Many PCS representatives are encouraging members to No vote in the current national ballot whilst continuing to represent members both individually and collectively in what is a challenging and demanding period. But soon we will be entering the election period for Assistant General Secretary (AGS) and General Secretary (GS).

Both elections brought forward from their constitutional periods and timed to enhance the election prospects of the failed Left Unity leadership that has presided over years of decline in our pay, terms, and conditions. A leadership currently busying themselves demobilising the national dispute on the basis of the lowest pay offer in the public sector.

Representatives and members should draw the conclusion of their deep disappointment in the national LU leadership’s dire conduct throughout our dispute and vote for John Moloney for AGS and Marion Lloyd for GS.

In mid-July, in line with the decisions of Independent Left (IL) and Broad Left Network (BLN) membership meetings, IL and BLN agreed a positive, principled, programmatic basis for a joint campaign to secure the re-election of John Moloney as the PCS Assistant General Secretary and the election of Marion Lloyd as General Secretary. 

Our agreement was prompted by the pressing need for a change in the leadership of PCS, a need which has become even more apparent in the time that has since elapsed.

For months, the primary activity of the Left Unity national leadership has been the derailment, and the public justification of the derailment, of the PCS national campaign on pay and job security.

For example:

• Having denounced the 2023-24 pay remit in April, because it obviously meant another year of sub inflation awards, the Left Unity leadership discovered in June that it was a ‘significant concession’. They switched from stating the truth about the Tories pay cutting remit to making propaganda for it!
  
  
• Leading Left Unity NEC members based in DWP who, as NEC members, now see what they did not see in April – that the 2023-24 pay cutting remit is not a significant concession – have decided to reject, as DWP Group Executive members, the predictably dreadful, below inflation DWP offer that is based on that same pay cutting remit.

The alternative – consistent with their original claim that the remit was a significant concession – would have required them to flog a real value pay cuts to DWP members in the runup to the AGS and GS elections.

• The Left Unity leadership welcomed and publicly boosted the Government’s decision – in response to the action of PCS members – to allow civil service bodies to pay a highly restricted, non-pensionable, £1,500 lump sum on a pro rata basis. They publicly accepted that the £1,500 should be paid pro rata, without any equality concerns, despite its obvious adverse impact on the many thousands of predominantly female, often low paid, part time members, even though the lump sum was not conditional on PCS’ acceptance, and despite it not being a salary award but a one-off payment, purportedly made “in recognition of the pressures of inflation.”
  
  
• They did not give a moment’s thought as to the real terms value of a one-off payment that would be paid pro rata and further reduced by government clawbacks through tax, NI, reductions in Universal Credit, cessation of free school meals, and increased repayment of student loans.
  
  
• The Left Unity leadership has become the only trade union leadership in the pay revolts that have swept the country, to ballot on an “NEC strategy” rather than the pay announcement on the table. A fact which speaks volumes as to the worth of their “strategy.”
  
  
• They do so on the stunningly misleading recommendation that to vote Yes is to “Continue the Campaign”, whilst ceasing all national and selective/targeted strike action, ensuring that PCS will not be able to fund much in the way of selective/targeted action, by removing the strike levy and failing to state in membership bulletins that in reality it is a “No” vote that would mean the continuation of our dispute.

The whole approach and behaviour of the Left Unity/bureaucratic leadership is designed to cement their control over PCS at the expense of the vital interests of PCS members.

The cynical ‘strategy’ has been to stop all action in support of our pay and job security demands and conduct faux consultation with branches while the lapse of time sucks the life out of our dispute.

Then conduct a misleading membership consultation ballot on an utterly misleading and confusing basis, further depriving the dispute of oxygen.

And finally, aim to obtain a majority vote over the holiday season in time to dump the dispute (while still pretending to be continuing it) thereby make way for the AGS and GS elections on the false fighting slogan that, “we are still in dispute!”.

