In the run-up to to the union’s all-members Facebook Live session on the national dispute, we’d like to give members some food for thought whilst tuned in.

PCS General Secretary, Mark Serwotka, recently stated, “as a consequence of a historic amount of industrial action, for the first time in our Union’s history we have forced the government to make major concessions on the question of pay.” But the truth is that the Government has only made minor pay concessions.

At the heart of PCS’ pay dispute for 2022 is the demand for a 10% cost of living increase in salaries and for a national living wage of £15.00 per hour. All that the Tories have done, by way of additional money, is to allow management teams in the civil service delegated pay areas discretion to pay an unconsolidated £1,500 per full time employee in 2023. This does not come anywhere near to meeting our 2022 pay claim.

Ironically, however, the General Secretary revealed one truth about his and Left Unity’s more than twenty years of dominance of PCS: they have delivered precious little to members by way of increased pay.

Seizing on the £1,500 as a way out of the pay dispute, the leadership:

• Failed to realise that the Government would claw back a chunk of the payment by reducing the benefit paid to members in receipt of Universal Credit.
• Failed to explore how such detrimental consequences could be minimised. (While any increase in income might be deducted from members receiving UC there is a significant difference between losing benefit for a one-off payment and losing benefit for a permanent rise in salary).
• Failed to insist that, the overwhelmingly female, civil servants who work part time should receive the full £1,500, instead of it being reduced pro rata, in recognition of the fact that inflation has hit them just hard as anybody.
• Failed to challenge the restriction of the lump sum to those in civil service employment on 31 March 2023 and at the time of payment, which will exclude those members who suffered detriment in 2022 but have since left the civil service, possibly after striking, and those members who joined after 31 March 2023 and may also have taken strike action.

These failings are the product of a leadership over eager to get out of the dispute and uninterested in the views and expertise of members. The leadership want the dispute over so that they can concentrate on the truly important thing which is the GS and AGS elections later this year. We can throw a spanner in their works by working for a vote to continue the dispute in the members’ ballot, that is sure to come soon. So, IL welcomes the news that some branches are grouping together to run such a campaign. Members need more money, so let’s continue the dispute. If you agree, why not to join the Independent Left by clicking here.

John Moloney, the unions Assistant General Secretary and supporter of PCS Independent Left has released a video on his re-election website clearly asserting his view that the dispute must continue.

Please visit his site to watch the video, read his platform for re-election and sign-up to support his campaign.

John 4 AGS.

This is how we see it; the NEC will meet later this month and a majority, though possibly not as great as the Left Unity leadership hopes, will vote to hold a ballot of members in the UK Civil Service to end the dispute. Given that the union’s web story has been entitled ‘proposal’ and that the advert for the webinar on Monday, 12th of June talks of ‘explaining the pay offer’, we believe the union will imply that the ballot is about deciding whether or not to accept the 4.5% plus the £1500. Although this will be completely dishonest, as the government is paying the £1500 regardless of whether the dispute is settled or not, it’s clear that is the current direction of travel of the leadership.

Further the ballot will be a snap one and will start a few days after the NEC meeting. Indeed, we would not be surprised to learn that the ballot is being prepared now.

The ballot will be an electronic one in order to increase turnover, but more importantly for the leadership to reduce the ballot period to three weeks or so. They want a shortened ballot so as to deny time to increasing opposition that is building against a cessation of the industrial dispute.

Importantly a number of branches have come out in favour of continuing the dispute and it looks like, certainly we hope, a branch-based campaign will be established soon to act as a counter weigh to the Left Unity leadership’s attempt to end the dispute. When we get details of that branch-based campaign we will publicise them, but in the here and now, we would urge you to put the below motion to your BEC and/or members meeting and tell us when you have.

 This BEC/Members meeting agrees to:

1. Oppose any decision to:
   a) Refrain from obtaining or renewing legal mandates for strike action.
   b) Depict the 2023-24 remit guidance plus an unconsolidated £1,500 payment as sufficiently meeting the aims of our dispute over the 2022 imposed pay settlements.
2. Positively campaign for the lifting of civil servants above the national minimum wage and at least to an underpin of £15 per hour.

Yesterday, 5^th June, the unions National Executive Committee (NEC) met to discuss the Government’s package of measures that it had outlined to the PCS General Secretary, Mark Serwotka, on the previous Friday, 2^nd June.

