The Majority of members who voted have voted Yes in the national campaign “consultation” ballot.

In a deluge of ballot material, including on the actual ballot paper, you were urged to ‘Vote Yes to continue the campaign for fair pay, pensions, justice, and job security.’

The dishonest, Orwellian slogan and question were chosen to confuse members and it did.

No other union in the public sector pay dispute has put such a duplicitous question to their members.

People who vote Yes to continue the campaign were unclear what that would mean when the leadership was claiming that it was only “pausing”, not ending, our action whilst also stating that in the event of a Yes vote they would cease to collect the levy required to fund selective/targeted action.

Nevertheless, on the basis of the ballot question and propaganda, the vote majority is to continue the campaign.

Unfortunately, the current leadership is not serious – or honest – about continuing our campaign. Infact they have inflicted immense damage on it by pausing action and destroying our leverage.

The campaign will not continue in any meaningful way if Fran Heathcoat and Paul O’Connor are elected, respectively, as General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary.

Fran Heathcote and Paul O’Connor are both part of the Left Unity (LU) leadership that runs PCS. The “strategy” of the LU leadership was largely in place many weeks before the ballot result was announced, and its purpose and effect has been to derail our pay and cost of living campaign.

The leadership’s “strategy” as supported by Fran and Paul has been to:

• Thank the Tories on 2^nd June for ‘hearing membership concerns’ (we have not heard a single member express that view – have you?).
• To accept on the 2^nd June, and in guidance to representatives issued on the 6 June by Paul O’Connor, that the highly restricted, one off, non-pensionable, lump sum payment of £1,500 should be paid on a pro rata basis and that consequentially part time civil servants, who are overwhelmingly women, should receive less than £1,500, even though the payment was in compensation for the pressure of inflation.
• Wait until the 30 June, after a massive membership backlash, to write to the Cabinet Office minister objecting to pro-rata payment. His reply was essentially that this was the basis of the guidance and that they never objected on 2^nd June. By this time of course, the leadership had given up all our strike leverage.
• Flog the £1,500 pro rata payments to members as a ‘major concession’. Despite after Tax, NI and Student Loan repayments it would be a lot less, and in the case of our lowest paid members claiming Universal Credit, would have a negative impact on their income.
• From June onwards, flog the Tories’ 2023-24 pay remit guidance (which sets the rules for non-senior civil service pay awards) as a major concession, having rightly previously denounced it before as guaranteeing another year of below inflation awards.
• Give up on our 2022/23 demands for a fully consolidated 10% cost of living award with a £15 per hour national living wage.
• Refuse to renew legal strike mandates.
• Call off strike action for our demands.
• Send PCS negotiators into this year’s pay negotiations without the leverage of civil service strike action, to get the “best possible deal” for members in 2023/24 (when the Government has been insisting since April that 2023/24 awards will be below the inflation rate).

This was a surrender note dressed up as a strategy.

The PCS Independent Left predicted where the leadership would “lead” members to: not a penny added to our 2022/23 salaries; the dire position of the lowest paid members (tens of thousands on or close to the minimum wage) unaddressed in 2022/23 and below inflation awards again in 2023/24.

In parallel to the consultation ballot, Group after Group (for example, DWP, HMRC, DfT, MoJ) have already rejected the 2023-24 pay settlements in their departments. So, we do not have to wait. We know what the 2023-24 pay round has brought us – falling living standards and the worse pay-rise in the public sector!

The Left Unity members, including Fran Heathcote, who sit on both the NEC and the DWP Group Executive Committee (GEC), and who have pushed the tosh that the Tories below inflation 2023/24 pay remit was a ‘significant concession’, voted to reject DWP management’s below inflation pay offer, an offer based on that same pay cutting Tory remit. But those same NEC/DWP GEC members are still pushing the line of “pausing the action” to see the results of the 2023-24 pay round! Farce upon farce.

Frankly, if the leadership of PCS really needs to see the detail of each civil service 2023/24 pay settlement before they realise that the outcomes will not be good for members, then they should not be leading PCS.

Do not mourn – Organise!

We see the current General and Assistant General Secretary elections as a continuance of the fight to defend and restore members living standards by another name.

If elected as GS and AGS respectively, Marion Lloyd and John Moloney will propose to the NEC that we start to re-mobilise members and activists over pay and we become strike ready as soon as possible, alongside a comprehensive joint programme for a fighting, democratic union.

By nominating Marion and John, and voting for them, you are ensuring that at least there is a possibility of a fight for better pay.

Please nominate Marion and John, not only on because of the damage the current leadership has done to our campaign and thereby to our pay, but also because members need a competent, professionally run, union.

We want a better union. One that works, is honest, gets things done, and wins things.

The PCS leadership has repeatedly argued, in support of their claim that a restricted, one off, non-pensionable, £1,500 pro rata payment and the worst consolidated remit in the public sector justifies abandoning our 2022-23 cost of living pay claim.

