PCS NEC aims to change the union

The National Executive (NEC) of the civil service union PCS is back up and running following the attempted coup against the lay leadership by the right-wing ("Left Unity") General Secretary. Good. The NEC majority is united on a platform of increased industrial militancy following years of declining Civil Service pay and continued onslaught on terms and conditions from governments of all shades.

The NEC now needs to get to work and provide visible leadership both for the coming fight and in delivering for members on the range of other demands members raised the PCS annual conference in May, ranging from providing better access to members data for reps to raising a serious fight for trans liberation.

This will all no doubt be continued to be frustrated by the right-wing bureaucracy and their supporters organised around the General Secretary in the ironically named “Left Unity” faction.

This makes it essential that supporters of a transformed, fighting, and rank-and-file union must continue to organise and build support among a wide layer of members and squeeze the bureaucracy out entirely.

First, meetings on the “Our Work, Our Way” campaign should be held in every workplace, transforming discussions on hybrid working, rotas and other ways-of-working disputes into serious political agitation around what workplaces would look like if we, the workers, were in control.

Second, town committee meetings linking together Civil Service workplaces across branches and employers should then be convened to unify, reinforce, and develop the demands raised in the workplace meetings on ways of meeting alongside the demands for pay restoration into a coordinated campaign with the support of the NEC.

Over the coming months and years, PCS members should take up the demand for the refounding of PCS with the same degree of seriousness of any of our industrial demands. Members are surely now learning - if they have not already - that for a serious fight on any issue which matters to them, the union must be torn away from a comfortable clique of full-timers and into the hands of lay members.