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Home   |   The Socialist 10 - 23 August 2006   |   Join the Socialist Party

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Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) Dispute:

Consolidate Gains - Build For National Action

Civil service union reps from PCS Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) branches gave an overwhelming endorsement – by a margin of nearly three to one - to the Group Executive Committee’s (GEC) recommendation to settle the Jobs, Rights and Services Campaign at a meeting in Leeds on 11 August.

John McInally, DWP Group Assistant Secretary and National Executive Committee

If agreed by an upcoming membership ballot, the current industrial action will end but the campaign to protect jobs, rights and services goes and will be stepped up. The gains made provide a solid platform of confidence and achievement as the National Executive Committee’s (NEC) moves toward a Civil Service wide ballot to secure a national No Compulsory Redundancy Agreement and an end to privatisation. The national ballot is also likely to focus on other grievances, including pay coherence.

The real lesson of the Jobs Rights and Services Campaign is: Campaigning Works – Action Delivers – Build For National Action!

DWP workers, with a campaigning Left Unity (LU) leadership, with Socialist Party members prominent, have struggled hard and taken more industrial action than any other section of workers against Government attacks in the past five years, with thirteen national days of strike action and eleven in the past two and a half years alone. In fact, no other sector of workers in the British trade union movement have taken more action in the past period.

This proud record of struggle reflects the fact that, along with facing major attacks from the government’s cuts’ agenda, DWP workers have also had to face the most hard-line and reactionary management in the Civil Service.

Management boasted they would give no concessions to PCS in the Jobs, Rights and services Campaign. They clearly hadn’t learned the lessons of the recent Pay and PDS dispute when they tried to introduce an appraisal system (PDS) that was intended to institutionalise low pay, introduce individual pay and destroy collective bargaining. That campaign ended in the humiliating retreat of management with the worst aspects of PDS being dropped.

The whole PDS system is now to be reviewed as a result of the ongoing PCS campaign against what remained of this hated system, as predicted by the LU GEC. This significant development also demonstrates that gains can be made indirectly through a fighting union leadership mobilising a determined membership, which can force management to make concessions knowing the union can turn any threat of industrial action into a reality. This can create the conditions where further concessions can be extracted through negotiations – negotiating from a position of strength.

The Labour Government’s assault on the Civil Service emanating from its pro-business agenda is unprecedented and involves over 100,000 job cuts, mass privatisation and sell-off of State assets, attacks on pay, pensions, terms and conditions, all accompanied by a vicious propaganda offensive that seeks to denigrate public sector workers, condemn the public sector as wasteful and inefficient and dishonestly argue the only alternative is the private sector.

DWP is at the centre of this assault and this in part accounts for the militancy of these workers. DWP workers have also developed a real confidence in the left leadership at GEC and NEC level, a leadership that negotiates hard but is prepared to take action when necessary.

Critically, DWP workers understand their leaders are serious, while taking action when required they also understand the balance of forces, the scale of the tasks and challenges facing them, that each strike is one battle in a war and that settlements must be reached at some point in order to consolidate gains, regroup and build for future struggles.

This campaign was launched as part of the anti-cuts work by the GEC who fully recognised that the cuts programme impacted in an uneven fashion across the department and even within districts or even offices themselves. The demands of the campaign reflected the wide concerns of members, with most identifying with one or other aspects of the campaign. What bound these demands together in a coherent sense was the fact all stemmed from the cuts, including the erosion of workplace rights that always accompany cuts agendas, wherever they are carried out.

DWP PCS members, like all civil service workers clearly understand that to halt the job cuts and other attacks will require a massive escalation of industrial action linked into a political campaign. Chancellor Brown, in particular, is absolutely committed to the neo-liberal agenda and its big business interests. The policy of Labour must be exposed and challenged on both the industrial and political fronts, this is strategy of the union both at Group and national level.

Introducing the "Modernisation" agenda in itself meant many problems and challenges but these were greatly exacerbated because management grossly oversold their capacity to deliver the cuts agenda resulting in major service delivery problems and operational chaos - backlogs, increasing workloads and stress, IT and communications failures, Call and Contact Centre failure. Assaults on staff rose by a staggering 62% in a year. Management attacks on terms, conditions and rights, particularly on Managing Attendance caused real anger as they were being misused to drive staff out of the Department.

There was also a growing awareness that New Labour intends to privatise core DWP services. These attacks are interlinked and part of a generalised assault on public services and must be challenged. As the Modernisation agenda proceeds, PCS’s key aims are clearly to fight to protect members’ jobs, rights, and terms and conditions while exposing the flaws inherent in the "Vision" and the serious consequences for service delivery to the public.

