As I said last week, another day, another Civil Service one day strike.
You won’t find me arguing that Civil Servants don’t deserve a pay rise, even though they all earn vastly more than I do nowadays (!), but I do wonder what PCS members are thinking.
They were going to be part of a strike involving numerous unions, almost all of whom stepped back before the event. Not PCS, of course. They went ahead with a one day strike in order to support their pay claim which will be submitted sometime next year. Eh? What were they thinking about?
My guess is that they were thinking of the glorious day when revolutionary socialism triumphs. When Mark Serwotka is carried shoulder high through Clapham, assuming they haven’t sold off the union HQ for unaffordable housing by then, by crowds of grateful citizens when capitalism is finally defeated. This will be at roughly the same time as hell freezes over.
I think the PCS union strategy is as follows:
1) Our members are very badly paid
2) Let’s go on strike for a day
3) Er…
4) That’s it
I’ve struggled to think of some other reason they led hardworking low paid members to the top of the hill last week only to let them find their own way down. The strike itself barely registered with the media and still less with the public. Whole swathes of the Civil Service ignored the call but a good few thousand angry union members felt it was worth losing a day’s pay to say how fed up they were. Fair enough, but was it worth losing a day’s pay at all? And moreover, what happens next?
A strike is usually a last resort for a union but for the ultra left led PCS, it’s the only resort. No strategy, just a one day strike. The timing of the strike is not a coincidence because members will lose pay at the end of October, not just before Christmas, but you can see that there will be nothing else happening until at least the new year. It won’t happen straight away but you can bet that there will be another one day strike in late winter, early spring, just when the union elections are taking place – a pure coincidence of course – and another at general election time in May when PCS won’t be supporting a mainstream party – it is not affiliated to any particularly party – but it will be supporting, directly or indirectly, the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, which is really the Socialist Party which is really the Militant tendency which is really the Revolutionary Socialist League. Still awake? They will hope you’re not.
There is little interest in improving the lot of lowly paid workers in PCS; this is all about the bigger picture of revolutionary politics and that is why members are leaving in droves and hoping for an alternative.
If a one day strike is the answer, it must have been a bloody stupid question but then if PCS posed it, then I rest my case.
