Tag Archives: PCS

The Budget and the DWP Employee Deal: Why it still matters and why members should vote ‘Yes’ to action in January!

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The chancellor has announced a rise in the statutory Living (minimum) wage for workers over 21 years old of 4.1%, to £12.77 an hour. For Civil Servants in the DWP who are contracted for 42 hours a week, this translates into an annual salary of £27890

This rise will take place in April.

Below is this year’s pay settlement for the 3 most junior grades in DWP. We have included the number of staff in each grade from the Government’s published figures.

Note that the London Living Wage as calculated by the Mayor of London stands at £14.80. This would translate into an annual salary of £31,168 for DWP staff contracted for 40.5 hours in London.

The figures include those who opted out of the Employee Deal, some of whose salaries are even less.

AAOpt-outSpot RateStaff in Post
National£27,774£27,774140
SLPZ£27,774£27,774
Outer London£27,774£27,77410
Inner London£27,774£27,774
AOOpt-outSpot RateStaff in Post
National£27,799£27,84419515
SLPZ£27,799£27,844
Outer London£27,799£29,722955
Inner London£27,799£29,722
EOOpt-outMinMaxStaff in Post
National£27,849£32,137£32,13739825
SLPZ£27,891£32,137£34,429
Outer London£27,992£35,615£37,0165290
Inner London£29,688£37,016£37,016

Our members know what this disgraceful situation means for them. But here are the headline figures:

  • 19,655 DWP staff (or around 22% of the workforce) are currently paid below the announced minimum wage.
  • All London based AA’s and AO’s are paid between £1,446 and £3,394 less a year than the London Living Wage.
  • All London based staff in all 3 grades who opted out of the Employee Deal are paid less than the London Living Wage.
  • Nationally employed AO’s who have to work weekends and earlier and later in the day as part of the Employee Deal, are only paid £45 more a year for the privilege.
  • The employer will be forced to increase the pay of 22% of it’s workforce in April because it won’t be paying them the statutory minimum.

The woeful spectacle of the largest government department being a poverty pay employer lies at the feat of the DWP management team and the Permanent Secretary. Who continually refuses to put a business case to the Cabinet Office to address structural low pay.

It’s nothing short of a scandal that the workers on the ground delivering social security aren’t even paid the minimum the government themselves believes is enough to live on! That the management of the department continue to refuse to address it is beyond contempt.

But PCS and specifically the leadership of the DWP Group have questions to answer here too.

In 2016, the current leadership negotiated and cheer-led for the DWP employee deal. They claimed that 4 years of above inflation pay rises for those who agreed to sell their weekends and evenings to the employer would address low pay in the department for the most junior grades.

PCS independent Left were the only group in the union that opposed the deal at the time. Among other criticisms, we made the point that the pay settlement was not future-proof and being handed over for the high-price of *permanently* selling off weekends to the employer wasn’t even ‘jam today’. The danger was that pay deals beyond the 4 years were not inflation proof, and the employer would return to bargain basement offers without a fight.

The Employee Deal was agreed (narrowly) and there has been no meaningful fight.

We have been criticised for bringing this up again, but it’s important in understanding the current situation.

Members will rightfully ask, why a unionised workforce, which are told repeatedly that PCS is a fighting union, are paid below the minimum wage and why we have negotiated and supported deals in the past that have ultimately resulted in this situation?

Why aren’t members who wish to take action over hybrid working and staffing, been armed with the opportunity by their leadership?

Unfortunately, union density in the DWP is waning as members answer these questions themselves.

We don’t think leaving is the right thing to do, in fact the only way to turn the tide on defending and extending our conditions and pay is having as many members in the union as possible.

We have the opportunity in the upcoming statutory ballot to demonstrate the strength of feeling of the rank-and-file on pay.

Members should vote in the ballot, encourage their colleagues to join and get involved in turning out members.

Branches should continue to agitate and organise members on the basis of their concerns, be it pay, hybrid working or jobs and staffing. And use that mobilisation to put pressure on the Group leadership to act.

