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.

No sooner had the NEC announced it was ending all national action to improve the 4.5% pay offer, the government announced it was accepting all recommendations from public sector pay review bodies, giving all other public sector workers a better pay rise.

Of particular note is that workers in sectors who haven’t given indications of giving up the fight – healthcare and education, are being given more pay.

Education workers, for example are to receive a 6.5% consolidated pay-rise, a settlement their leadership is putting to the membership – although not without considerable opposition from those members who believe they can fight and win more.

Closer to home, Senior Civil Servants are being given a 5.5% pay rise further increasing the pay differential between the junior and senior civil service and providing a proper kick in the teeth for the majority of civil servants who deliver on the ground.

If the concessions weren’t enough already (they weren’t) they certainly aren’t now.

From Militant Action to Humble Petition

Clearly caught off-guard, having previously lauded the 4.5% as ‘a considerable concession’, the union leadership was bounced into reacting to the new situation; that they were, for all intents and purposes, ending the national dispute having only secured the lowest pay settlement in the public sector.

The logical response would be to admit the decision to suspend our leverage by pausing re-ballots and industrial action on the basis of 4.5% was wrong, and commit to further action to achieve minimally the average 6.5% being offered to the rest of the public sector.

Instead, the union doubled down on its previous decision to suspend action, stating that it would ‘enter into negotiations with individual employers’ and ‘demand at least the same pay increases as other public sector workers’.

It doesn’t take a skilled negotiator to identify 2 outstanding problems with this strategy:

1. The remit from the cabinet office is 4.5% of the pay-bill. While employers can choose how to allocate that money among employees, 4.5% is still the totality of the pie they have to work with. Even with the additional 0.5% wriggle-room for the lower paid, they cannot provide a 6.5% increase for all workers even if they wanted to.
   
2. Regardless of 1, what leverage do negotiators have to achieve this? The employers are aware that the union has suspended all re-ballots and is allowing all current ballots to expire with no new action taking place.

We are aware that some on the NEC have claimed that negotiators, presumably by some act of alchemy, could achieve pay-rises above 4.5% for most members within the current remit.

While it’s possible in smaller, policy centred departments with fewer junior members of staff, to gear the money towards the lower paid, this cannot happen in in large operational departments.

In DWP or HMRC, where most of our members work and where more than half the collective 130k+ employees are AA-EO, it would be mathematically impossible to target a meaningful higher percentage of an already tiny pay-rise at the lowest paid.

The maximum increase to the pay-bill is still 4.5% and will be without further action. Unless of course the National Minimum Wage increases and departments are forced into increasing pay, not through union action, but through their legal obligation.

What next?

As long as the union is in a period of ‘pause’ while balloting on the NEC’s ‘strategy’, the longer we are inert and unable to exert any pressure on the government to improve the pay settlement. Contrary to the NEC’s position, we now have no leverage by which to secure the same pay-rises as the rest of the public sector.

We believe branches should continue to raise these issues with members and commit to campaign for a reject vote in the upcoming ballot.

Branches should follow the PCS Say No twitter account and discuss the statement on the PCSSayNo website, pass it and make use of the materials to agitate for a reject vote.

Slightly longer-term, members, reps and branches should consider whether they want to support candidates in the upcoming General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary election who support the current dire position or those who have consistently argued for a continuation and escalation of the dispute.

John Moloney, a supporter of the Independent Left is the incumbent Assistant General Secretary and is standing for re-election. John is the only Senior Full-time Officer of the union, indeed the only member of the National Disputes Committee, who has consistently argued for the continuation of the dispute and against settling on the current concessions. We urge support for his re-election.

Yesterday, the Mark Serwotka/Fran Heathcote/PCS Left Unity leadership voted to kill our campaign for a 2022/23 10% cost of living pay rise and a £15ph National Living Wage (NLW), having won the worst pay offer in the public sector.

In a nutshell, the NEC:

• Is misleading you over the membership feedback it has received.
• Is overstating the progress made against our claims.
• Has given up on the fight for the 2022/23 consolidated 10% cost of living pay demand.
• Has given up on the 2022/23 £15/hr minimum demand, to lift tens of thousands of members out of low pay.
• Has decided to accept that nearly all members will receive yet another below inflation pay award in 2023/24
• Will live with the fact that nearly all civil service employers will pay the one off, non-pensionable lump, sum of £1,500 on a pro-rata basis, not drawing one lesson from the failure of national negotiators to meet their elementary equality duties on behalf of our members.
• Will ask members working for employers that have refused to pay the lump sum to either accept their lot or fight on alone.
• Accepts that non of the payments are funded by new money, with money coming from frontline services and potential job losses and redundancies.
• Will enter talks on job security and pay coherence without any industrial pressure being applied to the Government.
• Is supposedly “pausing” (ending) our national campaign.

The rest of this article deals in detail with aspects of the NEC’s decisions and propaganda.

NEC’s consultation claims

The NEC states that it received over 160 responses from branches and based on that feedback agreed to run an online consultative ballot from 3 to 31 August.

Revealingly, the NEC made no attempt to break the consultation down for you. If that happened in a Government consultation exercise, the leadership would be rightfully angry.

