PCS

Public & Commercial Services Union - trade union for civil servants

PCS needs a strategy to win

PCS conference has agreed that members will be balloted over jobs, pensions, redundancy payouts and pay. This ballot begins immediately, the union hoping that if members vote yes, then it will take joint strike action with the NUT on 30 June. The bulk of delegates at conference agreed that the ballot should begin straightaway even though in many areas this will mean mobilising members from a standing start but the prospect of co-coordinating action with NUT is too important to miss. After 30 June — already being dubbed the glorious 30th — we move from the realm of plans to hopes. PCS are...

Organise for 30 June!

On Tuesday 17 May members of the National Union of Teachers will begin balloting on strikes against the government's plans to increase their pension contributions, raise their pension age, and cut their pensions. The government plans affect all public service workers - in similar, though slightly varying ways. They go together with the government's plans to increase the age for the state pension, and are setting the frame for further trashing of what pension provision remains in the private sector. Another teachers' union, ATL, will start balloting on 20 May. On 18-20 May the civil service...

Teachers, lecturers, civil servants to strike together

Unions representing over 800,000 teachers, lecturers and civil servants are set to take national strike action on 30 June against Government plans to radically attack their pensions. The government has already switched the measure for annual increases for public sector pensions from the Retail Price Index (RPI) to the generally lower rate, the Consumer Price Index (CPI). A pension currently worth £10,000 a year will, by 2016, be worth £800 less than it would be on RPI. The government also looks set to increase the level of contributions and raising the retirement eligibility age. For teachers...

PCS: don't leave jobs as a makeweight issue

The national executive of the civil service union PCS will put an emergency motion to its conference on 18-20 May, seeking permission to ballot members over pensions, jobs and pay. Delegates to the PCS conference are used to the Executive using the device of an emergency motion (on non-emergency matters) to dominate conference proceedings and to bypass and ignore normal branch motions put up in the normal manner. That said, it is correct that members should be balloted on pensions, jobs and pay, particularly when we can co-ordinate such action with other unions. However, taking industrial...

30 June and after

Teachers, civil servants, and other workers are set to strike on 30 June against the coalition government’s increases in pension contributions, cuts in pension provision, and raising of the pension age. At Easter (22-26 April) the National Union of Teachers conference voted to ballot union members for a series of strikes. Other big public service union conferences are coming up soon. The civil service union PCS meets in Brighton on 16-20 May. Its Executive has already decided to ballot members on strike action, soon enough for them to join NUT on 30 June. The lecturers’ union UCU, which meets...

"General strike" on 26 March demo

There were hundreds of placards on the TUC anti-cuts demonstration with the words “General strike” — produced by the SWP and, in a new development, the Socialist Party. Workers’ Liberty has criticised the SWP’s use of this slogan because it does not "follow the logic of the class struggle": it is not the right demand to take the movement forward from where it currently is. If the TUC did “call a general strike”, it would almost certainly flop. But the SWP don’t believe this is a serious possibility either. Opportunist as ever, they brandish “general strike” to sound left-wing and attract...

Fight these pension cuts!

John Hutton has produced his final report on the future of public sector pensions. But even before the report, according to the TUC, the value of these pensions had been reduced by 25 per cent due to a mix of negotiated changes and the government’s arbitrary switch to the Consumer Price Index as a measure of inflation. But other Hutton recommendations will worsen the situation. The recommendation to end final salary schemes and increase the Normal Pension Age (NPA) for all staff to 65 will impact badly on existing and future public servants. Unfortunately public sector unions have already...

Industrial news in brief

A wildcat strike at a BP plant near Hull has forced management to back down on plans for unilateral redundancies. The GMB and Unite members, opposed attempts by Redhall (an engineering construction contractor operating on the site) to impose redundancies that were outside the framework of the nationally-bargained collective agreement for the industry. 400 workers walked off the job and blocked the main road into the site, backing up rush-hour traffic. The strike marks a further flare in militancy in an industry that saw enormous unofficial strikes over similar attempts by bosses to disregard...

Fighting after March 26th

The labour movement is facing the most generalised attack on the working class in 20 years. Ministers and officials are routinely monitoring the union response and actively planning to defeat any resistance. If the unions do not respond with deep and extensive industrial action and a political alternative, then wages will be slashed, and everyone’s “social wage” of public services and benefits will be hollowed out and recast as a private-sector, parasitic, business opportunity. Without industrial action and a political alternative, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. Unions will be...

Scottish unions rally

Around 300 people attended the 26 February Scottish TUC anti-cuts rally in Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre. It would be unfair to be overly critical of the event. If anyone from another planet had been in the audience, for example, they would doubtless have found the glittering array of eight platform speakers all saying the same thing in not particularly different words an illuminating event. Any alien visitor would also have learnt that education cuts are bad, as too are local authority cuts, health service cuts, civil service cuts, Ministry of Defence cuts and the closure of RAF bases in...

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