04.11.2004

Civil service workers fight back

Lee Rock is London regional organiser of the Public and Commercial Services Union and a member of the CPGB. He spoke to Tina Becker about the November 5 civil service strike

The government is determined to force through over 100,000 job losses. Is a one-day strike sufficient to stop such a draconian attack?
There is general acceptance in the union that our one-day strike will - by itself - not achieve a tremendous amount. Nobody believes that it will win us this particular dispute. However, it can serve to show our potential strength. It is, after all, the first time in a generation that the civil services union is taking action on such a large scale.

You shouldn’t forget that we only won this ballot by 70,000 to 40,000 votes - it will be a while before we can achieve a ‘yes’ vote in a ballot for all-out, indefinite strike action. This has to do with the fact that some departments, like the inland revenue, for example, are getting hit a lot less in terms of job losses. Other departments like the department for work and pensions are faced with a 40,000 cut in staff. But there is broad solidarity between workers in all departments to make sure that as many people as possible will come out on Friday - we are expecting between 150,000 and 200,000 workers to join the strike.

What are the chances of further action after that?
The big problem is the way in which the question on the ballot paper was phrased by the executive. As I understand it - and there is a bit of a dispute over this - the formulation does not allow for further action. We might have to ballot again before we can take further action. This was, of course, a conscious decision by the leadership, not just a slip. Maybe they thought that by formulating it in such a weak way, the less determined members who might vote ‘no’ when faced with the prospect of a long battle could be won over.

The PCSU national leadership is now asking all the different departments to draw up plans on how to take the campaign forward. As all departments are hit differently, the executives of those sections will have to think about the response in their area. Now, this does of course not exclude further national action. But, again as I understand it, this is not the plan pursued by the executive, although such a course is clearly necessary. There is talk of further cross-departmental action, with a number of limited one-day strikes, but nothing involving the whole membership.

In my opinion, it will be more difficult to get another national action off the ground in the near future. Of course, if the strike proves to be successful and brings more people out than anticipated, we might see pressure develop for more national action.

But undoubtedly the ballot should have included a provision to allow the union to take further action without going back to the members. In my view, it was a mistake to be so timid.

The Socialist Party is of course in the dominant organisation on the PCSU national executive.
Yes, but it is hard to tell who exactly on the executive can be held responsible for this bad formulation, although it would fit in with the analysis of comrades from the Socialist Party. In their view, the PCSU alone cannot win this dispute and defeat the government. They - or the rest of the executive - have certainly not put forward a strategy on how to win and have kept the strike action on a very low level indeed.

This seems particularly timid if one considers that there is not only the threat of large-scale job cuts. There are also attacks on pension rights and sickness payments.
In fact, all public sector workers are threatened by these attacks. Hospital workers, teachers, local government workers and every single civil servant will be hit by this New Labour offensive. However, as Mark Serwotka pointed out at the Respect conference, there is unfortunately not a lot of support or cooperation coming from the general secretaries of those unions affected.

Quite clearly, there is need for the rank and file of Unison, the NUT, the PCSU and others to get together quickly. Some of our members have been visiting Unison branches and it must be said that Unison and NUT branches are starting to approach us more and more often too.

The Socialist Party has of course talked a lot about the need for a ‘public sector worker alliance’ in order to defeat the attacks. But from where I am sitting this does not seem to find reflection in much of what they are doing. The SP are of course smaller than they used to be and do not have as much influence in Unison and other public sector unions as they have in the PCSU - I don’t get the impression that they are really pushing for this kind of cooperation. More likely, the ‘public sector workers alliance’ seems to be mainly a fallback position that can later explain why we did not win the dispute.

However, there are links being made across the unions and this is very positive. As this kind of solidarity and cooperation is very new, it is happening more slowly than we would wish. At the moment we are mainly exchanging information. But tentative links are being made and we are definitely witnessing the beginning of a new kind of cooperation.