No sooner had the NEC announced it was ending all national action to improve the 4.5% pay offer, the government announced it was accepting all recommendations from public sector pay review bodies, giving all other public sector workers a better pay rise.

Of particular note is that workers in sectors who haven’t given indications of giving up the fight – healthcare and education, are being given more pay.

Education workers, for example are to receive a 6.5% consolidated pay-rise, a settlement their leadership is putting to the membership – although not without considerable opposition from those members who believe they can fight and win more.

Closer to home, Senior Civil Servants are being given a 5.5% pay rise further increasing the pay differential between the junior and senior civil service and providing a proper kick in the teeth for the majority of civil servants who deliver on the ground.

If the concessions weren’t enough already (they weren’t) they certainly aren’t now.

From Militant Action to Humble Petition

Clearly caught off-guard, having previously lauded the 4.5% as ‘a considerable concession’, the union leadership was bounced into reacting to the new situation; that they were, for all intents and purposes, ending the national dispute having only secured the lowest pay settlement in the public sector.

The logical response would be to admit the decision to suspend our leverage by pausing re-ballots and industrial action on the basis of 4.5% was wrong, and commit to further action to achieve minimally the average 6.5% being offered to the rest of the public sector.

Instead, the union doubled down on its previous decision to suspend action, stating that it would ‘enter into negotiations with individual employers’ and ‘demand at least the same pay increases as other public sector workers’.

It doesn’t take a skilled negotiator to identify 2 outstanding problems with this strategy:

1. The remit from the cabinet office is 4.5% of the pay-bill. While employers can choose how to allocate that money among employees, 4.5% is still the totality of the pie they have to work with. Even with the additional 0.5% wriggle-room for the lower paid, they cannot provide a 6.5% increase for all workers even if they wanted to.
   
2. Regardless of 1, what leverage do negotiators have to achieve this? The employers are aware that the union has suspended all re-ballots and is allowing all current ballots to expire with no new action taking place.

We are aware that some on the NEC have claimed that negotiators, presumably by some act of alchemy, could achieve pay-rises above 4.5% for most members within the current remit.

While it’s possible in smaller, policy centred departments with fewer junior members of staff, to gear the money towards the lower paid, this cannot happen in in large operational departments.

In DWP or HMRC, where most of our members work and where more than half the collective 130k+ employees are AA-EO, it would be mathematically impossible to target a meaningful higher percentage of an already tiny pay-rise at the lowest paid.

The maximum increase to the pay-bill is still 4.5% and will be without further action. Unless of course the National Minimum Wage increases and departments are forced into increasing pay, not through union action, but through their legal obligation.

What next?

As long as the union is in a period of ‘pause’ while balloting on the NEC’s ‘strategy’, the longer we are inert and unable to exert any pressure on the government to improve the pay settlement. Contrary to the NEC’s position, we now have no leverage by which to secure the same pay-rises as the rest of the public sector.

We believe branches should continue to raise these issues with members and commit to campaign for a reject vote in the upcoming ballot.

Branches should follow the PCS Say No twitter account and discuss the statement on the PCSSayNo website, pass it and make use of the materials to agitate for a reject vote.

Slightly longer-term, members, reps and branches should consider whether they want to support candidates in the upcoming General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary election who support the current dire position or those who have consistently argued for a continuation and escalation of the dispute.

John Moloney, a supporter of the Independent Left is the incumbent Assistant General Secretary and is standing for re-election. John is the only Senior Full-time Officer of the union, indeed the only member of the National Disputes Committee, who has consistently argued for the continuation of the dispute and against settling on the current concessions. We urge support for his re-election.