It is impossible to identify a more cynical national betrayal of membership interests in the history of PCS. It is our job to try to keep the national dispute alive, despite the leadership, and to prevent them from reinforcing their national control of PCS.

Ensure that your branches book GS and AGS nomination meetings now; nominate John Moloney and Marion Llyod; turn out the vote for them; turn out the Left Unity leadership!

It is time for a change.

Nominate, campaign and vote for Marion Lloyd and John Moloney for General and Assistant General Secretary

Today the largest Government Department, DWP announced one of the lowest pay offers in the civil service for its 90k employees, 43k of which are PCS members.

Below we take a look at some of the details of the offer and why DWP PCS members should now Vote NO to continue the dispute.

1) Most DWP staff, including many on the National Minimum Wage, will be getting the absolute minimum afforded by the Cabinet Office remit: 4.5%. So much for the leadership’s suggestion that delegated bargaining units would be able to maximise payments from the treasury’s remit.

2) The very lowest paid will receive between 4.5 and 6.25% but this will only keep their salaries millimetres above the National minimum wage until next April. So much for the unions demand of 10% and more specifically of a minimum underpin of £15/hr.

3) Thousands of staff in London at the most numerous EO grade will get 0.42% less than nationally. Is it cheaper to live in London?

4) Thousands nationally will be getting an insulting £80 non-consolidated bonus. Much of which will be eaten by tax.

Compared to other departments this is one of, if not the lowest pay impositions in government for workers who keep the UK welfare system running and who continued to do so throughout the pandemic.

The strikingly low-pay being imposed on these key workers is equalled by the strikingly tone-deaf response of the PCS leadership.

In the ongoing consultative ballot, the leadership is asking these members, many on the minimum wage, many using foodbanks and claiming in-work benefits, to give up the fight by agreeing to continue to suspend industrial leverage and strike action on the basis of the continuation of poverty pay in DWP.

Despite the leadership claims that negotiators could perform alchemy with the 4.5% remit, we said it was impossible to make the 4.5% go further than 4.5% and we take no delight in being proven right.

The suspension of re-ballots and strike action over the past 3 months has left DWP members neutered and naked in negotiations and the employer has done exactly what it said it would do – impose the worse pay settlement in the public sector on some of the lowest paid civil servants.

In the meantime, the union leadership has purposefully delayed, suspended and equivocated, leaving the momentum and purpose of the national campaign dead in the water.

But there is hope.

We are urging members to vote against:

• The NEC in its pseudo ballot consultation by returning a resounding ‘NO’ to their strategy to end the dispute.
• The leadership’s candidates for General Secretary (Fran Heathcote) and Assistant General Secretary (Paul O’Connor) later this year.
• Vote to remove the NEC majority in next year’s NEC elections.

Branches are being organised through the Branches Say No campaign. Go to its website and discuss in your branch the statement, contact the campaign to say you will support it, and make use of the materials to agitate for a reject vote. Also follow the PCS Say No twitter account.

DWP members must VOTE NO if we’re going to defeat poverty pay.

The ballot paper is misleading, it begins ‘Vote Yes to continue the campaign for fair pay, pensions, justice, and job security’ and if that was on offer we would vote yes as well, but it’s not.

The leadership is engaging in doublespeak and in reality a yes vote means ending this year’s campaign. We are reminded of the slogan from George Orwell’s 1984 that ‘war is peace’.

The ballot paper goes on to say that in the next stage the union will conclude pay negotiations ‘to get an acceptable 2023/24 consolidated pay increase’.

Of course, you won’t get an ‘acceptable‘ consolidated pay increase, unless you read ‘acceptable’ as sub-inflationary. With the treasury setting out pay instructions to departments that they can increase their pay bill by 4.5%, plus an extra 0.5% for the low paid, pay negotiators cannot ensure that pay deals for ALL members will match inflation or even match what others in the public sector will receive.

