On the 15th and 16th of July the NEC returned to business after we were so rudely interrupted by the General Secretary’s lock out of the NEC for the best part of a month.
We proceeded with the important work of:
- Discussing and passing motions on the practical steps to build the national cost of living campaign for the second time
- Discussing how the union should respond to the EHRC and GPG guidance on facilities and trans and non-binary staff to protect our members
- Discussing live disputes, organising and how to build the union into a supermajority union
- Discussing the union’s proactive approach to the Capita pensions issues and the possibility of future insourcing
- Setting up the subcommittees and their members for the second time
- Receiving an update on the priorities of the Scottish Executive Committee and Welsh Executive Committee to understand how best we can support their work
- Setting out the stall for PCS’s approach to TUC in September
- Passing motions to ensure there is legal advice that gives us absolute clarity on the roles of the General Secretary, the President and the NEC, so we know once and for all what the NEC can do, what the GS can do and how to work together when these overlap, rather than allowing the GS to seek to run the union without the NEC whenever she feels like it.
It is clear from the above that there are numerous live issues that members need the NEC to take forward, and despite the General Secretary’s previous actions that prevented the NEC from functioning, holding members’ disputes, such as those in FCDO, to ransom, IL members of the NEC are now getting down to the serious business of delivering for members.
Had you read Left Unity’s report of the most recent NEC, you would have been hard pressed to identify the actual work that is being undertaken by your NEC. We believe that this is telling.
We understand the value of the NEC to lay in the important work it enables, the strategy it sets, and how it seeks to defend and deliver for members.
We think it is good and transparent that groups (and individuals within them) agree and disagree on the key issues of strategy and tactics and think it is much more transparent that this is captured and discussed in an open forum, rather than only ever hidden away behind closed doors before the NEC meetings themselves.
However, what Left Unity’s report of the NEC betrays is that some see the NEC through their own petty grievances. For example, despite Left Unity’s attempts to categorise Joe Dale as ‘from the AWL wing of the Coalition’, the reality is that the Independent Left is a plural faction with people in many different groups and none, Joe himself is not in fact a member of the AWL (or any other political organisation). It is telling of Left Unity’s view of the world that they can only imagine factions as monoliths, rather than lay members working together with a shared view of how our union should be transformed, but with many different individual views beyond that shared vision.
National Campaign – the work must ramp up
A key discussion of the July NEC focused on the National Campaign and provided us the opportunity to get things back on track regarding the national cost of living campaign and make the instructions of motion A375, passed at ADC 2026, a reality.
Frustratingly, a lot of actions already agreed at the 29th May emergency NEC, and the NDC meeting the following week, have not been carried forward by the National Union and its full time officials. Again the impact of the GS’s shutdown of the NEC must be mentioned here, as at the 11 June NEC meeting, the NEC had already voted for her to carry out further actions via the union’s officials that were also not taken forward.
To start with, the actions that were carried out: as the NEC and NDC agreed, a letter was sent to the Cabinet Office at the start of June, setting out our demands on pay, pensions, jobs, office closures, hybrid working and the other matters covered by our Cost of Living campaign (as described by A375) and expressed our view that the 3.5% pay remit would clearly be insufficient to address the needs of our members.
The NDC agreed a MAB (07-26) which was sent to Group Presidents and PCS full time officials with bargaining duties on 4 June and this set out the ask for bargainers to seek to postpone formal delegated talks until the 11 June NEC wherever this was possible (8 working days), to give time for the Cabinet Office to respond to the letter that was sent, and to give the union time to produce agitational and training material for delegated bargainers. However it also made explicitly clear that “Nothing in this guidance should be taken as prohibiting discussion with management.” This reflected A375’s call on the union to ensure that members are never ‘empty chaired’ in talks with management, while preventing the risk that uncoordinated delegated talks would undermine a national campaign through conflicting agendas being pursued. Our view was that discussions about pay flexibility business cases which could enable an above remit pay award should be discussed with management by bargainers but on the understanding that any outcome would likely result in an inadequate pay award for members when these business cases are required to be cost neutral (IE paid for with future job cuts, or London/National switching) and inflation is expected to increase.
This approach resulted in helpful discussion at the July NEC. For example, it was through these delegated discussions that IL NEC members were able to raise that the Cabinet Office was giving different messages to Departmental pay leads and PCS nationally on which pay flexibility business cases needed to be cost neutral (such as those regarding pay settlement date changes, where cost neutrality makes such a case much less beneficial for members by significantly reducing future pay awards or leading to job cuts).
However, there was far more we agreed on 29 May that was not carried out. We had called on the General Secretary to ensure that member facing activity to build the national campaign was taking place. As far as we can tell, this has been entirely ignored by the national machine between early June and the July NEC. Instructions calling on Group Executive Committees, Regional Committees, National Branch Committees to convene emergency meetings after 11 June to discuss the national campaign appear to have been ignored by the machine, indeed we know an attempt to organise such a meeting was actively prohibited in at least one Region where their Regional Committee attempted to do this. It also called on the lay-led organising forum (as per A375) to be established to coordinate activity, national-level members meetings to be organised and bargaining units to hold all members meetings on the campaign in June, July and August, inviting NEC members to help explain the case, preparations and strategy for a dispute. It is unclear that the central machine has even informed reps that this was agreed by the NEC.
The NEC had voted to instruct that “no time should be lost in the preparation of materials – posters, web materials, leaflets and any such other materials are deemed necessary” as part of the national campaign “and to ready our members for a potential ballot beginning in September”. We are still waiting to see any such output materialise from the central PCS machine.
All of these activities were sanctioned by the NEC on the 29th May so it is disingenuous of Left Unity to claim that the farce that they orchestrated on the 11 June is what caused a delay to the building of the national cost of living campaign.
The reality of the July NEC therefore is that we had significant consensus on the national campaign because we were, for the most part, reiterating our support for activities to be carried out that we had already instructed to happen in the NEC and NDC in late May and early June.
Member facing activity is crucial to build support for our demands, and lay the groundwork for decisions in September about advancing this dispute. Some in Left Unity have expressed concerns about moving this campaign forward and want to ‘wait and see’ what happens with delegated talks, but this is a recipe for demobilisation, not building a campaign to win.
If you have ‘Our Work, Our Way’ type issues- those about how and where work is done and the control staff have over it, such as hybrid working, office attendance, rota changes or similar- which are unique to your employer but that you want to be included in a potential dispute, your reps must be discussing these with your members and talking to your bargaining full time official as soon as possible.
This national campaign will need to be different from campaigns of the past. It is vital we build as broad a campaign as possible based on the issues that matter to members throughout our union. The national campaign must cover both singular large scale Civil Service disputes (on issues such as pay and job security) and thematically co-ordinated local disputes within and beyond the Civil Service, where we are fighting on the same sorts of issues but in different contexts. Our Work, Our Way as a common co-ordinating theme is a key example of this approach. This is the way we will bring our members with us, by showing we’re fighting for the issues that matter most to them while maximising the leverage we have throughout our union. Now is the time to stand up, build the campaign and be part of it.