Having killed the national campaign for cost of living pay awards backdated to 2022, the Left Unity (LU) faction leadership in the civil service union PCS is now presiding over below-inflation civil service pay awards for 2023.
Yet they are keeping up the pretence that they have merely “paused” the campaign. It is a tactic they hope will help them win the elections for General Secretary (GS) and Assistant General Secretary (AGS) later this year: facing both ways to win the support of members who wanted the campaign to continue and members who did not want to strike.
In doing so, LU is leaning heavily on the outgoing GS, Mark Serwotka. But his 23 years of leadership have – for all the spinning – been marked by failure:
• Historically low level of national membership.
• 15 years of pay decline.
• Endemic low pay.
• Abolition of pay progression.
• Reduced annual leave for civil servants recruited since 2013 and an hour on the working week for those working in London.
• Less sick pay.
• Pension age up from 60 to 67.
• An ill managed “national office” that does not provide adequate support to members and representatives.
When Serwotka stood for GS in 2000 he dismissed his opponent as a “well paid” official (Serwotka is now on £103,000 per annum!) who held senior office while members were coming under attack. By his own test, Serwotka has failed. This year LU has delivered the worst pay outcomes in the public sector.
PCS Independent Left (IL) members, including AWL supporters, will be supporting the IL/Broad Left Network (BLN) campaign to re-elect IL’s John Moloney as the AGS and to elect Marion Lloyd as GS.
The 21 September announcement by 27 Revenue and Customs (R&C) LU supporters that they are resigning from LU “with immediate effect” is an important, symptomatic, development. These activists are based in 12 R&C branches, include seven members of the R&C departmental committee, and have decades of LU membership between them.
They have rightly decided that the union leadership is not serving the members, citing its lack of respect for democracy, failure to consult branches over important changes, poor bargaining, lack of national support for lay representatives, and basic inefficiency. They are calling for other LU members to sign their statement, to “act now and help us create the union we deserve!”
Less importantly, but again symptomatic, the Socialist Workers Party has (possibly!) announced its split from LU after years serving as courtiers to the now-retiring Serwotka.
The SWP has declared the choice in the GS election – between Marion Lloyd and LU’s Fran Heathcote, the National President - to be a poor one, although they failed to campaign within LU for an alternative candidate. But they passively conclude: “In the end, we say it will be more likely to grow future strikes if Lloyd wins, and that is how we think PCS members should vote.”
According to SWP members, the three SWP members on the union National Executive have therefore all resigned from the “party” and will be campaigning for Heathcote! It is unclear whether the remaining SWP members will openly campaign for Marion Lloyd to defeat Heathcote and accept expulsion from LU.
What is clear is their denunciation of Marion Lloyd for supporting John Moloney’s re-election, with the lie that the “...Alliance for Workers' Liberty urges on support for Nato in the Ukraine war.”
The truth is:
• The SWP “condemns” Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine while campaigning for the Ukraine to be denied the weapons it is demanding and needs to defend itself. They are indifferent to Ukraine’s right to self determination.
• AWL supporters in PCS, as elsewhere in the labour movement, (successfully) campaigned for PCS affiliation to the Ukrainian Solidarity Campaign (USC), for solidarity with Ukrainian trade unionists, and in opposition to the SWP’s effectively pro Putin position.
• The SWP has been heavily defeated on this issue within PCS, in part because of Serwotka’s support for Ukrainian self determination and the USC.
John Moloney has donated well over £100,000 to the PCS Fighting Fund from his outrageously high PCS salary, has a record of achievement on behalf of PCS members, and is the only senior official to have opposed the derailment of the national campaign.
All very different to his LU opponent in the AGS election: the senior, well-paid, long-term PCS official Paul O’Connor. Which possibly explains why the SWP are disgracefully silent on whether they will support O’Connor or will be abstaining. §