And ultimately, when it comes to next years Group elections, branches and members should consider the long-term record of those in charge an whether the strategy has worked.

PCS’ Social Media and Persona Non Grata

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Those with a keen eye will have noticed a conspicuous absence in PCS’ recent social media postings during the recent TUC Congress that expose an unacceptable and ongoing abuse of the union’s media channels. Whilst PCS officials found time during conference to interview a former Deputy President of PCS, long gone from the civil service, seeking his views on the Employment Rights Bill, the actual Deputy President, Bev Laidlaw, who was also in attendance, was not featured in a single post during conference. The reason for this is not hard to identify; Bev is Independent Left, not Left Unity. This fact alone seems to make her persona non grata in the eyes of those who control PCS’ publicity and media platforms.

This is not just an oversight. It is a repeated, calculated practice. To date, Bev has never once been interviewed or even properly acknowledged on union social media in her role as Deputy President. At the same time, LU-aligned officers and NEC members feature regularly, boosting their profile and boasting of their activities within the union. This amounts to nothing less than factional censorship, using the union’s own media resources to build up one group while erasing the existence of others.

Such behaviour is a betrayal of the membership. Every PCS member pays their subs; every elected officer is chosen by a democratic vote. PCS media is not the private property of one political grouping. It belongs to the whole union. Yet by manipulating coverage LU is treating official channels as a propaganda arm for their slate. This grossly undermines the principles of democracy and transparency on which trade unionism depends.

The consequences of LU’s actions are not minor. When members can see plainly that communications are skewed, trust in PCS leadership is eroded. When the second most senior elected lay officer in the union is deliberately excluded because of her affiliation, it sends a signal: your vote only counts if you support the ruling faction. This is not representation; it is control by omission.

As Orwell warned in 1984, the tactic of making opponents into “unpersons” is a tool of authoritarianism. For PCS to engage in such behaviour is shameful. Our union should be leading by example, modelling fairness, inclusivity, and respect for democracy. Instead, it mirrors the very injustices we are supposed to oppose in the workplace.

This practice must end immediately. PCS communications should serve the whole membership, not the narrow factional interests of those who presently dominate the NEC. To continue down this path is to hollow out democracy itself.

For active, not passive pay meetings

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Pay meetings are a powerful opportunity for PCS branches to put union democracy and organising into practice. These sessions should be more than an exercise in top-down, passive reporting—they are a space for real dialogue, decision-making, and mobilisation for winning a fair deal for our members.

Branches do best starting by distributing background information and campaign materials in advance, so the meeting time is focused on open discussion and action. For the best results, avoid spending too long recounting what’s already happened or why the meeting is being held; let members bring their own ideas and priorities to the table.

Meetings work best when everyone feels able to contribute. Borrowing from American union best practice, adopt the norm: “Challenge ideas, not people.” PCS, rightly, is asking branches to invite non-members to the meetings. So encourage not only PCS members, but also non-members and new joiners to speak—this helps ensure meetings are welcoming, and aids recruitment. Certainly at the meeting, any non-members should be asked to join.

Critically, meetings must address the fundamentals: the need for a ballot, readiness for strike action, and transparent planning for collective campaigns. Even if PCS’ leadership is reluctant to discuss these topics, members should insist they are aired; otherwise what’s the point of hold the meeting?

Finally, end every meeting with clear, agreed next steps: forming ballot committees, planning leafleting, organizing solidarity actions, or even practice picketing. Keeping meetings member-driven and outcome-focused is how PCS branches can build the strength needed to secure decent pay for all.

Whether it’s pay, hybrid working or wider political issues, PCS and other unions usually default to a passive top-down mechanism for engaging with members. This isn’t the way things need to happen and it doesn’t reap the best results. We know many branches are already taking the steps laid out in this article, but we hope more will do so. It’s imperative we change our organising mindset if we are going to win as a union.

If you agree, please consider joining the PCS Independent Left.

Where is the National Campaign?

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PCS is at a cross roads. For months, Left Unity (LU) has done nothing to build amongst members for action on pay, jobs and working flexibility, and have only yesterday, belatedly, announced an activists forum (August 19th) to discuss the issue with members.

