Get ready to ballot on 20 October

Katrine Williams, PCS NEC member, personal capacity

With our PCS national campaign ballot on pay, jobs and conditions opening on Tuesday 20 October, it is imperative that all efforts are concentrated on smashing the anti-union 50% strike threshold.

We will be among the first unions to use the new legislation for electronic balloting for a national strike ballot. All members will receive an email on 20 October, apart from those where the union does not hold a home email address, and members in Northern Ireland who will be sent a postal ballot paper.

The chronic underfunding of the civil service has a huge impact on our members in the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. Members have had enough of job insecurity and the pressure of ever-increasing workloads as staffing levels are squeezed, all for pay that has been held down for years. As we head into winter, when our fuel bills and other costs will be soaring, we have no choice but to fight on pay, jobs and conditions.

The National Executive Committee (NEC) met on 9 October to check progress on the campaign and what we need to put in place to deliver effective strike action.

In another attempt by the misnamed ‘Left Unity’ grouping (which includes general secretary Fran Heathcote) to derail the national character of the ballot, the NEC had to deal with a number of submissions from areas influenced by Left Unity to take groups out of the ballot, including the biggest group in the union, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). However, the left majority on the NEC argued that a national ballot uniting all civil service members is the best way to win.

A national ballot means all groups fight together

In DWP, our pay has stagnated so disgracefully that three-quarters of our members would benefit from our demand for an £18-an-hour minimum. The national minimum wage has been going up faster than our pay and so tens of thousands of our members keep ending up back on the minimum wage. This includes the vast majority of workers on the coalface of delivering primary benefits to the public, with impossible workloads and pressure, and massive staff shortages.

We also face office closures in some cases, with no alternative or workable location to move to, and constant reorganisation and cuts.

Nothing that comes out of the delegated pay talks, which rigidly confine negotiators to staying within the paltry 3.5% civil service pay remit, can deliver what our members need. The government is intent on tying our lowest-paid members to the minimum wage forever, recalculating how the hours we work are defined.

Reintroducing national pay bargaining would address the total waste of having to hold over 200 separate pay negotiations, and would remove the scandal of members getting different pay and conditions for doing the same or similar jobs.

Now that we have a left majority on our NEC, we are seriously tackling attacks that affect us across the many departments and workplaces all together, rather than leaving areas to fight on their own. This is despite the role of Left Unity and their supporters in the union machinery doing all they can to undermine and sabotage the ballot.

We have just consulted branches about how we can raise the extra funds needed to deliver targeted strike action to hit the government where it most hurts, alongside national action. 90% of the branches who responded had given serious consideration to how we can implement a levy on members, recognising the differences in pay and tailoring the levy to raise funds fairly.

The NEC also agreed to send solidarity to the Irish unions about to start public sector-wide strike action this week in the Republic of Ireland, and to the French school students facing the full force of the riot police for protesting against cuts to education.

Enact the PCS motion to TUC

It is clear that we are not alone in fighting the cuts. It is positive to see that other unions are also balloting – probation workers in Napo and University and College Union members in further education. 

It is also clear the Burnham government will not address the cost-of-living crisis or underfunding unless it is forced to. It is imperative that the TUC General Council implements the policy submitted by our union to last month’s Congress to organise a Saturday demo against austerity, with the trade union movement leading the fight against cuts to mobilise everyone together.