PCS and the results of the “pause”

It is almost six months since the Left Unity leadership of the civil service union PCS decided to “pause” PCS’s national pay, jobs, and pensions dispute, at the heart of which was a 2022/23 civil service wide pay claim for a consolidated 10% pay increase and a £15 per hour national underpin.

They claimed that a “pause” — the cessation of all industrial action and the lapsing of all legal mandates to take strike action — would allow PCS nationally to engage with the government in talks about job security, low pay and pay coherence and allow PCS representatives in the huge number of civil service delegated pay bargaining units (BU) to enter 2023/24 pay talks to get the “best possible deals” for members.

The outcome of the delegated pay talks for 2023/24 is now plain. The vast majority of PCS members have once again received below inflation pay awards, as the historic, unprecedented, long term decline of civil service salaries inevitably continued:

Since before the “pause”, the government had insisted that 2023/24 pay settlements had to be significantly below inflation; negotiators went unarmed into BU pay talks; and the LU leadership had signalled to the Tories that they did not want further dispute.

Yet the leadership has failed to issue a report to membership on the 2023/24 pay outcomes, a crucial measurement of the success of the “pause”. We will never see such a report, or not an honest one, certainly not while the General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary elections are in full flow.

Similarly, we have yet to receive a comprehensive report of the national talks on job security, pay coherence, and low pay. It is unsurprising. The Tories can see and smell the PCS leadership’s weakness, as demonstrated in their insistence on greater civil service office working. More importantly, their recently announced £20bn of tax cuts will be funded by slashing public spending. Significantly reducing wild pay differences for the same grade of work between one BU and another, and ending endemic low pay, is not on the Tories’ agenda.

When the outgoing PCS general secretary first stood for election in 2000, he demanded a return to national civil service pay rates and national bargaining and denounced the divide and rule of pay delegation. We are still waiting, in greatly more difficult circumstances. It is time for a new PCS leadership, starting with the election of John Moloney and Marion Lloyd as assistant general secretary and general secretary. Voting closes 14 December.