Motions carried at conference called for a ballot to be held by mid-September, why have they silent on the campaign since conference? There is a real risk we won’t hold a ballot at all, sending all the wrong signals to the Labour government, and to our own members about the strength and seriousness of PCS. 

LU’s message of weakness is not simply about 2025/26. PCS has to have a meaningful bargaining agenda for longer term pay reform, addressing all the structural problems in civil service pay: wild variations in pay between the same grades in different departments and agencies; lack of progression pay arrangements; members trapped on the minimum wage; different grades of members being paid at the same rate of pay because they are all on the minimum wage; a lack of meaningful national negotiations over specialist members who are treated as a singleton specialism but within the delegated bargaining structure that breaks the civil service up in to a huge number of different pay systems.

Time for a serious plan

So, despite the LU leadership, what would “getting serious” actually look like?

First, it’s time for an all-hands-on-deck approach. Every full-time organiser and full time official needs to make the ballot their priority, putting aside non-essential work for now. At branch, town, and regional committee level, we should be calling urgent meetings and launching member discussions about the ballot. This can’t be business as usual anymore—everyone in the union needs to shift gears so we’re focused and ready to win.

But mobilisation isn’t just about what happens at the top. Communications need to be powered by activists and rooted in real-life experiences. HQ can’t reach everyone, and—let’s face it—mass emails from the centre are no substitute for a message from someone you actually know and trust. That’s why activists should be encouraged not only to draft their own messages, but to send them out, speaking in the language and style that members respond to. Local voices must take the lead. That’s how we build momentum and trust.

Of course, even the best-organised ballot is hampered by our low union density. We can’t shy away from recruitment—we have to bring more people into the union, quickly. That means inviting all staff—not just existing members—to meetings. Our message, our campaign, and our events should speak to everyone, showing them why joining PCS strengthens all of us. To build the power we need, every new recruit counts.

It’s also time to be honest about our demands. The current set simply isn’t connecting with enough members. We’re hearing that what really matters along with pay is meaningful progression, equal pay, the right to flexible and hybrid working, and a four-day week – let’s not forget: LU originally opposed the four-day week – now it’s clear we need demands that actually resonate with people’s real, everyday concerns. Consulting activists and using relatable, straightforward language will help us build a platform everyone can rally behind.

Above all, the strength of our union comes from the bottom up. Regional and town committees—along with branches—should be taking the reins on local ballot work, empowered with real resource and decision-making capacity. National leadership must support that by channelling power down, not hoarding it. Campaigns fuelled by members and activists at every level are the ones that win.

Yes, the hill we’re climbing is steeper because of past delays, but that doesn’t mean we can’t reach the top. If we keep our focus clear, act collectively, and trust in the power of our activists and members, we can still build a campaign that makes PCS a union everyone wants to join—and a force the government can’t ignore.

Let’s shift gears together and launch the campaign our members need and deserve.

Trans exclusion: A stain on PCS

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With PCS’s annual delegate conference concluding on Thursday, we wanted to share a report of the main issue of the conference.

As we have reported on earlier: The General Secretary, President and the National Standing Orders Committee made a number of decisions and statements in the run-up to and during this week’s conference which attacked the rights of trans delegates and blocked the discussion of motions of trans solidarity in the wake of the Supreme Court Judgement on the Equality Act.

The primary issues were:

  1. The President and General Secretary, without NEC consultation, releasing a public statement in advance of conference which stated that the union was intent on enforcing their own interpretation of the Supreme Court Ruling, advising trans delegates not to use the toilet of their gender. In doing so enforcing segregation and causing harm and harassment to our trans delegates and placing PCS to the right of the rest of the trade union movement, the Brighton Conference Centre and Civil Service Employers.
  1. The Standing Orders Committee sending all motions from branches which mentioned ‘the trans issue’ in bulk to the unions lawyers, asking for legal advice ‘in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling’. And subsequently ruling that not only would none of the motions be put to conference, but that none of them would be printed and that this decision could not be challenged. This included a motion from MHCLG HQ Branch which was unceremoniously thrown into the ‘bulk submission’, but to which the legal advice didn’t relate.
  1. The Standing Orders Committee, on the eve of conference, ruling that motion A57 on trans rights which had already been printed and circulated as part of the original motions booklet, would also be ruled out of order. The legal advice for this wasn’t forthcoming and had to be fought for on conference floor by the majority of delegates continuously refusing to adopt standing orders. 