While headline figures of the pay offers made to date may look appealing on the surface, one must always pay attention to the detail and the operative clause ‘up to’ within these offers betrays the fact that this will not be the case for all. Indeed, we fear that in departments including the DWP and HMRC many members won’t even receive a 4.5% consolidated pay rise.

The ballot paper goes on to say the next phase of the campaign is to pause the strike action, which really means ending the strike action.

An analogy might make this clearer. If you walk up a hill and then pause, you stay where you are on the hill. If you have to march down the hill, then you do not pause, you are in retreat.

By the end of August all the strike mandates will have expired and therefore we will need to reballot everywhere. We have outlined previously why a yes vote means this will not happen this year. Voting Yes, supporting the leadership’s strategy, means retreating into 2024.

The other parts of the ballot paper are things we will do regardless of the vote; if members vote NO, then we are not going to stop the pension legal action etc.

An honest leadership would say openly that a yes vote means no action this year and into 2024. Indeed, you could make solid arguments for this position. Instead, the leadership relies on subterfuge and linguistic sleight of hand.

We are honest and will say it like it is. Voting NO means reviving the campaign and pushing on up the hill, and that is better than giving up.

Vote NO.

As we understand it, Left Unity is now claiming that the government’s pay announcement of 4.5% (plus 0.5% for the lower paid) actually amounts to the government increasing the pay budget by £4.1 billion pounds.

This does not make sense.

If £4.1 billion represents 5% of the pay budget, then that means that the overall civil service pay bill is in the region of £82 billion.

The latest published figures show that there are 510,000 civil servants. Take away the 31,000 who work in the Scottish and Welsh civil services, you get 479,000 in the UK Civil Service.

If you divide £82 billion by that figure, then you would get an average pay of £171 thousand.

If you divide £4.1billon by that figure you get an average pay increase of over £8.5 thousand!

If that was our average pay increase and pay, then we don’t think there would be a pay dispute.

So why tout a figure that is wrong? Firstly, human error, that is someone made a mistake when doing the sums, but behind that, is the need to show that that the pay announcement is not just big, no in fact, it is a huge deal, and nothing says huge like a price tag of a few billion quid.  

The fact is that the leadership have ‘won’ us the lowest pay in the public sector. That’s why we are campaigning for a NO vote in the upcoming ballot. No amount of mathematical spin can disguise the fact that the money that the government is paying out is not enough. We can and should get more but that requires us to still remain in dispute.

The ballot on whether to call off the dispute starts very soon. Now you might say that’s not true as the leadership claim we are moving to a new phase, just pausing the dispute and not calling it off; that later this year, we will evaluate the outcome of the pay settlements and then decide whether to begin action again.

Let’s pick that claim apart.

When the leadership say ‘later this year’, they are talking of November by which time all existing strike mandates will have run out and would mean having to re-ballot everyone and start afresh, causing further delays to any action.

Given that the General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary elections will be running in November, they won’t start any industrial action ballot whilst that electoral race is ongoing. Voting ends on 14 December and the leadership are not going to start a strike ballot during this period so this means we’d be looking at closer to Xmas to restart the process

We believe that the Left Unity leadership will say in those circumstances, let’s see what the 2024 remit is (this sets the pay budgets and usually comes out in March), so pushing off any ballot until mid or late next year. So that’s why we say the ballot is about calling off the dispute for this year. Kicking the can further and further down the road, starving the dispute of oxygen.

In previous postings we have set out in detail why the pay announcements are the lowest in the public sector, are not close to what the union demanded and show how equality considerations were ignored. 

We indeed concluded that there was a fundamental failure by the leadership in regard to equality.

Now we are working as individuals in branches, to support the branch based campaign PCS Say No . If you go to that site, you will see material that you or your branch can use for the ballot. You can follow them on twitter as well.   

Whilst we are up against the machine (creaky as it is in PCS), and they will throw everything into getting a yes vote, we, together can mobilise members to oppose the ending of the dispute. We have the facts on our side, the arguments as well. If we get those to members, then the vote can go the right way.    

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.