My old civil service friends who belong to the PCS union are being called out on strike again. This time the strike will happen on Friday 28th April, not coincidentally, just before a bank holiday the following money. Smart thinking by the comrades who control the union. For the loss of a mere day’s pay, you can have a long weekend. Let us all thank The Glorious Leader, Mark Serwotka, for being so, well glorious. Let us remind ourselves what the union is fighting for (the words are those of the PCS):
- a 10% pay rise
- a Living Wage of at least £15 an hour
- an immediate 2% cut in contributions that our members have overpaid to their pensions since 2018
- no further cuts to redundancy terms
- and a job security agreement, coupled with the resources desperately needed to deliver public services.
The union seems to have quietly dumped the demand for 35 days annual leave and a shorter working week with no loss of pay, quite possibly on the grounds that other unions might have said, “Are you taking the piss?” The campaign, such as it is, has been dragging on for nearly a year now with a bit of selective action here and there, with members being paid their full salary by the union to go on strike for a few weeks, and so far a one day national strike and guess what? So far nothing has changed. PCS is controlled by the hard left Left Unity cult, yet there has been great criticism of their record. Just read this:
“In the two decades it has controlled the union, Left Unity:
- Has not secured a single substantive victory as a national union – be it on pensions, pay, terms and conditions, jobs or equality – despite all the national disputes which have been called, which members have supported, and which the NEC never called off, preferring to let them fade away and hope the members wouldn’t notice.
- Is not politically coordinating and challenging the widespread unequal treatment of older, more junior, disabled and ethnic minority members under the PMR and inefficiency procedures despite PCS conference policy requiring it to do so.
- Cancelled the 2015 NEC elections in an affront to the democracy of PCS and in breach of the requirement for annual elections.
- Pays top officials £90,000+ per annum out of the membership dues (the one pay battle that the “leadership” has won and the one cost seemingly beyond its sharp service reducing eye). Only John Moloney, the Independent Left member elected Assistant General Secretary, takes a workers’ wage and donates the majority of his wages to the Fighting Fund.
- Planned to flog off PCS HQ to pay our running costs (a sure sign of poor administration) and then, when they were unable to do so, claimed that a sale was not needed.
- Is steeped in a spinmeister culture – even once including lamentably claiming a breakthrough national pay agreement that never existed – that corrodes membership confidence and miseducates members and activists.”
Quite damning, isn’t it? Who do you think wrote it? A right of centre organisation that hates the Trots? UKIP? The Daily Mail? No. One of the other two hard left Trot groups, the Independent Left (IL) that seeks to overturn the ruling Trot group in this year’s NEC elections. And some of it is what I have been saying for years. PCS has not won a single national campaign since it was founded in 1998. It is usually in dispute, as IL says over “pensions, pay, terms and conditions, jobs or equality” but it never wins them. More than that, the comrades, led by The Glorious Leader, never call off campaigns. They simply let them “fade away and hope the members (won’t) notice.”
I do not necessarily agree with all of the IL sloganising, least of all the attacks on full-time officials earning substantial salaries. Indeed, I merely point out that these salaries are negotiated and agreed by the unions to which the officials belong. Anyone who accepts less than the rate for the job is, in my eyes, a scab and I note that the IL’s Assistant General Secretary John Moloney avoids being called a scab by accepting the rate for the job but then choosing to give some of it to the union’s fighting fund. But their overall criticism is fair. PCS has failed disastrously under the Trot leadership and cares more about spin than substance.
It is possible that Rishi Sunak’s government will grow tired of the unions and throw them a few pennies to end the strikes, although I rather doubt it. They will know as well as anyone what a piss poor union the PCS is under Serwotka and the comrades and that they will never dare press the nuclear button and call out everyone on an all out indefinite strike. They can, and I suspect will, ride it all out, PCS will lose as usual and the comrades will let yet another campaign fizzle out.
Why, you may be wondering, don’t more moderate folk stand for election in PCS? There are currently three political factions, all well to the left of Jeremy Corbyn, and no one else is contesting elections.? What’s stopping them? Well, it’s simple. The comrades control virtually all the branches and in order to get on a ballot paper a candidate would need to secure a certain number of branch nominations, which they can’t do. The opposition to the Trots in PCS is either Trots or more Trots. And each of the hard left factions are organised to some degree and a single lone candidate can’t be, unless they happen to be very rich and can afford an expensive publicity campaign, in which case why would they be in lowly paid work anyway? In short, the comrades always win in PCS and the comrades will always win. My guess is that most civil servants are not of the revolutionary left but most of their so-called representatives are. You pays your money, you takes your chances with a bunch of hard left chancers and the record shows they always lose.
When even the comrades are attacking other comrades, you know the game is up. My civil service pals were among the heroes of Covid, keeping vital frontline services going and thanks to both a vicious hard right government and a bungling, politically motivated hard left trade union they’re being taken for fools, which they’re not.
Civil servants are lions led by donkeys and they have been for a quarter of a century. They deserve so much better than the treatment they are getting but barring a miracle – and remember folks, miracles don’t happen – the current pensions, pay, terms and conditions and jobs campaign is doomed. Not that the comrades will ever tell you it’s over. They will want to fight to lose again another day.
