Resolutions and token strikes
How can workers in the civil service resist Gordon Brown’s
vicious threat to axe over 100,000 jobs? Will the left-led Public
and Commercial Services Union leadership be up to the task?
Following last week’s two-day strike by PCSU members employed
in the department for work and pensions (DWP), the union is to ballot
its entire 300,000-strong public sector membership next month for
a strike against Brown’s draconian cuts. In a statement to
members issued on August 2, general secretary Mark Serwotka talks
of the need for a decision on industrial action to be speedily taken
and carried out: “Our strategy will need to consider all parts
of the union to ensure that specific campaigns focus on immediate
threats. This is vital, as some departments will seek to move quickly
to implement the cuts.”
However, the ballot will seek authorisation only for a one-day protest
strike to be called in October. By that time it is quite likely
that thousands of redundancy notices will already have gone out.
Of course, the union is bound by all kinds of legal constraints
and imposed delays - will it be forced, for example, under anti-union
legislation to organise separate strike ballots for each government
department? - and it is wary of asking the membership to support
anything more for fear of losing the ballot. But what message does
such a limited proposal for action send out - to both its own membership
and the government? That the PCSU has no serious strategy capable
of defeating the New Labour assault.
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True, the executive, meeting on July 21-23, decided on a campaign
of opposition to all compulsory redundancies and compulsory relocation,
as well as privatisation and casualisation. However, passing intransigent-sounding
resolutions is one thing. Organising successfully to put them into
effect is quite another.
Apart from its one-day protest ballot, the PCSU has decided to “engage
an external advertising and communications agency” and “a
leading university professor with a background in labour relations/economic
issues” to help it mount a PR campaign. It has elicited a promise
of “maximum support” from the TUC and submitted a motion
to its September congress seeking “active support” from
other unions. It is also hoping to link up with pressure groups
worried by a diminution in services.
None of this will be worth very much if civil servants themselves
cannot be won to a militant campaign of resistance. Of course, with
only around 65% of the workforce unionised and with no tradition
of waging all-out industrial battles, mobilising such a campaign
will be no easy task. But if the leadership - made up in the main
of ‘revolutionaries’, with the Socialist Party and its
supporters forming the EC majority - could persuade everybody (not
least itself) that it had a winning strategy, then the rank and
file, unionised or not, could be won to back it enthusiastically.
But the signs do not look good. Take the DWP dispute - which is
still rumbling on over the 2003 pay claim and management’s
imposed appraisement scheme. The numbers supporting the latest strike,
held on Thursday and Friday July 29-30, held up well, with a good
turnout on picket lines reported.
However, the calling of three 48-hour strikes with literally months
in between each one has not succeeded in moving management at all.
At the time of writing there is not even a hint of fresh negotiations
and no new strikes have been called. Meanwhile the 2004 pay increase
was due on July 1, so perhaps the EC is hoping for a half-decent
offer, so that the 2003 claim can be quietly given up as a lost
cause.
At the June annual conference, in response to the SP proposal for
more of the same in the DWP dispute, the Socialist Workers Party
put forward a motion calling for a three-day strike, to be followed
by two days every month. Socialist Caucus called for selective strikes
in key departments, to be called alongside further, “more disruptive”
two-day strikes. To be honest, there is nothing much to choose between
any of these left-backed alternatives - none of them are likely
to make the government or management cave in. And that applies just
as much to the comrades’ approach to Brown’s latest attacks.
It is true that selective action in certain departments - inland
revenue and customs and excise, for example - could hit the government
financially. But members would have to stay out for many weeks,
if not months, before the exchequer would feel the effect (and in
the meantime it would be saving money in unpaid wages).
What is needed is not only a campaign, across the whole civil service,
for indefinite, all-out action - timed to coincide with any strikes
called by other unions, as Mark Serwotka has proposed. But in addition
the PCSU should take the lead in approaching militant unions - the
RMT, FBU and CWU immediately spring to mind - to convene a conference
of the left with the aim of mounting a united, political fightback.
The Socialist Party makes a great deal of noise about the need for
a “mass workers’ party”. So why cannot its PCSU members
make the first moves? On the agenda of such a conference - to which
the Labour left and all socialist groups should also be invited
- would be the need to challenge New Labour in order to begin the
process of establishing a political force capable of going onto
the offensive against first the state and then the whole economic
system.
Peter Manson
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