We are angry. It is clear that most responses were critical of the government’s package of measures and many favoured renewing our strike action and campaign. Whatever one’s views, we are entitled to a transparent, full, and accurate report about the membership and branch feedback.

The NEC’s Orwellian claim of significant progress

The national union states in its 2 July message to members, “We have made significant progress” but adds, “Nevertheless we have clearly not won all of our demands.”

Yet, if we benchmark those claims against what we demanded and what we have received, it turns out that we have not won any of our demands.” Most importantly for most members, we have not won our demands for a 2022/23 cost of living increase and £15ph underpin for the lowest paid workers.

All we have been given is:

• A one-off payment (welcome though that concession is) which is not being paid in full to part time staff, which is highly restrictive in coverage, is not a substitute for a cost of living rise and will actually cause financial detriment to members claiming UC and child benefit.
• A promise of talks on job security and “pay coherence.”
• A ‘promise’ from the government not to make further detrimental changes to redundancy terms until after the next election.

See here for fuller scoresheet of our demands vs. the concessions

NEC kills the claim for a 10% pay rise in 2022

At its meeting of 12 July, the NEC did not explicitly vote to dump the claim for 10% cost of living pay rises , but in reality it has been dumped.

The NEC knows full well that management teams will not discuss our 2022/23 national cost of living claim in 2023/24 delegated pay talks. Yet the NEC has refused to submit to the Cabinet Office (CO) a national, inflation proof, cost of living claim for all employers for 2023/24.

If the NEC are not prepared to make a cost-of-living demand for 2023/24, we can take it for granted that the cost-of-living demand for 2022/23 is dead in their eyes.

NEC abandons the claim for a National Living Wage

Tens of thousands of PCS members – after 23 years of this union leadership – remain on or near the minimum wage. Our low paid members took a terrible hit in 2022. The little respite they subsequently obtained, by way of a further increase in salary, came, sadly and dreadfully, because of the Tories increasing the minimum wage in April this year and not as a result of industrial action.

In May Mark Serwotka stated, “In HMRC alone, almost one in three staff are now on national minimum wage. In DWP one in five staff are having to claim in-work benefits. These people…are suffering the consequence of year after consecutive year of meagre pay rises leaving tens of thousands of them in financial crisis.”

Those comments remain true. Yet the NEC is not fighting for the 2022 National Living Wage claim and it has refused to submit to the Cabinet Office a NLW claim for 2023/24.

NEC abandons 2022 national pay fight, preferring divide and rule 2023 delegated talks

Earlier this year, Mark Serwotka told the Cabinet Office Minister that an offer of talks about 2023/24 pay was not enough, “that the cost-of-living crisis faced by our members and the disgraceful levels of in-work poverty that they are suffering from must be immediately addressed”, and that “There will be no resolution to the current dispute without the issue of 2022/23’s pay being addressed.”

These issues have still not been addressed. Yet the 2022-23 national pay campaign has been “paused”, and we are being marched into 2023/24 delegated pay talks in well over 100 employers.

The Minister stood firm, the PCS leadership did not.

NEC salutes the 2023/24 pay remit it previously dismissed as ‘inflammatory’, ‘derisory’ and ‘insulting’

To bolster their exit strategy from the 2022/23 dispute, the NEC describes the Government’s below inflation 2023-24 civil service pay remit as a “significant concession.”  

But that is far from the line they took when Government published the remit in April:

• Mark Serwotka said the remit would pour fuel on the flames of resentment after more than a decade of pay freezes and sub-inflationary rises.
• In a video, he stated: “other workers have already rejected out of hand a payoff of four and a half to five percent for 2023. That is not enough, it’s half the rate of inflation and we need more.”
• PCS supported the Early Day Motion 1097, which described the 2023/24 pay remit as “derisory”, noted that it had been set below inflation at an average of 4.5 per cent, “following an insulting… award of two per cent for 2022 to 2023”, said it would do “nothing to tackle years of endemic low pay”, and called on the Government to offer a real-terms pay rise.

Now, after waking from the nightmare version of the 2023/24 pay remit and dozing off again to a gentler dream, the NEC has discovered that the “key point” is not that the remit is “derisory”. No, the “key point” now, is that 4.5% plus 0.5% “is more than double [the Government’s] originally intended figure of 2%”.

A truly outstanding Damascene turn which must raise the eyebrows of even the least cynical observer.

Of course, that original figure of 2% was mooted in November 2022 for all the public sector; was never formally put to PCS and reported to members as such; and shifted upwards across the public sector as the Government grappled with roaring inflation and a public sector pay crisis.

NEC privately accepts below inflation awards in 2023/24

The NEC’s report to members is startlingly silent as to the pay increase it is seeking for members in 2023/24.

One might wonder how a national union leadership, supposedly leading a fight to halt cuts to the value of members salaries and to end low pay, could be silent on the question: How much should we ask for?

