Now is the winter of our discontent, said William Shakespeare, or was it John Steinbeck? I’m more of a Steinbeck man myself and having employed the services of Mr Google it appears the answer is both but I’ll add another name to the winter of discontent theme I’m about to write about: Mark Serwotka. The fiery Welshman is general secretary of my old trade union PCS and is leading, if that’s the right word, a campaign of industrial action which is taking my old friends and colleagues on a road to nowhere. On Wednesday 15th March, Budget Day, the union is holding a one day strike, along with teachers, London Underground staff and Junior Doctors. I support all these workers, many of whom like my former colleagues earn pitiful wages. I know because until 2014 I earned pitiful wages. I am very concerned that the PCS campaign is as pitiful as many members’ wages and, unlike the other groups of workers mentioned, the union, and more importantly its members, are headed for a fall.
It was around a year ago that PCS union branches, overwhelmingly controlled by the hard left, started to submit motions to its annual conference in Brighton. The comrades are nothing if not organised and by the time the conference took place in May, it was always going to be a formality that strike action would be agreed by conference delegates on behalf of the handful of people who took place in the union’s laughable ‘democratic’ systems. And so it did. PCS covers a wide variety of government departments and agencies, as well as outside companies and it is quite the effort to obtain a 50% turn out of members to make a strike call legal. So the union spent the entire summer campaigning for the coming ballot and much of the autumn running the ballot. In many departments, like DWP, the union scraped a ‘yes’ vote for strike action but in others, like HMRC and MOD, they failed to get a 50% turn out. The union’s executive then agreed a programme of strike action.
First, they called members out on strike in certain areas like the Borders Agency and a handful of DWP offices. The strikes were for more than one day and to ensure the union managed to get people out on strike it agreed to pay their full wages, paid for from the union’s so-called fighting fund and by a compulsory monthly levy on all members (despite not actually asking members if they were prepared to pay extra money). Finally, on 1st February 2023, all civil servants took 24 hours of unpaid strike action achieving…..absolutely nothing. But it wasn’t all civil servants. As we have noted, HMRC failed to achieve a 50% turn out so wasn’t involved. Neither were the Valuation Office Agency, Companies House, Care Quality Commission, the Welsh Government, The Ministry of Justice, Treasury, Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office. PCS decided to re-ballot some departments, presumably on the basis that you keep balloting until members vote ‘the right way’.
So, now we have the largest civil service union a year into its campaign with nothing to show for it. So far, a solitary one day strike with another to follow this week and some small selective action, neither of which have persuaded the government to renegotiate with the union. I am not surprised by this. Not a single PCS member believes they will win this campaign, not least because of what the union is asking for, which is:
- 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.
Part of the original demand also included a demand for 35 days annual leave for all civil servants and an undefined shorter working week with no loss of pay. All well and good but there are two things here. Everyone knows the government won’t cave-in to that lot and even if there was some movement in negotiations, of which there are currently none, how would members know how they’ve won? None of which is to say that hard working front line workers don’t deserve better pay and conditions – they surely do – but this is Dream Town. Then there’s the politics.
PCS is a highly political trade union, run from top to bottom by members of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism. There are three ‘slates’ of candidates at the union’s annual elections and all come from a place way to the left of Jeremy Corbyn. They are, to varying degrees, organised and it would be all but impossible for, shall we say, a more moderate, mainstream left of centre candidate to gain power at pretty well any level of the union. General Secretary Serwotka gets elected unopposed every five years – no annual election for the Welsh windbag (and quite right too, but that’s an argument for another day) despite having presided over decades of below inflation pay rises (cuts, in other words), attacks on civil service pensions, job losses and so much more. It’s democracy, Jim, but not as we know it. In PCS, you vote for the hard left or you don’t vote at all and when you get the hard left in power you get a pathetic pay campaign like this one.
As a former union man, I support taking strike action when it’s deemed necessary. Sometimes, there is no alternative. But vitally if a union chooses a campaign of strike action there has to be an end game. I see no value in calling strike action that won’t bring about considerable concessions from management. By Wednesday night, civil servants, many of whom utilise food banks in their own offices, will have lost around £160 or more in lost wages and for what?
We will see how this strike day goes, but anecdotally at least I do not envisage a great success. I know plenty of people in a variety of government departments and agencies who are either agonising with a decision as to whether they should throw away a large wedge of already taxed income or work through a campaign doomed, as I believe it is, to failure.
Due to the government’s (anti) trade union laws, PCS is about to re-ballot members to ensure they still want to take part in further strike action and is running a long campaign for two reasons. One is that they will struggle to get the 50% turn out without bombarding members with campaign materials and fiery speeches from the likes of Serwotka but the second reason is far more nuanced. The campaign and ballot will, coincidentally I’m sure, run throughout the annual NEC elections and the annual conference which comprises, need I add, as almost entirely hard left activists. A cynic might add that the timing is as much to do with securing election in the elections than actually achieving anything for members. I’ll leave that one up in the air.
What, then, should PCS members do? Take strike action which they know will change nothing or bite the bullet and carry on working? Many, I know, will choose the latter course and frankly I don’t blame them at all.
Soon, the government’s individual pay bargaining units will meet union reps – there is no national pay rate, despite this being national strike action – and negotiate next year’s pay rates. My guess, with the government about to inflict yet more austerity on a worn out people, won’t offer anything remotely near the current inflation rate and I’ll be amazed if they reverse ferret on last year’s pay. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong and the PCS demands will all be met and I’d be very happy if they were, but I won’t be happy because it won’t happen.
Serwotka and PCS has overstretched this time and is leading its members on the road to nowhere via Shit Creek. I joined PCS’s predecessor union CPSA back in 1974 and I can honestly say that in all that time we never won a single pay dispute, with the possible exception of 1979 when the outgoing Labour government wanted us out of the way before the general election, won by…Margaret Thatcher. We all know what happened after that.
From 1997 to 2010, under a Labour government the pay and conditions of workers, including civil servants, improved markedly before David Cameron’s austerity heavy Tory government, in which some Lib Dems took jobs, undid almost everything Labour had done. And therein lies a lesson.
The only light at the end of a very long tunnel is for people to elect a Labour government. Because of the mess the Tories will leave behind, this will not be an instant guarantee of massive wage rises, but things will be fairer and better. And if the Tories inherit their own mess, people will find out very quickly that things can get even worse. The election of a Tory government after all they have done would feel like the end of times for many people, especially those working in the public sector. Serwotka’s patchy selective strikes and the odd one day national strike will never be enough.
If the comrades decide to press on with last year’s campaign, there is only one honest option for them to take. If the limited action taken so far hasn’t worked, then what will? As part of the Council House elite, I believe nothing will work but I don’t see that being an option for the Toy Town revolutionaries. All that will be left will be a national all out indefinite unpaid strike. If that, the honest option, is what you believe in, then carry on supporting the strikes. If you don’t, then when the re-balloting begins, then don’t vote at all because the comrades will campaign with their core vote and rely on others to vote negatively in the hope that this will take the turn out to over 50%. These people are many things, but they are not stupid.
My old friends and colleagues deserve so much better. Sadly they won’t get it from this lot. The winter of discontent carries on like nothing happened and thanks to the inadequacies of PCS, nothing will happen.
