As trade unions sadly become a near irrelevance, unless you happen to be a train driver or guard, in which case you can still bring the country to a standstill, one union leader exemplifies just why unions have become a near irrelevance. And who is this leader? Why, step forward PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka.
Serwotka is painted by the media as a “firebrand” and a member of the “awkward squad”. His fiery and usually empty rhetoric suggests the first description is correct, but the “awkward squad”? Well, he makes things awkward for his members, for sure, but I’ll bet the government love having him in charge of the biggest civil service union.
At the moment, Serwotka is in hospital awaiting a heart transplant. He is not a well man and no one, not even his biggest political enemies, would not wish him well. For all his ranting and raving in his day job, he is still a family man with a child and we should all wish him well for a full recovery. However, it’s not Serwotka’s heart I am concerned about: it’s his head.
From his hospital bed, Serwotka is writing a blog for the few union members who remain and are interested. His style is the usual flowery language and he makes no attempt to disguise his far left politics (although he does disguise his true political party preference). In his latest polemic, Serwotka nails his colours firmly to the mast of what he believes will break the cap imposed on civil service pay: “collective action”.
As a revolutionary, Serwotka is short on detail but his means are obvious: strike action. He does not mean just strike action in the civil service; he means strike action throughout the labour movement, which is to say the only part of the workforce that remains unionised, which is the public sector. The only thing that’s missing, he says, is “confidence”, “confidence that our collective activity can be a means to change people’s material circumstances.” Confidence, in other words, that strike action could change government policy.
Amazingly, he’s serious. Just read this:
“Joint action will be necessary. This would be one step in building a labour movement that has the capacity to change the political climate and give people the confidence the left can deliver for them.
“Action like this is underpinned by the economic alternative, now being taken more seriously by the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn, that we have talked about and developed over the last few years. An alternative of confidence and hope over fear and despair.
“A strong and effective campaign of joint action over pay should be our starting point in the fight against the rise of right-wing populism. If we fail to step up to the mark, the consequences will be bleak.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read nonsense like this, the same nonsense Serwotka has been spouting since he was a “firebrand” union official in the Welsh valleys, then, like now, leading his members up the garden path. Serwotka leads a union that cannot get 10% of its members to vote in union elections and only a few more in ballots for strike action or anything else. He leads a union that has failed in every campaign from staffing to pay to pensions. He leads a union of largely moderate members with a combination of bluster and revolutionary socialism. 30 years of abject failure will not give people confidence that Serwotka has any of the answers. And if Jeremy Corbyn is taking Serwotka seriously, then all our fears about the harakiri direction Labour are about to be realised. But there’s more, much more than this.
Only this year, PCS members in the DWP were urged by their leaders to accept a grim pay deal, lasting until 2020, in which some members would get substantial rises for a few years in order to finally reach the maximum in the grade (the rate for the job, that is) whilst those already on the maximum would get piddling rises of just over 1% a year in exchange for agreeing to work more “flexible” hours (i.e. evenings and weekends). Given that inflation is likely to hit 3% next year, many thousands of civil servants will face substantial real term pay cuts in the years ahead. And this deal, I repeat, was recommended to members by Serwotka’s comrades who are mainly from the Socialist Party (Militant). In one breath, Serwotka calls on the labour movement to take “collective action” against the government’s pay cap and in the next his comrades urge members to accept a pathetic deal that will make them worse off.
There is no doubt that Britain’s unions have been considerably weakened by the actions of successive Tory governments, but I will always argue that they have been inadvertently aided and abetted by the wrong-headed and woefully incompetent, strategy-free, ultra left leadership.
I know exactly what the ultra left are up to as well but you will need to bone up on the concept of “transitional demands” if you have sufficient time on your hands. Trotskyism is as cynical as anything else on the planet.
My best wishes are with Serwotka in that he gets his transplant and when he recovers to do something useful and constructive with his time. This will not include leading a broken trade union to final destruction but maybe he’s already taken it too far for it to matter.