The PCS leadership has issued an extremely partial, favourable, misleading, account of the Government’s package on the PCS website. It states,

“…the Minister confirmed that the government will make significant concessions relating to pay, redundancy terms and job security.”

Ministers will claim anything to encourage unions to scale down and end a dispute, especially when they realise that trade union leaders are anxious to settle, as the PCS leadership and other civil service unions are.

But, truth be told, the one thing the Government is not doing is making significant concessions to PCS, and certainly not on pay.   

PCS leadership omit to mention what members are fighting for

Astonishingly, in its website briefing, the PCS leadership omits to mention what we have been fighting for, particularly 10% on pay with an underpin for the worst-paid and does not compare those objectives to the measures in the government package. If it had done so, the minor nature of the package outlined to Mark Serwotka would have been obvious.

The spinning if this news to members is clear, the statement refers to “significant concessions” but pointedly does not identify what the Government has refused to concede.

Pay: What we have been fighting for and what has been conceded

Our claim was for a 10% consolidated cost of living increase for 2022/23, underpinned by a consolidated national living wage of £15 per hour.

The immediate backdrop to our claim was, of course, the Government’s slashing of the real value of our real pay in 2022/23 (following a pay freeze in 2021 and the relentless squeezing of our pay since 2010).

The Government has not offered us one penny by way of a consolidated backdated pay rise for 2022/23.

Instead, it has given departments “discretion”, but not additional funding, to make a non-consolidated lump sum payment to staff of £1500 “in recognition of cost-of-living pressures in 2022/23”.

It is not an offer to PCS, it is a decision that Departments have already stated they will implement. This is a concession, it has been won by membership action, and we should tell non-members that and seek to recruit them. Nevertheless, the leadership is under a duty to be candid with members about the limitations of this measure:

1. The £1,500 unconsolidated one-off payment concession comes nowhere near our claim of 10% consolidated underpinned under-pinned by £15/h for 2022/23.
2. Cabinet Office advice issued over the weekend suggests that the payment will come out of current departmental and executive agency budgets – the Treasury will not provide additional to fund this unconsolidated payment, in contrast to Education and Healthcare where unions’ demands for new money to cover pay costs in order not to further slash public services was won.
3. It is likely that staffing levels will be reduced to fund the payment, forcing us all to work harder and under more pressure to cover the staffing gaps, worsening public services, all to fund our own ‘bonus’. It is astonishing but revealing that the leadership did not insist, unlike the teaching and healthcare unions, that Treasury release additional money to fund the payment. It is possible that departments and Executive Agencies will cover some of the payment out existing bonus schemes.
4. Because the payment will be unconsolidated:
   • Any increase in 2023/24 pay will be calculated based on the salary levels established in the pay slashing year of 2022/23. Our actual consolidated salaries will not recover even a fraction from the collapse in real value in 2022, or the pay freeze in 2021, or the year-on-year reductions in purchasing power since 2010. All suffered on the watch of the same union leadership now spinning the government package.
   • It will not count for overtime pay, redundancy and pension calculations.
   • It leaves our low paid members, and the low paid non-members PCS needs to recruit, still on desperately low pay.
   • For the thousands of members claiming Universal Credit, it will negatively impact their payments.

Lower-paid members

In May Mark Serwotka rightfully pointed out,

“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 the government’s own workforce, who are suffering the consequence of year after consecutive year of meagre pay rises leaving tens of thousands of them in financial crisis.”

But the package of measures the PCS leadership is stating as “significant concessions” will leave all such colleagues in the same situation, but the leadership choose not to mention this fact. But they do find the space and the courage to identify as a “key element” of the government package, “A commitment to further talks on low pay…”. Talks which have concluded each of the last 13 years with a real-terms pay-cut. That should pay the rent and feed the kids.

It is a damning fact that twenty years or more of the current Left Unity leadership of PCS has seen tens of thousands of PCS members on or close to the minimum wage and reliant upon increases to that legal minimum.

In DWP, the situation is worse still. In 2016, the leadership sold members the Employee Deal, where members were asked to sell their weekends and earlier and later in the day to the employer for crumbs in pay. Now many AA’s/AO’s are on the same pay – the National minimum wage – and still have to work Saturdays and earlier and later in the day. The PCS Independent Left opposed and campaigned against the Employee Deal, and one of the bases was that it did not protect pay in he long-term.