When the advice was provided, it did not relate to this year’s Supreme Court ruling at all, rather it stated that calling on the union to ‘oppose exclusionary ideologies that reduce human experience to the biological characteristics of sex alone’ was likely to infringe the rights of those who hold such ideologies as a protected characteristic under the equality act. Leaving us to ask whether existing PCS policy confirming that trans women and women and trans men are men still stands or is itself ‘illegal’.

Who controls conference?

As a result of the above, conference, taking the lead from trans delegates and allies, refused to endorse standing orders, with passionate speeches and heckles from the floor demanding that minimally motion A57 was reinstated onto the agenda. 

Regardless of the SOC legal advice, the President could have accepted A57 as it had already been printed, and the supposed legal jeopardy already breached, by simply calling for a vote on a previous Standing Order Report which included it, but he did not.

In a twist of bitter irony, conference was told repeatedly from the Chair, that it was the sovereign body of the union, despite repeatedly refusing to allow votes to overturn the Standing Orders ruling out of all the trans solidarity motions, on the basis that the Chair of Standing Orders had the constitutional authority to simply refuse for them to be heard. 

To imbue one individual, regardless of political stripe, with the authority to rule-out any motion on the grounds of legal jeopardy and the legal responsibility to do so, is not a tenable or democratic situation and completely undermines the idea that PCS is a member led union. 

PCS Independent Left will be proposing rule changes for next year’s conference to ensure that minimally, it’s conference who endorses any such ruling after being furnished with the legal advice, and that the union indemnifies any individual against legal challenges arising from it, as it does already with the NEC.

We also welcome the election of members of the Coalition for Change to the Standing Orders Committee to challenge such behaviour next year.

Annual Conference should be the sovereign body of the union. Not the Standing Orders Committee and certainly not the lawyers.

When the law is wrong, we fight the law 

There is broad consensus that the Supreme Court ruling is detrimental to trans rights. We consider the ruling and the subsequent interim EHRC guidance as part of a cultural and legislative trajectory of erasure of trans people from society.

When unions in the deep south were faced with legally enforced racial segregation through Jim Crow, did they simply accept the law or did they break it in order to organise black and white workers against it? Did unions simply accept the poll-tax when it became law, or did they support the mass campaign of non-payment to oppose and ultimately defeat it? 

Did our own union simply accept the law had changed disallowing union membership at GCHQ, or did they oppose it and support each and every rep who was sacked as a consequence?

There are, of course, many other examples of unions refusing to accept the law when it challenges the rights, or in this case, the existence of their members.

PCS activists and members need to ask themselves and their leadership – why is it different this time?

The President, General Secretary and the Standing Orders Committee chose to seek legal advice on this question. It is beyond comprehension that they did not know what the response would have been.

But even if they hadn’t, there are other motions on the order paper which could have been challenged legally on a similar basis to the trans solidarity motions. Unison, for example, regularly rules out motions on industrial action on the same basis, using legal advice from the same lawyers as PCS. Why weren’t these motions sent to the lawyers?

At best it’s cowardly and conservative. At worse, underhanded, exclusionary and undemocratic.

It is also important to note that some Group conferences taken this week, did allow similar motions to be debated and voted on, which almost entirely debases the rationale behind excluding them from national conference.

An existential fight

This is not an issue like the debate on the national campaign, or our strategy on hybrid working. This is an existential fight for the trans community. This is why there was rightfully a majority to refuse accepting standing orders on two successive votes.

We sincerely hope that delegates who were frustrated about the delayed start to conference recognise this and direct their frustration to those who prevented the interests of our trans members being debated by conference.