The NEC is silent because it:

• Is intent on extracting the union from our current dispute with the Government.
• Refused to submit a claim to the Cabinet Office for the coming pay year, which would establish a benchmark against which members could measure the 2023-24 pay outcomes.
• Bundled us out of our 2022 national campaign and into the Tories’ divide and rule system of delegated bargaining, knowing that the Government’s “Civil Service Pay Remit Guidance, 2023 to 2024” only allows employers to make average pay awards up to 4.5%”, with flexibility for an additional 0.5% targeted at lower pay bands, at a time when CPI inflation stands at 8.7%, food and non-alcoholic drink inflation at 18.4%, and interest rates have soared.
• Knows that many of us are heading for another below inflation award, and it does not intend to resist.

The NEC has decided not to resist the pro-rata of the £1,500 payment for part-time staff

The NEC reports that it will “continue to campaign” over the “strictures” on the £1500, including pro rating. This is disingenuous.

The leadership:

• Accepted, certainly did not challenge, pro-rata payment on learning of its likelihood on the 2 June.
• Welcomed the Government’s measures, including pro rata payment, as the Government hearing membership concerns on the 2 June.
• Did not express concern about pro-rata payments in membership videos, email briefings, and website reports.
• Told delegated pay negotiators in guidance to “seek a clear, up-front commitment to the payment of the £1,500 lump sum for all staff (pro rata where applicable)”, although it conveniently omitted to say when it would not be applicable in a bulletin to bargainers onthe 6th of June.
• Has not campaigned on pro-rata payment and other strictures on payment.
• Following pressure from members, Mark Serwotka did send a face-saving letter to the Minister objecting to pro-rata payment, but 28 days after the minister first told the leadership about the instruction or discretion give to employers to pay on that basis, and only following considerable membership anger. That is not “campaigning,” it is evidence of fundamental failure in the leadership’s exercise of its elementary equality duties as negotiators.
• Complained, in the same letter, of other “strictures” on payment that were clearly set out in the government Addendum 28 days earlier.
• Has not set out what campaigning actions it will now take to rectify the situation.
• Has not threatened industrial action.
• Has not announced any legal action.
• Knows that the Government knows it is only “speaking up” now to save face in the wake of membership anger. The Government has refused to budge on these issues.

See here for fuller details regarding failure of equality duty.

Abandonment (“pause”) of strike action

The Government knows that the leadership wants out of the dispute, is busy selling to members the meagre Government package of measures announced on 2 June, and has called off action, ostensibly for months but, in all likelihood, permanently.

There is therefore no pressure on the Government to pay the lump sum in full to part time members; to immediately press outlier employers to pay the lump sum; to deliver in a comprehensive and meaningful way in talks on job security and pay coherence; to improve the 2023-24 remit; and to do anything about the 2022/23 imposed ‘awards’.

The leadership has disarmed us, and the Government is delighted.

Employer areas which are not paying the £1,500 or which are paying pro rata

The Union leadership has failed in significant ways in this regard:

• The Government made it clear that all it was doing was giving employer groups the discretion on whether to pay a lump sum, to pay up to £1,500, and whether to pro-rata payment. Yet, on this basis the national leadership quickly began running down our dispute, easing the pressure on the government, failing to insist on a national decision on the three areas of discretion, and then came a predictable cropper when most employers paid pro-rata or even refused to pay.
• It did not, as other public sector trade unions have done, insist on the Government funding the lump sum payment with new money. The lack of funding was an obvious incentive to resource starved employers to refuse to pay or to pay on a pro-rata basis.
• It continues to fail to demand funding, with implications for job loss and service reduction.
• They have left members in the outlier employers to fight alone, making a mockery of the principle of an injury to one is an injury to all. They have not made clear whether the fight for payment is also a fight for full payment to all staff in the relevant areas, not for pro payment.

August ballot

The ballot will not ask the straightforward question of whether PCS should terminate its job protection and pay campaign. Even though the NEC is slowly killing the campaign by inertia and will take the rest of July, all of August, and however long it takes to complete the 2023/24 pay negotiations, to continue its tactic of inertia, hoping members simply tire of or forget about the campaign. Instead, it will ask you to endorse its “strategy.”  

We advise you not to endorse the NEC’s “strategy” if you are one of the members who:

• Works part time and for whom the leadership failed to insist, for a decisive month, on full payment of the lump sum.
• Is on Universal Credit, and whose situation was not considered by the leadership in good time.
• Is on or close to the minimum wage under this union leadership.
• Is sick and tired of frozen pay or pay awards below the rate of inflation under this union leadership.
• Is facing office closure and/or job loss.
• Wants better pay.
• Wants a leadership that is competent, and especially competent regarding equality.

Drowning your sorrows

If you want to drown your sorrows (we do not!), and you scrape together the money to do so out of your meagre salary, we advise you to drink responsibly. But we must point out to you that brewers have been weakening the alcoholic content of beer while increasing prices.

Hold the leadership to account

Rather than be sorrowful, we urge you to feel positive.

Remember those great ballot turnouts, those thumping majority YES votes, the record numbers of people – especially newly energised young members – on picket lines and the shift – small but a shift nonetheless – that we forced out of the Government. Better than feeling sad, feel positive, by insisting on accountability within PCS.

In doing so we urge 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.