PCS to ballot from 20 October

The civil service trade union PCS, over its recent National Executive (NEC0 meetings, has rightly focussed on the national campaign for pay, jobs pensions, and terms and conditions and industrial relations.

PCS Independent Left (IL), the group within PCS which AWL members are active in, has made clear throughout both these meetings that this campaign is not just about pay, but also about delivering on the mandate members have given them to deliver across multiple areas of dispute with the employer.

Winning on these fights will make a massive change to every member’s working life, from extra pay and a job security guarantee to opposition to office closures and putting ways of working back in the hands of people doing the work.

Taking up that challenge, the NEC has agreed to ballot the whole Civil Service from 20 October.

There are some on the NEC who support a national campaign and those who don’t. Left Unity, the ironically named right-wing faction centred around the General Secretary Fran Heathcote, is clear that they wish to ignore conference decisions, saying that the motions setting our campaign into motion has been superseded by events, including by the offer of a weak pay award which falls well short of our demands!

Left Unity members then lined up one-after-the-other to describe the weakness in the areas they have held control for years. In DWP, Home Office, MoJ, they all describe low density, low engagement, low willingness to fight. Their solution? To carry on as they have been and do nothing!

That said, the national campaign will face immense pressure. PCS’ density is low, and large sections of the activist layer have fallen out of regular organising activity.

But it is clear that an active, campaigning union can recruit and build quickly. IL members raised the need to use this dispute and campaigning to build it as a catalyst for recruitment and organising across every branch and workplace. The momentum from this campaign needs to build a super majority union and to transform the workplace.

Every rep needs to be bold and organise openly in the workplace to create a new culture of workplace trade unionism organising, and the NEC must make sure reps are encouraged and supported in making that happen.

The full list of demands can be found on the PCS website here.

It should go without saying that elected lay trade union officials should be able to communicate their decisions to their members and be able to organise the campaigns which matter to them and their members without any interference from their employer or unelected factional bureaucrats in their trade union.

In PCS, the Civil Servants union, that is not the case.

Having been elected as a member of PCS Independent Left and as part of the Coalition for Change onto the PCS NEC, I see that key decisions have been consistently ignored – or at best acted on at a snail’s pace – by the union full-time officers (FTOs), attempting to decapitate or slow down any action they can.

The most dramatic manifestation of this was the attempted coup by the General Secretary earlier this year (which Solidarity reported on here), this sort of deliberate frustration of the democratic structures of the union by its full timers has continued at every level for the whole of the union's history.

To respond to this, PCS Independent Left has proposed a campaign of “Refounding PCS.” It is right to do so. This campaign looks to give power in the union to the workers themselves.

At a national level and for the NEC, that will mean electing full-time officials who will serve on a workers’ wage; conference decisions being acted upon by the NEC and those actions clearly communicated to members; NEC meetings being live-streamed wherever possible, with decisions and minutes circulated across the union.

In branches, too, reps should finally be able to email their members and given the proper resources and support in producing regular bulletins and newsletters to organise and build. Regular members meetings should be held, and the union should actively pursue being an every day part of the working life of every member of staff where we organise.

Many of these changes will take some time to develop and be enacted. Changes to the standing orders of the NEC would require a decisive election win, while other changes would likely require a special rules conference.

However, there are things which can be done immediately.

Firstly, the NEC should ensure that the parts of its standing orders which enable the circulation of decisions are actively followed. Motions should go in to ensure that reports are drafted by NEC members and published following every meeting. Branches should coordinate and organise their campaigning together, and regular workplace meetings should be called.