THE PCS is preparing to ballot its 310,000 members for strike action
against New Labour’s job culling plans. Chancellor Gordon Brown has told
the union and everybody else that he won’t be put off his plans to sack
104,000 civil servants by any threat of strike action. As some one once
said: "He would say that wouldn’t he?"
Bill Mullins
The PCS national executive committee is meeting as we go to press. It
is expected to announce a date for a national one-day strike in defence of
jobs and pension rights.
This will be the start of a campaign which the union is asking all
other unions, particularly in the public sector, to give support to.
The union has set up an anti-cuts committee, made up of lay members,
which is coordinating the campaign across the union and beyond.
It is preparing a massive amount of material to be sent to the members.
This will expose the government’s plans and more importantly, explain why
members should vote ‘yes’ to strike action when the ballot starts.
The union has been given legal clearance to ballot all its members in
one go. This might sound obvious but the anti-union laws insist that you
can only take strike action against your immediate employer. In the case
of the civil service that means over 200 separate groups of employers
(agencies) set up over the past 10 or 15 years.
This means that the union has to have 200-plus sets of negotiations
over pay and conditions. One of the main aims of the new left leadership
of the PCS is to unify the union once again under the banner of one pay
claim.
The employers and the government are only too happy to keep the union
divided, some of the smaller groups are under the control of remnants of
the old right-wing union leadership. If left to themselves they would
refuse to participate in the joint union campaign against the job losses.
The union now will be submitting a series of demands to the
"crown" employer through the so-called Whitley committee for a
guarantee of no compulsory redundancies and the protection of pension
rights. If, as likely, the employers refuse to accede to these demands,
the plans for a strike ballot will be put into action. For further
information read the socialist over the next few weeks.