The Independent Left wants the union to win for members. One of the bed rocks for winning is a high level of engaged membership. Engagement went up wonderfully in many areas during balloting and on selective and national strike days, especially amongst young people, but nowhere near sufficiently after years of falling membership.

Despite the national union continually failing to understand our relative density in various employer groups, at the moment, PCS membership is below 50% in most areas and less than half of all civil servants at PCS grades are now in the union.

This is bad for members, bad for the people we need to inspire and recruit, and bad for the future of PCS. Low density (proportion of members as percentage of total workforce) was a problem representatives had to deal with when persuading people to vote and support strike action. Taking the unions membership figures against those employed in PCS grades, this is the dire state in some departments:

Ministry of Defence: 14%
Ministry of Justice: 25%
DWP: 49%
Home Office: 38%

Unfortunately, the Left Unity leadership, which has presided over this union-wide, record membership decline, lacks the drive and the plan to improve the situation. Indeed in their strong hold of the DWP, membership density seems to have gone down during the dispute.

Because of the dire state of organising in PCS, one of the planks in the platform agreed between Independent Left and the Board Left Network, on which Marion Lloyd (for General Secretary) and John Moloney (for Assistant General Secretary) are standing, is the Mass drive to recruit non-members: We need to have 80%+ membership. This can only be done with a radical overhaul of how we organise.

Just saying you want to do something does not mean it will get done. But without a declared destination you will have no direction of travel.

The current leadership, which includes the Left Unity’s candidates for GS and AGS, lack the same ambition and aim, which partly explains why they have presided over an ever poorer level of membership recruitment and retention.

If you believe PCS should be trying to recruit all staff into the union and should be aiming to become a super majority union, then nominate Marion and John.

The following joint programme for the future of the union was agreed by two groups of activists in the union, the Independent Left (IL) and the Broad Left Network (BLN), as a basis for the candidacies of Marion Lloyd and John Moloney for the General and Assistant General Secretary elections.

We urge support for these positions and therefore support for Marion and John in the upcoming election.

Continue the dispute: the government’s highly limited “package of measures” was not and is not conditional on PCS ending its industrial action and its dispute and does not come anywhere near settling PCS’ pay and job security demands. The 2023-24 pay remit will mean a further reduction in real pay and the £1,500 payment is a one-off non-pensionable payment, limited in coverage, subject to pro-rata payments for part time staff, and not even guaranteed to be paid in all “employer areas” We must fight on to win a fair deal on pay and employment protection, including permanently lifting staff off the minimum wage. If we don’t continue the fight this year, we will have to fight again in the future.

Escalate our campaign: we must adopt a rational and democratically agreed plan of national and selective strike action, and action short of strikes, to defeat the Tory cost of living squeeze and to defend our pensions and jobs. We must put in place a permanent arrangement for building the Fighting Fund. We must seek to co-ordinate our actions with other unions.

Begin a campaign to reverse the detrimental changes to our pensions: retirement age, including for state pension, should be 55. In the civil service, 68 is still too late, we pay too much and get too little, and privatised PCS members often have it even worse. We must fight back.

Devolved Government members: Members in the Scottish and Welsh Governments should determine the pace and form of their pay, Terms and conditions, fights.

Key issues: Build into our national campaigning the key issues facing members, including office closures, chronic under-staffing and the other myriad ways that austerity manifests for all PCS members, including for contracted-out, privatised members.

End multi-tier Terms & Conditions: Campaign to end the multi-tier work force, which sees younger staff on worse conditions than those with “legacy” terms.

Extend democracy in PCS: Full-Time Officers with bargaining responsibility for our members should be elected, and Full-Time Officer pay should be brought more in line with the wages of union members. More power and resources should be devolved to left behind areas such as the Met Police and the Culture Group. For real devolution of power to members in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. To reconnect with members and drive-up NEC and GEC election turnouts.

Mass drive to recruit non-members: We need to have 80%+ membership. This can only be done with a radical overhaul of how we organise.

Put equality genuinely at the heart of what PCS does: Insist on equality impact assessment of all employer proposals (leadership’s acceptance of pro rata payment of £1,500 to part time members without even asking for equality evidence and assessment is shameful). Oppose and campaign against detrimental centrally driven changes, give full support for reps to build anti-discrimination cases and campaigns from the ground up. Reaffirm our commitment to fighting for trans rights, and opposition to gender critical ideology

Reinvigorate PCS political campaigning: Fight for the repeal of anti-trade union laws; oppose all public sector cuts; for energy democracy and for a National Climate Service; for universal social security net run in the interest of staff and claimants;, attain Tax Justice in the UK; oppose racism and fascism.

Organise, resource, and support PCS members in private sector: Commit to a serious struggle to improve levels of unionisation and organisation in private, privatised, and outsourced companies and services; improve terms and conditions at work across all private sector members, particularly on pay, holidays, sick leave, sick pay, bullying and trade union recognition. End outsourcing and bring all staff back in-house.

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.