dispute based on 24-hour strikes with weeks or months between actions won’t be effective. We need to fight the dispute to win. I’ll argue for the maximum degree of national, all-out action that we feel we can deliver. All-out strikes must be supplemented by selective or rolling action, keeping up the pressure on the employer in between national strikes.
I’m also arguing for the maximum amount of strike pay and hardship payments possible. By the end of the year, we’ll have around £3 million in strike fund. Every member pays 50p a month from their dues into that fund; we may well look to increase that amount. I don’t agree with those who say “striking should be a sacrifice”; invariably it does involve sacrifice, but we shouldn’t elevate that into some kind of principle.
The point of a strike is to win. If paying strike pay helps more workers stay out for longer, we should do it.
• John Moloney is assistant general secretary of the civil service union PCS, writing here in a personal capacity