The GEC had already secured important gains through hard negotiations on avoidance of redundancy that gave some protection to workers. The brutal reality is that the union often has to campaign furiously even to stand still such is the scale of the attacks. The GEC’s campaign, working with branches and members has been exemplary, involving Parliamentary and media work, alliance building, local activity and so on. A Parliamentary Select Committee into Jobcentre Plus which PCS gave evidence to produced a devastating critique of the so-called Modernisation programme.

The GEC had to carefully balance when to go for a national ballot - the support given when it was called proved it was done at about the right time. Two two-day sets of Group –wide action, along with an overtime ban, forced management to the negotiating table.

The settlement includes significant improvements on Redundancy Avoidance, Managing Attendance, Rights at Work and Service Delivery.

On Redundancy avoidance this includes a statement of confidence from management that joint working with PCS will enable the threat of compulsory redundancies to be "substantially mitigated or removed". This is a step back by management from their previous position and PCS will hold them to be "removed".

Management have conceded that temporary or permanent relocation of work is to be considered as an alternative to redundancy, a key gain that can be used to protect members jobs, particularly in isolated or rural communities. A joint review has also been conceded before any bulk transfers.

On the hated Managing Attendance and other workplace rights important gains have been made – such as on the issue of ‘backsliding’ which has been reduced from 24 to 12 months.

But the GEC accepts more must come from the reviews conceded by management in three months’ time. Nevertheless, the concessions mean many members who would have fallen foul of the increasingly stringent "human resources" practises will be able to feel much safer now.

On staffing and service delivery a new Review Mechanism has been secured to "fast-track" service delivery concerns with management who have committed to providing considered, reasonable responses to PCS concerns within "agreed and reasonable timescales." This provides the ability to vary headcount and reduce stress on members in "hotspots".

Negotiations are to begin in September on a new Employee Relations Framework as part of a commitment from management to improve industrial relations. Management initially said they would not negotiate with PCS over the Jobs, Rights and Services Campaign but were forced into it by Group-wide industrial action and now claim they want a "fresh start"! If this isn’t proof of the power of industrial action then nothing is.

However, such promises will not be taken at face value but judged on actions – on how management negotiate the ERF, how industrial relations are conducted from henceforth, including a halt to harassment and victimisation of reps and, most of all, whether or not they enter into the reviews outlined above in a serious and honest way. If this is the case then a fresh start will mean even more gains and concessions can be won from the reviews.

However, no "fresh start" can disguise the political realities of the Labour agenda for DWP and the rest of the Civil Service – the war goes on and more battles are inevitable. Despite this, a commitment to improve industrial relations can bring gains for our hard-pressed reps and members.

The decision to settle is a tactical one. It is a question of weighing up the balance of forces, whether we would be able to deliver the scale of industrial action needed at this stage to move management further and whether the deal itself offers the kind of gains and concessions that will make a material difference to members. Whilst it is accepted that the deal does not deliver all members need, it would be a grotesque misrepresentation of reality to argue that it has not provided real progress and gains.

The GEC believes more action could definitely be delivered, such is the hatred of management and Labour amongst DWP workers, but is equally clear that if the deal is not accepted the scale of escalation required to force further concessions would be considerable and there is a genuine question whether that could be achieved at this stage – that is not just the leadership view, no one at the reps meeting suggested such escalation could be delivered.

To press ahead with action in such circumstances would be adventurism of a type that could see a gradual falling off of support for action, a strengthening of management’s position with the current concessions coming off the table and moving toward a national ballot with the DWP membership, the most militant section of the Civil Service workforce defeated and demoralised.

Such considerations are the real dilemmas of socialist leadership which contrast with the cynical condemnations of the deal by some in the left sectarian press who never having the responsibility to make such tactical decisions always call for campaigns to continue, regardless of the balance of forces, the wider strategic considerations, the battle-weariness or readiness of embers: life is easy for such people, they have only one slogan – Onward To Victory.

General Secretary Mark Serwotka precisely answered such considerations in at the reps meeting, setting out why a settlement in the DWP and a consolidation of the gains made, would provide a solid platform for the national Civil Service ballot that the union will move toward unless concessions are made at national level.

The settlement can only be agreed, and understood, in the context of the national campaign against the cuts and the strategy agreed at the most recent National Executive Committee (NEC). The GEC conducts all its campaign work firmly within a national framework, working very closely with the national body and General Secretary. The idea that somehow Groups can "go it alone" or, worse, "exempt" themselves from struggle while protecting themselves, irrespective of what is going on in the wider Civil Service is dangerous nonsense.