In behaving as they have, PCS Left Unity have not only thrown our trans members under the bus, but have – potentially unwittingly – signalled to transphobes in the wider trade union movement how to ensure similar situations are played out in other unions. 

We want to be very clear to every rep and member, that is the consequence of their behaviour this week.

If there was one incident which demonstrates this the most, it was the emboldening of transphobes to an extent that for the first time at PCS conference, they felt it acceptable to boast from the podium of misgendering and presuming the gender of delegates and harassing them in the toilets. Later providing the same perspectives freely to the Daily Mail.

The power of self-organisation

We want to pay a huge tribute to the self-organisation of trans delegates who led allies in refusing to back down, despite the force of the leadership, lawyers, the standing orders committee and full-timers acting against them.

We also don’t want activists to be disheartened. The power shown on the conference floor during the debate on standing orders and during the Equalities section and the continuous stream of delegates throughout the conference highlighting support for trans siblings should be heartening. There is an organisation here which isn’t going away.

PCS Independent Left will continue to back our trans members and the wider trans community. 

Solidarity means listening to the voices of oppressed people, not silencing them. It means amplifying their demands, not refusing to print them. It means backing them, regardless of the law.

Rally for trans rights outside conference on Wedensday morning

Why PCS should refuse to abandon our commitment to Ukrainian brothers and sisters

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In February, PCS sent a delegation to Kyiv as part of the unions continued commitment to solidarity with Ukraine and Ukrainian workers. A position that PCS Independent Left were central in ensuring was taken-up in the wake of the Russian invasion.

On the second evening, Kyiv came under ballistic attack from Russian missiles – now a weekly if not daily occurrence for the citizens of Ukraine.

2 ballistic missiles got through the Ukrainian air defences, causing the destruction of infrastructure and several fatalities and more casualties. Chris Marks, NEC member and delegation participant made this video the morning after.

On this evening, these 2 missiles were part of a wider attack of 8 – Ukrainian Air Defence was able to knock out the other 6.

It was only able to do so due to the weapons provided to Ukraine by other nations, including the UK. Weapons which have consistently been called for by all Ukrainian workers unions, including PCS’s sister unions since the beginning of Russia’s imperialist invasion in 2022.

Just like the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, the Ukrainian people have the right to ask for arms to defend themselves from tyranny wherever they can get them, as the Ukrainian unions do.

Not because they have any trust in the governments they come from, but because they are in a life and death fight against a much stronger imperialist power which has the self-stated desire to conquer and oppress them and destroy their democratic rights.

It is therefore wholly regrettable that the National Executive Committee decided by a slim majority to endorse motion A30, being debated at Annual Conference, which draws the same false moral equivalence between the Russian imperialists and the Ukrainian defenders that has been made by Donald Trump recently and forces the union to campaign to ‘end arms to Ukraine’.

The union hasn’t taken an explicit position on ‘arms to Ukraine’ until now. Some of us would argue that it should have done, but not doing so also allows the union not to conflict with the calls of our Ukrainian counterparts.

It is such a truism, it shouldn’t even need stating: If arms to Ukraine were successfully stopped, Ukraine would loose and the Russian imperialist venture will be victorious.

If PCS passes this motion, it will send a very dangerous message to our members, give a – however minor – propaganda victory to the Russian war effort and will represent a betrayal of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters.

Who are we to try and prevent the very thing the Ukranians are telling us they need?

The motion was only able to be endorsed because the Socialist Party joined all Left Unity NEC members in voting to support it. This was a huge mistake and has allowed the authoritarian international politics of Left Unity to win out for a motion which purposefully doesn’t reference the Ukrainian workers movement or any class demands.

It is a mistake to move PCS away from its position of consistent international solidarity and support of workers fighting imperialism. A position which has been recently re-iterated by the former General Secretary.

If you agree, please ensure:

  1. Your branch is mandated to oppose motion A30 and references back the incorrectly E-marked motion E194, which re-iterates the unions position in solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Please get in touch if you’d like support in doing this.
  2. Vote for candidates in the ongoing NEC elections with the record of consistent international solidarity.