The PCS NEC met last week to discuss last minute proposals from the General Secretary for this year’s national campaign strategy.

Observant members will notice that last year’s national campaign, which we were told was merely ‘paused’ has, as we predicted, been swept under the carpet, never to be spoken of again. But as a reminder – we settled on the lowest pay offer in the public sector and a £1500 bonus which the failed candidate for Assistant General Secretary told bargaining units to accept being paid pro-rata’d.

The NEC decided on a pay-claim and a national consultative ballot for strike action, which they have described as a ‘survey’, which would be carried out over 2-weeks from the 20^th of February, which may or may not result in a disaggregated Civil Service statutory ballot before May.

Ballot timetable

To put this in context, branches were asked to agitate around a consultative ballot on pay, which would commence less than a week after it was announced, would last only 10 working-days and who’s demands have been sprung on members and activists at the last minute without any consultation or rationale.

The formula of a short, rushed consultative ballot with little preparation time and minimal rank-and-file engagement, followed by the potential of a statutory ballot if the response is positive is paint-by-numbers Left Unity industrial strategy. But this timetable is particularly galling.

Such a rushed ballot strategy presents 3 key issues:

Firstly, the incompetent administration of the ballot is already causing problems. From members not being sent the links on the day the ballot started, to being asked for their National Insurance Number rather than membership number to vote and hosting the ballot site on a none ‘https’ secure server. All are unnecessary barriers to participation and will reduce turnout.

Secondly, a predictably poor turnout does not provide an accurate measure of members feelings. It also provides those who would rather not move to a statutory ballot the ammunition to argue that members are not sufficiently prepared for action. The leadership have used this argument previously not to move to a statutory ballot and we should be conscious this may be the case again.

Thirdly, running potentially 2 ballots in such a short space of time is a recipe for unnecessary confusion and fatigue among members and activists. Members are potentially being asked to take part in two ballots, asking the same question within weeks of each other, and activists are being asked to turnout the vote twice over. As both ballots are conducted in different ways, more confusion is likely.

The Academic Study

The foundation of the pay claim was an academic study commissioned by the union on pay trends in the civil service overtime, but specifically since 2007. For transparency, we attach the study at the bottom of this article.

This was received by the union in January, but not shared with the NEC until just before the meeting and not shared with branches until this week.

The study illustrates the serious loss in real-terms wages since 2007, summarising that just to restore real-term earnings to 2010 levels, an average of 35% pay increases at grades AA-EO would be required.

This figure does not surprise us. Independent Left comrades both in branches and on the NEC have consistently argued that pay restoration is a key demand and that to continually carry over the same pay claim year-on-year while pay shrinks, is a tacit endorsement of real term pay losses. Historically, this has been met with ridicule, with the leadership stating that members would find a 35% pay demand to be absurd.

Pay Restoration

They say good things come in groups of 3. During the last years national campaign, the union adopted 2 tactics we had been advancing for years. Namely selective/targeted action in areas which were industrially disruptive and a levy on members subs to ensure such action could be supported.

This year, the NEC has rightfully adopted the demand of pay restoration, although one could argue too little too late considering years of real-terms pay degradation.

Pay restoration is a key demand. It’s not an arbitrary percentage rise which has no basis in the material reality of members experiences, and which isn’t tied to the increase in the cost of living. It’s asserting the principle that workers’ salaries should at a bare minimum always keep up with the cost of living. It is good it’s finally been adopted.

Lowest paid left out

Why then, hasn’t the £15/r under-pin for our worst paid members been uprated? £15/hr was in the 2022 claim and since then, we’ve had historically high inflation. It would be excellent if we simply won on pay restoration, but if we don’t achieve that, the point of the underpin was to act as a separate bargaining point for our lowest paid.

They have been sadly ignored by this claim.

Hybrid working

Many thousands of our members have since the end of the pandemic, little choice by to attend the office daily, despite proving during the pandemic they were able to do much of their work from home.

One of the key issues for hybrid workers is the move to increase office attendance from 40% to 60%. This is a widely and deeply held grievance, which if included in the claim would help to increase participation.

For non-hybrid workers a specific demand advancing the principle for flexible working where possible should be included.

Exclusion of FM workers

Once again outsourced and facilities management workers are left out of the claim. We understand this pay claim is for Civil Service Workers, but there is no reason why the demands we’ve made nationally for our outsourced workers should not sit-beside them in a joint campaign.

As it is we have a national campaign, into which most of the union’s effort is focussed with a much more secondary and in many groups like the DWP, non-existent campaign for Facilities Management workers. Workers which hold significant industrial power in our workplaces and who through a coordinated campaign could bolster leverage for all members.

So, incompetence or sabotage? Or a mixture of both?

The question for us is, is this strategy designed to sabotage the campaign from the start or is it simply a poor, incompetent plan? We will give the new leadership the benefit of the doubt and go with the latter, but there may well be members of the leadership faction who do have the inclination or capability to fight an industrial campaign.

What is telling, is that numerous NEC members have admitted in various forums that they hadn’t even read the study before voting on the claim, preferring to simply accept the claim as presented by the general secretary. Whatever your faction, the role of an NEC member is to scrutinise decisions based on the total amount of evidence. It is depressing, but not surprising that NEC members do not think this is important.

Regardless, we have a lot of work to do over the next weeks to ensure the maximum membership turnout. Vote Yes to industrial action.

What’s the alternative?

If the aim is to have a live mandate by conference in order to be able to take action in a timely fashion during this year’s pay round, we should have begun the process much earlier, on the safe assumption that the pay-remit would not be acceptable to us.

As we are where we are, we believe a better option would be to use the coming weeks to continue to ensure the foundations in branches are prepared for a statutory ballot, not to agitate around a superfluous consultative ballot.

In terms of the claim, pay restoration is good (but needs to be explained to members), but the refusal to uprate the underpin and the omittance of one of the key workplace issues of the day – flexible working – are serious oversights which could have been caught if the process wasn’t so rushed or we had a different leadership.