The refusal of DWP to give a No Compulsory Redundancy Agreement reflects the position of the Cabinet Office (the body that covers the UK Civil Service). The NEC has written to the Cabinet Office demanding a national No Compulsory Redundancy Agreement and an end to privatisation. It has become clear partly through the experience of struggle in DWP that such agreements are achievable only through the type of national agreement that the NEC is attempting to secure through the Cabinet Office and upon which there will be a national ballot if the demand is not met.

Such an agreement is essential, especially given the recent announcements on the Child Support Agency (CSA), which the GEC will fight to keep as part of DWP, and in light of the Government’s plans for privatisation for core DWP work which, along with the many other privatisation initiatives throughout the Civil service, not least in the Ministry of Defence, has the potential to expose PCS members jobs to compulsory redundancy.

For many PCS members in DWP and elsewhere the threat of compulsory redundancy may not be the first thing on their minds and the union will need to raise awareness. In reality no-one’s job is safe, not just because of the current cuts and privatisation programme but also because Chancellor Brown, a fanatical pro-marketeer intends to continue the cuts after the current spending round ends in 2008 and to greatly expand the privatisation agenda.

The Labour agenda really does mean an attempt to break up the Civil Service in a way even Thatcher would never have dared dreamed of. The DWP dispute is, in reality, one battle in what will be a long war for the future of the Welfare State. It is in that context the settlement was properly recommended.

The key is now to ensure that the consultation the NEC will hold following its September meeting wins the overwhelming endorsement of reps in order to move toward a successful ballot that can unite all civil service workers against the government onslaught on jobs, rights and services and against privatisation.

The vote at the meeting was not simply an endorsement of the GEC recommendation, important as that was, it was also a serious show of support for, and confidence in a national leadership that is ruthlessly honest with members and activists alike and which does not hide the scale of the challenges and threat PCS members face but which will not shirk from facing them.

A leadership that aims to achieve unity in fighting the government’s plans will always seek to ensure there is open, honest, even critical debate to clarify issues and address concerns. This is not only desirable but necessary.

There must be a concern, however, at the unscrupulous, cynical and dishonest opposition of those on the sectarian fringes of the movement who, while having little representation in PCS, voice continuous criticism of the left leadership at Group and national level. The PCS leadership at Group and national level is widely regarded as amongst the most campaigning, fighting and effective in recent decades in the British trade union movement.

Workers understand, especially those in other unions, that PCS is fighting not just a reactionary government and management but doing so while other trade union "leaders" prefer a cosy relationship with Brown and Blair at the expense of their members jobs, terms and conditions.

Opposing the deal is legitimate - but only when an honest workable alternative can be given. No alternative has been given. Not one speaker claimed escalation was possible.

Mark Serwotka strongly rebuked one of the sectarians most hostile speakers who, incredibly, claimed that compulsory redundancy was not a real threat for DWP workers (this individual shocked delegates by actually reading out anti-PCS material from a management document that dishonestly claimed the strike was not effective, before arguing that only paying workers 85% strike pay on selective action could win!).

In recent years the Left Unity-led DWP Group Executive Committee has launched and delivered more industrial action than any other section of the British trade union movement.

The real danger of this approach is it proceeds from the undermining of the union and its achievements, which in turn can – if left unchallenged - destroy the confidence of members in fighting back against the employer.

The argument that the union should just call further strikes did not get any backing because most reps understood that rejection of the offer and to attempt to get more concessions would require major escalation.

Reps knew that united Group wide action had brought the employer to the negotiating table but they were also keenly aware that the GEC had lobbied hard for targeted action submissions from branches to supplement the Group wide action and few had been received.

This does not imply any criticism of branches, on the contrary the GEC always made clear that it would be wrong and even destructive to attempt to institute action where support was patchy, uneven or non-existent.

The real truth is that the overwhelming majority of activists have fought hard to produce magnificent Group-wide action, and now recognise the necessity of banking the gains that action has won.

There is an understanding that they must now regroup to fight again another day, this time with the rest of the 300,000 PCS members.

The reps meeting represented the best traditions of union democracy and would be the envy of activists in many other unions. If the meeting had gone against the deal then the post meeting GEC would have had to seriously re-consider its position. The endorsement of the GEC position shows the union at Group and national level is fully in touch with the mood of activists and the ballot will show whether that is the case with members as well, the GEC is confident the ballot will also endorse the GEC position.

Members will be proud of what they have achieved against the toughest employer in the Civil service and PCS should be proud of them too The vast majority of PCS members are proud to be part of a campaigning union. However, they also understand that although what they have secured through their present struggle and sacrifice is not everything they want, it is good enough to be consolidated in preparation for further battles.

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