On 2 June the government informed PCS, and two other civil service unions (FDA and Prospect), that it is prepared to allow departments the “discretion” to pay an additional £1,500 to civil servants “in recognition of the pressures that they have felt during the 2022/23 pay year.”
The £1,500 would be unconsolidated, i.e., it will not increase salaries. Departments variously announced that they will implement the unconsolidated lump sum or that they would consider it in departmental negotiations.
Some departments have, apparently, suggested that payment will not be made to staff on poor performance procedures (usually lower-grade, often ethnic minority, often with a “disability” as defined in law) and to staff on attendance warnings (which would exclude staff with serious illnesses and with “disability”).
The ministerial explanation for this discretion– “in recognition of the pressures” - is nauseating in its hypocrisy. The ruling Conservative party has driven down the real pay of civil servants for thirteen years, including in the last pay freeze in 2021.
PCS members need substantial, permanent, increases in pay. An unconsolidated award of £1,500 in the 2023-24 pay year comes nowhere near to meeting PCS’s claim for a 10% consolidated pay increase for 2022-23 and a living-wage underpin of £15ph.
But PCS’s scant report read: “…PCS welcomed the fact that the government and Cabinet Office has now listened and responded to the concerns of our members after they have taken what has been the most industrial action in the union's history in this dispute.”
Members’ concern is that they should receive a consolidated pay increase that matches inflation. Ministers have not responded to that concern. Properly recognising that the Tories have moved a little because of the PCS action does not require a serious leadership to exaggerate that small move.
Earlier this month PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka stated: “In HMRC alone, almost one in three staff are now on national minimum wage. In DWP one in five staff are having to claim in-work benefits. These people are the government’s own workforce, who are suffering the consequence of year after consecutive year of meagre pay rises leaving tens of thousands of them in financial crisis.”
An unconsolidated one-off payment will leave members on the minimum wage, still having to claim benefits. It will do so after 20 years or more of “socialist” leadership of PCS by Left Unity and Serwotka.
The Government will immediately recoup a chunk of an unconsolidated payment by reducing the amount of in-work benefit paid to civil service recipients and by extracting higher repayment of student loans from younger staff.
Buried within the Government’s decision to pass to departments the discretion for the payment of the £1,500 is a Tory trap.
PCS has prohibited departmental and other bargaining unit representatives from engaging in delegated pay talks for 2023-24, to ensure unity of members across the well over one hundred departments and other “delegated bargaining units” which have separate pay scales and to maintain a national union focus on winning the 2022-23 pay claim.
The Tories’ aim is to entice PCS into localised pay “negotiations” for 2023-24 and thereby break the national character of our dispute.
Given the oft stated views of National Executive Committee (NEC) members from the leadership faction (Left Unity) throughout this dispute, i.e., that members cannot afford to strike, there is a risk the PCS leadership will walk into that trap, and enable their supporters in some departments to agree or passively accept or agitate on the NEC for “their” Department’s 2023-24 below-inflation awards plus £1,500 to be treated as both sufficient for 2023-4 and as settlement of the 2022 dispute.
The Government has told departments that they will only be allowed to make average pay awards of 4.5%, with a further 0.5% targeted at lower pay bands, at a time when the annual CPI rate of inflation (April to April) stands at 8.7% (19.1% for food and non-alcoholic beverages) and the Bank of England believes that inflation at the end of the year will still be above 5%.
The PCS leadership should have been clear in talks with ministers and officials that it required a national solution to a nationally imposed 2022 pay cut. And that should be its position now. The NEC should not allow the Tories to bury the 2022 dispute by reversion to local pay “negotiations” for 2023.
The difficulties here are accentuated by the silence of the leadership on the 2023-24 pay round, and its failure to unequivocally state that the union requires inflation-proof awards this year in addition to 10% for last year, although the way it has handled the dispute has seen the 2022 pay campaign run into the 2023 pay review period.
If the leadership wants local talks to commence for 2023 it should submit an inflation-proof national claim for 2023 that all negotiators must comply with (an option it rejected at this year’s annual conference) and it should be clear that departmental 2023 talks cannot resolve the 2022 dispute.
The NEC meets on Monday 5 June. We will see then what Serwotka recommends to the NEC and what it decides. We have to be concerned, however, that the inept, unconfident, secretive, running of the dispute and negotiations has placed PCS in a weaker position than it should be in, and that the small cabal of people who run PCS, and the Left Unity NEC members who nod through all that is recommended to them, will begin moves to close the dispute down.
Throughout the dispute the leadership has lacked confidence in the members to strike and to win the dispute. The leadership took twelve weeks to call the first national strike day after ballot results on 10 November. This inordinate delay, coupled with its ignorance of the anti-union laws applying in Northern Ireland, meant that when the leadership did call a national strike for 1 February, it had to belatedly exclude Northern Ireland members. To date the leadership has only called three days of national action in 30 weeks.
At the annual conference (23-25 May) Serwotka said that our members are not CWU or RMT and would not take 15 days national action (even if so, why only three days is a mystery). The leadership has repeatedly thrown away momentum and opportunities to increase the pressure on the Government.
The leadership placed all its bets on paid selective action, having resisted for over two decades the PCS Independent Left’s call for such action to be a vital part of the Union’s armoury. But it had failed to build up the financial war chest (another two-decades old PCS IL demand) necessary to fund extensive and ongoing selective action.
PCS Independent Left rightly supported a belated, post ballot, levy of all members, but even so the Union’s ability to fund selective action remained constrained by the leadership’s lack of foresight, preparedness, and willingness to listen to those, the PCS IL, who “got it right” many years earlier.
The failure of the leadership to announce ballot dates to renew the legal strike mandates that will expire in July for members in HMRC reveals nervousness about its ability to re-ballot successfully and sends a powerful signal to Government to stand firm.
As does the leadership’s failure to begin bringing DWP members back into the dispute. More than three weeks after DWP was a mere 1% below the 50% turnout required to renew the strike mandate, the leadership has still to set dates for another ballot to get over that hurdle.
Although members are much more focussed on the pay aspect of the dispute, the national dispute also involves other demands – around employment security, pensions, and redundancy terms - that the Government could easily move on. Even there the Tories have been dismissive.
In reply to PCS’s demand for a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies, the Government has reiterated its commitment to avoiding such need “wherever possible.” The Tories could park an army of compulsorily redundant staff in the “wherever possible” caveat, especially when staff selected for compulsory redundancy receive greater compensation if they subsequently “volunteer” to leave, and, unsurprisingly, invariably do so.
The Government has rejected PCS’s demand for a reduction of 2% in pension contributions backdated to 2019, as recommended by the civil service pensions board, and is fighting PCS’s legal challenge (PCS lost in court but has permission to appeal).
In response to PCS’s demand that they commit to not making detrimental changes to civil service redundancy terms, ministers have stated that they will refrain from any changes before 2025. This is a concession, and we should say that PCS’s action secured it.
But the PCS leadership should not exaggerate. In the light of PCS’s successful legal challenge to the lack of consultation over Tories last set of detrimental changes to redundancy terms some years ago, the Tories wish to appear to be consulting properly. Ministers downgraded changes to redundancy terms when Johnson and Rees-Mogg quit and took with them their insane policy of shedding 90,000 civil service jobs as fast as they could. Ministers have no desire to pay off any more staff than they have to at present; and the Chancellor is forcing departments to shed staff by “natural wastage".
