For a PCS leadership championing members’ interests and advocating:
A membership led Union: Members should be thoroughly consulted on demands, strategy and tactics and provided with honest, timely, reporting of negotiations to ensure democratic decision making.
Stop the NEC muddle, develop the dispute: The current dispute was forced on PCS by the Coalition’s relentless drive to cut our living standards. Yet the NEC balloted members before it had even worked out what action it would ask members to take and how we might win the dispute! It has focussed the dispute on making the government “talk”. Instead we must sharpen and focus the campaign on the key pay and pension demands and clarify the industrial strategy.
The development of an imaginative industrial action strategy: We advocate a national voluntary levy, substantial national strike action alongside paid selective action, rolling strikes, overtime bans, and highly disruptive part day strikes as pioneered by DfT members.
Accountable and in touch officials: Full time officials should be elected and paid wages more in line with members’ pay. Salaries of over £80,000 pa for senior officials are a scandal.
The defence of living standards: The NEC has floundered on pay for years as our real pay and the real value of pay range maxima have been slashed.
National pay: The current PCS leadership has had years to restore national pay and address low pay, the lack of pay progression, and the arbitrary differences that see civil servants of the same grade but in different “bargaining units” paid wildly different salaries . Yet we are in a worse pay position than ever.
Building public sector rank and file links: PCS must systematically develop democratic, cross-union, town and regional committees as a way of opposing cuts, building solidarity and pressurising other Union leaders.
An independent PCS strategy to win on civil service issues: The NEC based the defence of our pension rights entirely on the willingness of other Union leaders to wage a joint battle and watched hopelessly as those “leaders” predictably pulled the plug on the campaign. The PCS leadership should have had an independent strategy to defend the PCSPS, with joint union action as one aspect of that strategy.
Greater union resources for private sector members: PCS must face up to the substantial challenges facing commercial sector members and launch a recruitment and organisation drive amongst contractor staff.
Fight the Tories’ drive to reduce facilities for representatives to a bare minimum: Working with other unions, PCS must oppose the coalition’s attempts to prevent effective union organisation.
An alternative to Government austerity policies: Working with other Unions, campaign groups, students, academics and supportive Labour MPs, PCS must launch an effective campaign for jobs, growth and social equality: tax the rich; reverse cuts in corporation tax; launch a social housing programme; reverse the cuts; take the banks into public ownership; fund decent pensions for all and restore welfare provision.
Placing equality at the centre of PCS’ campaigning
PCS must launch an Equality Action Plan, drawn up in full consultation with members, that feeds into all negotiations and campaigns: confronting the disproportionate impact of disciplinary procedures on more junior, ethnic minority and disabled members; challenging PRP, which discriminates by race, disability and grade; promoting equal pay claims; challenging the £15,000+ bonuses of top civil servants; using sex discrimination law to oppose the attempts to re-introduce a UK wide mobility obligation throughout the service; draws out the link between inequality in wider society and the civil service.
VOTE IL/IS TO TRANSFORM PCS!
The PCS Independent Left and the PCS Independent Socialists are working jointly to transform PCS into a proactive membership led union.
Our supporters:
• Have delivered some of the best pay, terms and conditions in the civil service;
• Have ensured that pay progression is incorporated into contract in a number of bargaining units so that progression pay is paid irrespective of the pay freeze;
• Have delivered 30 days annual leave on entry across a number of bargaining units;
• Have uniquely delivered Staff Handbooks that explicitly incorporate agreements with the employer into contracts of employment;
• Initiated and resolved the legal case that established the Crown as the employer of all civil servants and initiated the campaign to compare pay rates across civil service bargaining units;
• Initiated key PCS equality policies (for instance, the equality proofing of all personnel policies; challenging discriminatory distribution of box marks and PRP);
• Formulated the policy for Departmental pay as one way of significantly reducing the number of delegated bargaining units as a step back to national bargaining.
President
Christine Hulme, DWP
Vice Presidents
Marjorie Browne, DWP
John Moloney, DfT
NEC
John Anderson, MoJ
Steve Bennett, MoJ
Nick Bird, DWP
Tom Bishell, DWP
Marjorie Browne, DWP
Len Campling, MoJ
Sue Catten, DWP
Trish Doran, DWP
Chris Hickey, CLG
David Jones, CLG
Rhys Martin, OIC
Karen Johnson, CLG
Bev Laidlaw, DWP
John Moloney, DfT
Sin Ping Leung, MoJ
Declan Power, DWP
John Pearson, Comm Sec
Dave Putson, MoJ
Tony Reay, DWP
Matt Wells, DEFRA
PCS Independent Left 