A statement from the civil service union PCS says: “The union’s national executive [NEC] has agreed plans for a determined campaign for fair pay and working conditions, including a ballot for industrial action by more than a quarter of a million civil and public servants.”
“The NEC agreed that if employers do not respond satisfactorily to our demands, we will move to a national ballot in the new year for a programme of industrial action.”
One of “the demands” is on pay, yet we are still in a pay dispute from 2011! In the ballot that started in May 2011, the NEC said that demand was for “an end to the pay freeze and a fair pay rise for all”. The new ballot in 2013 will also cover “cuts to pensions and jobs”. Our ballot in 2011 was for those issues as well (remember the pension dispute!)
The current leadership has an irritating habit of starting disputes it never concludes, allowing them to fade away or merge into ever-wider (and less focused) disputes, with only the union’s radical left acting as a collective memory.
In George Orwell’s 1984 the record of the past is continually being changed. In PCS it isn’t altered so much as ignored. If PCS leaders undertook an honest accounting of what has happened to our national disputes since 2011, and set against what they said they wanted to do, they would find themselves greatly wanting.
All the signs are that the union will ballot in late January or early February. Conveniently (again we see shades of previous national votes), such a ballot will coincide with the NEC elections. We think that despite the many demands that will be put to the government, defending terms and conditions (which all departments are currently reviewing) and (possibly) opposing increases in pension contributions will be the real focus of the campaign.
There will be, yet again, no real fight on pay or jobs.
We are not opposed to a fight over terms and conditions and pension reform; we just want the union to be honest in its dealings with members. And that honesty extends to strike tactics. No doubt we will have our ritualistic one-day national strike – possibly in co-ordination with other unions – but what next? PCS knows that such limited action will not win anything for the members, but it will persist with that tactic.
To win, we need as much national, all-members action as can be had, coupled with selective, targeted strikes and other industrial actions. We need a strike levy so that we can sustain a dispute, and we need get members involved in the running of the campaign through democratic action committees with real power. In our conception of the union, members are not just passive recipients of occasional circulars, who can be called to strike when the union deems it necessary.
We will of course build for a yes vote in any ballot on action, but we will also argue for a radical transformation of the union’s tactics and strategies we believe necessary to win.
