04.08.2004

Resolutions and token strikes

The PCSU's ballot for a one-day strike action against the government's threat to axe over 100,000 jobs shows that the union has no serious strategy capable of defeating the New Labour assault, says Peter Manson

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.

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