Left Unity, which leads the PCS union, decided not to hold a ballot of members across the UK civil service. Their official reason as to why no vote? Well activists, that’s you, failed a series of internal “stress tests.”

These tests were based on attendance at the National Activist Forum, the Campaign Schools, and members’ meetings. The poor turnouts for these showed that the union was not ready for a vote on industrial action.

Now the notion of “stress tests” is taken from the work of Jane McAlevey, the US union organiser and writer.

However, Jane’s actual concept of “structure tests” bears little resemblance to what Left Unity conducted. In her model, the tests are active, collective exercises. They involve asking members to take a clear, measurable action — sign a petition, attend a picket, contact co-workers — something that shows real strength and organisation across an entire membership. Passive activities like meetings were never meant to count as tests.

To repeat – a real structure test involves all members taking a specific, measurable action—it’s a massive, active undertaking.

Meetings, as Jane said are not stress tests. But even if they were, Left Unity did next to nothing to promote them. There was no central push, no real publicity, just vague notices. The resulting low attendance wasn’t a stress test failure; it was a clear verdict on Left Unity’s non-organising of the campaign. If there was a test, it was of the leadership’s competence, and they scored a resounding ‘Fail.’

In any case, the national forum was dire. In an article from one of our comrades in August, they wrote of the Forum

There were a fair few comments about how there’d been very little communication about the campaign until now, and why we were holding these fora and the strikes schools in the same week in the middle of the summer holidays, at 7 days’ notice. In response to this, Fran seemingly blamed A383 for setting an unrealistic time scale, while Martin noted that the overlap of the Scottish and English summer school holidays means that there about 9 weeks of comparative quiet. You’ve had since May, comrades!

,…

I could not help but think throughout that the subtext of all of this is that quite soon the NEC will conclude that we are not ballot-ready. And this will precipitate no reflection on their part, because they don’t want to have a ballot.

Then there was confusion over the timing of meetings. In a tweet of 12 August, we wrote:

New Branch Bulletin says branch meetings should “conclude as far as possible by September but also “no later than mid-September”. Which is it?  Branches only got this on 11/12 Aug — barely a month to organise. Unclear deadlines + short notice = harder for branches to deliver. Feels like we’re being set up to fail. Certainly this is an unserious way to operate. But then what do you expect from LU – order, planning, thought!

The sad truth is that Left Unity never wanted a ballot or a serious campaign in the first place.

The entire process—the late notice, no real publicity or drive to build for events, the confusing deadlines, and the misuse of the stress text concept, was designed to blame activists for the leadership’s own failings. By deliberately conducting an unserious campaign and then claiming members weren’t ‘ballot-ready,’ Left Unity manufactured the outcome they wanted: an excuse to avoid industrial action.

If you want a serious leadership then we have to vote Left Unity off the NEC and GECs. To help in that please join the IL. You can do that here: https://pcsindependentleft.com/join-us/