PCS strike for a living wage
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
Nearly 300,000 civil and public service workers, members of the PCS
union, are taking the courageous step of an all-out, one-day strike on
10th November. They voted for this action in a ballot on the derisory
below-inflation pay offers from a host of departments and agencies throughout
the service – offers dictated by the Labour government’s 2 per cent public
sector pay cap.
This huge strike will be followed by a 3-month overtime ban, and two
days after the stoppage the union’s national executive will meet to plan
for sectoral action in defence of pay.
Even in the run-up to the strike the union has appealed to the government
to avoid the shutdown of services by negotiating a decent pay rise. But
with New Labour displaying rank class hypocrisy - bailing out bankers
and billionaires but cutting the pay of some of the lowest paid workers
who deliver vital public services – strike action is the only weapon
available to PCS and its hard-pressed members.
Services hit will include Jobcentres, Tax Credits, passports, immigration
and customs, coastguards, driving licences, driving tests, museums, tax
collection, courts, Registers of Scotland … and many more, in the biggest
display of workers’ unity across agencies seen for a long time.
These workers are not the Bowler-hatted Mandarins of myth. They are hard-working
and low-paid. One in five earn below £15,000. Tens of thousands are just
barely above the minimum wage – hardly a princely sum in the face of
mounting food, fuel and housing costs.
In October at least six government departments – including coastguards
and Scottish Courts – had to give emergency pay rises to lift workers
above the new £5.80 minimum wage (whilst still in the middle of pathetic
pay offers that provoked strikes in these areas)!
Yet the worst pay offers – such as that to over half of DWP staff – involve
a big fat zero per cent rise for this year! And the best, in Registers
of Scotland, still only means the lowest-paid grades getting just above
the minimum wage.
John Jamieson, member of the PCS national executive committee and a member
of the Scottish Socialist Party, told me:
“Some of our members are scared of being perceived as being greedy, because
of the economic climate of crisis. But our strike action is through need,
not greed, unlike the unadulterated greed of the bankers.
“All we are demanding is to tread water with inflation to pay our bills
and not fall even further into debt. Not much to ask when banks are getting
bungs to prop them up, while bank bosses still have their bonuses protected.
Need, not greed.”
On top of these pay cuts, civil servants are doubly disadvantaged compared
to the rest of the public sector, because pay progression (from the minimum
to maximum of the pay range) and cost of living pay rises are all lumped
into the one budget and their combined total kept to below the government’s
pay cap.
The PCS are rightly demanding separate budgets for these, to ensure proper
funding for basic pay rises to match inflation – which recently crashed
through 5.2 per cent according to the government’s own figures. And they
are demanding the government pay heed to warnings from none other than
the Bank of England that pay cuts are detrimental to the wider economy.
PCS members are further aggrieved by bonuses of £40,000 to the most senior
civil servants – the genuine mandarins!
The Scottish Socialist Party – both within and outwith the ranks of PCS
– is standing four-square with these workers in their battle against
pay cuts and the growing threat of regional pay.
For years we have helped build action by PCS and championed their fights
against cuts to pay, jobs and services.
We have consistently argued the money is there to fund a defence and
improvement in public services and the pay and conditions of the workers
delivering them.
We have defied the lies of New Labour –and more recently also the SNP
government in Holyrood – who both say there is not enough money to go
beyond a 2 per cent pay rise.
These lies are blown to smithereens in the wake of the £500billion bailout
for bankers and billionaires. And that only goes to prove that the madness
of the capitalist market system worshipped by these parties needs to
be replaced by a sane, rational, democratic socialist system. One that
would invest the vast wealth in men, women, children and the essential
services they require, rather than in propping up the reckless rich who
give gambling a bad name.