The 2023 pay remit – another real-term cut to salaries looming

The PCS leadership want to accept the 2023-24 remit plus the £1,500 unconsolidated one of payment as both settling the 2022 pay dispute and liveable with in 2023. Hence it identifies, as another “key element” in the government package, 

“An increase in the headline pay remit figure from 2% to 4.5%, with an extra 0.5% for the lowest paid, for 2023/24.”

An offer which was widely and right-fully claimed as ‘derisory’ and ‘insulting’ by many leadership speakers at this years Annual Delegate Conference.

It is obvious that the PCS leadership want to accept the remit plus the £1,500 unconsolidated one of payment as both settling the 2022 pay dispute and liveable with in 2023.

Oddly, the leadership has never revealed to members any paperwork which showed that the Government was committed to a 2% pay remit for 2023/24 in the current political climate. But, more pertinently:

1. Our dispute, the legal strike mandate, is focussed on rectifying the brutal real terms pay cuts imposed on our base salaries in 2022/23 and the 2023/24 remit does not address that.
2. The leadership fails to put the 2023/24 remit guidance in the context of ongoing inflation and the continued decline of our real pay. The annual CPI rate of inflation in the 12 months to stands at 8.7% (19.1% for food and non-alcoholic beverages) and the Bank of England believes that inflation at the end of the year will still be above 5%. 
3. At present members are on course for another real terms cut to their salaries in 2023/24.
4. When the 2023/24 remit guidance was published the PCS leadership were appalled by it because it was below inflation:
   1. On 16 April Mr Serwotka said the pay-remit guidance proposals would pour fuel on the flames of resentment among officials after more than a decade of pay freezes and sub-inflationary rises.  
   1. On 26 April PCS supported Early Day Motion 1097 which condemned the 2023/24 pay remit guidance: “…this House notes the recently published pay remit guidance for the civil service for 2023 to 2024 which has been set at a average of 4.5 per cent…following an insulting imposed pay award of two per cent for 2022 to 2023…; is alarmed that this derisory pay offer does nothing to tackle years of endemic low pay across the civil service…is aware that food inflation…in the 12 months to March [reached] 19.2 per cent with the inflation rate still above 10 per cent; is concerned that any pay award below the current rate of inflation is a pay cut…calls on the Government to get back round the negotiating table and show respect to their workforce by offering them a real terms pay rise…” (emphasis added).

Other concessions?

The website briefing claims,

“…the Minister confirmed that the government will make significant concessions relating to pay, redundancy terms and job security”.

With regard to job security this is not true. The Government has said that it “remains wholly committed to supporting Civil Service employers in avoiding the need for compulsory redundancies wherever possible.” A meaningless statement as it’s Conservative ministers and not us who will decide what is possible.

The Government has undertaken not to worsen severance terms before 2025 and that is to be welcomed, but ministers had already deprioritised this attack and agreeing not to worsen our severance terms is hardly compensation for our collapsing real pay.

The Government has refused to budge on repayment for the overcharging of civil servants’ pension contributions and that will be fought out in the courts.

Maintain the fight for our living standards

At present it seems likely that the NEC meeting at the end of June will decide to ballot members with a recommendation that the 2022 dispute be called off (and that will also mean no fight over 2023 pay). There is currently no basis for doing so.

What the government has announced is not enough. It represents a swingeing and permanent cut in our living standards. The union’s leadership should be leading the fightback rather than preparing the ground to get members settle for the Tory package.

What next?

We believe branches should organise executive and members meeting as soon as possible with a view to establishing a cross branch-based campaign against the current ‘offer’.

PCS Independent Left encourages branches to propose the following motion and contact us when passed to unite the maximum amount of opposition to any attempt to shut-down the dispute:

This BEC/Members meeting agrees to:

1. Oppose any decision to:
   a) Refrain from obtaining or renewing legal mandates for strike action.
   b) Depict the 2023-24 remit guidance plus an unconsolidated £1,500 payment as sufficiently meeting the aims of our dispute over the 2022 imposed pay settlements.
2. Positively campaign for the lifting of civil servants above the national minimum wage and at least to an underpin of £15 per hour.

This BEC/Members meeting agrees to liaise urgently with representatives in other branches with a view to establishing a cross branch-based campaign on the above.