Fran Heathcote and Paul O’Connor, who are respectively Left Unity’s candidates for General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary, have issued what presumably are their slogans for the election campaign. Those are: Anti-austerity, National Campaigns, Check Off Victory and Resisting Racist Policies.

In future postings we will go through each of the above, although it is not clear what the first two mean or refer to (The soon to be defunct ‘National Campaign’, maybe?). Be that as it may, in this one we want to concentrate on Check Off Victory

What is Check Off and What Happened

Check off is a system by which union subscriptions are deducted directly from your salary. It has been commonplace to pay subs this way across the public sector, indeed parts of the private sector, for decades.

In 2014/15 the Tories ended check off in most departments. They gave the union short notice of this and therefore PCS had only a few months in the affected departments to re-recruit all our members.

Whilst through the valiant efforts of reps, the union recruited the bulk, we still lost tens of thousands of members. The attack on check off, which was designed to bankrupt the union, did not succeed but did force the union into a financial crisis that we have only really come out of, in the last three years.

The union did take legal action on check off and won cases against five departments, the most significant being the DWP, where an out of court settlement netted the union over £3M.

However, three departments appealed and were successful. The union is therefore seeking to go to the Supreme court to get a definitive ruling.

Therefore, in a strict sense, we have had one victory and three losses, though we all hope we will win final victory.   

We did not have to have fought at all  

Whilst not criticising or underestimating the work been put into the check off cases, if the lead set by Independent Left (IL) activists had been followed, then there would have been no need to have fought those cases in the first place.

Under the New Labour, a super department call the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) was formed.

A team of PCS negotiators, of which John Moloney, IL’s candidate for AGS, was a member, negotiated a handbook where the key provisions were incorporated into staff’s contract of employment.   

Following this ‘victory’, IL members in branches put a motion to PCS national conference asking that the national union go to groups and national branches to determine what was already contractual and to bargain to contractualise the rest. This motion was passed unanimously.   

The Left Unity leadership however refused to implement the motion.

The first department that the Tories came for to end check off, wasn’t the DWP but the Department for Communities and Local Government. This department was spun-off from DETR and therefore had a contractual right to check off. This was tested in the High Court in September 2013 where the union won. The department did not appeal and check off has stayed in place.

This first attack should have been a wake up call for the union. The PCS leadership should have said to itself, if they are trying to end check off in one department, maybe they will go for the rest? Maybe we should do something in anticipation? Of course nothing was done.

When they came for check off in Department for Transport (DfT), which again was a spin off from DETR, they backed off from scraping it because it was a contractual right. Again check off stayed in place.

If Left Unity had followed the strategy adopted by Independent Left negotiators like John Moloney then the same might have happened in DWP etc. That is we would not have lost tens of thousands of members and therefore avoided a financial crisis and a haemorrhage of union density.

Therefore, Left Unity’s claim of Check Off Victory is a hollow one, once you know the facts.

In the upcoming elections we should ask: Who is more praise worthy: the ship’s crew who rescued most of the passengers after the ship has sunk, the sinking being partly their fault; or the crew who ensured that the ship didn’t sink in the first place.