My old friends in the civil service are doubtless looking forward to a sustained period of strike action, having voted for it in a recent ballot. Not everyone in the civil service and the other employers covered by the PCS union voted for strikes, including those in the MOD and HMRC who simply didn’t turn up in sufficient numbers to reach the 50% turn out required to call for strike action, but fear not: the Trot-controlled leadership will be re-balloting both departments early in the New Year in order to get the result they want. Call me a pessimist – call me anything you like, actually! – but the PCS ‘strategy’, if you can call it that, seems doomed to failure to me. Here’s why.
PCS, as we have already observed, is a trade union run and controlled by the hard left. In this year’s National Executive Committee (NEC) elections, the hard left defeated the other two hard left factions to retain power. Members have no alternative. There is no centrist group, not even a mainstream left group. That, I suspect, is why well over 90% of PCS members didn’t bother to vote. And why should they bother if the hard left always wins? Anyway, at the annual conference this year in May, delegates voted by an overwhelming majority for strike action and the NEC spent six months preparing for it, followed by a six week balloting period. In most big departments the ballot was won. In the biggest department, my old stomping ground in the DWP, the union just scraped a 50% turn out. Here come the strikes. But do they?
The comrades are already at war. Militant, in its latest guise as the Broad Left Network (BLN), is the minority group on the NEC. They called for immediate strike action in all departments whereas the leadership, known as Left Unity, Lunity as some call them, have written to the government asking for a bigger pay rise before calling action. You would have thought that unity would be a prerequisite for calling action, but here we are talking about a wildly dysfunctional organisation. Nothing has been agreed so far, except that the NEC is imposing a compulsory and indefinite levy on all members of £5 a month to help fund selective action in some departments, where striking members will receive full pay from the union. I am not sure that imposing a financial levy on its own members without first asking them is a particularly smart move but then we are not talking about a normal trade union. BLN is fuming about this, concentrating their anger at their real enemy: the other set of Trots who currently run the union.
My guess is that the government will not improve its abysmal 2% pay offer and PCS will call some sort of selective strike action in ways it feels can most damage the government, in areas such as transport, passports, border control; that kind of thing. In addition, there will be unpaid national strike action for those other departments who voted for it. Good luck with that one, my friends. You are, in my opinion, lions led by donkeys. Outstanding public servants, employed by a government which doesn’t respect you and a shambolic trade union which I fear could not run a piss up in a brewery. It will not, I’m afraid, end well.
Rather than a great victory, I suspect that this so-called pay campaign, which also includes a demand for 35 days annual leave every year and a shorter working week with no loss of pay, will be what an old friend described to me as a “clusterfuck”, with the collapse of strike action almost immediately, widespread recriminations among the comrades with each side blaming the other and, in the absence of any alternative, the return to office in next year’s NEC elections of those who caused the clusterfuck in the first place. And a mass resignation of members, pissed off as they surely will be with the imposition of a compulsory monthly level which none of them were asked about and a hopelessly mismanaged campaign which ended in disaster.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a strong believer in trade unions. They are a force for good, until like PCS they become a force only for the advancement of Trotskyism and the destruction of capitalism. And my old pals in the civil service are mere pawns in the game.
Of course, the government could surprise us all and grant all the PCS demands at a stroke. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. In fact, if I was a betting man, I’d bet the exact opposite. Anyway, good luck everyone. You’re going to need all the luck you can get.
