11.11.2004

From the picket line

Bev Laidlaw is Yorkshire and Humber regional assistant secretary for the Public and Commercial Services Union and chair of its Sheffield branch. She spoke to Peter Manson about the November 5 national civil service strike against Gordon Brown's 100,000 job cuts

The strike was very strong in Sheffield. We in the department for work and pensions had already had nine days of local unofficial action, so we thought that convincing people to come out again on November 5 might be a bit of a problem. But that wasn’t the case.

Out of around 1,100 there were 170 crossing the picket lines. A lot of these are on fixed-term contracts, who are normally the hardest people to recruit. But these people too are now realising what the situation is - why they are not being taken on permanently - and they are joining the union as well. This is despite the fact that job losses in Sheffield are expected to be offset by the home office moving work up here. However, that work is becoming increasingly casualised.

Morale has not been good, but most people saw the bigger picture, with pensions and sick pay also under threat. Many departments already cannot cope with the work, even though there are so many casual staff employed, so people are saying, if we can’t do the job now, how are we going to manage after the cuts? In fact the local job centre is advertising for 50 casual and fixed-term staff. These are employed for six months and can then be replaced.

There is a lot of anger directed at the management and the government. They are spending millions on the occupation of Iraq, yet insisting on false savings in the civil service. Most workers in job centres and benefit offices, for example, consider themselves front-line staff, not the back-room staff Brown says need to be got rid of. We are actually paying benefit to some of the most needy people in the country. How can the service be cut to those people even more?

The kind of support we got in Sheffield has been reflected across the country. Of course, 200,000 on strike, while impressive, is nothing like the whole PCSU membership, so is nothing brilliant in my book. So there is much to do to carry the campaign forward.

There has not been a great deal of coverage in the media of the November 5 strike. They seem to regard it as people just letting off steam and don’t feel particularly threatened. The NEC assure us that there is a strategy, but they won’t tell us what it is. We have been calling for a national meeting of branch secretaries. That would allow local activists to have their say over where the dispute should go from here.
When we returned to work on Monday, members were saying, ‘What’s next then? Where do we take it now?’ This was because the NEC took the decision to ballot only for one day of action and nothing else. I was told by an NEC member that there had been a debate on the executive, but they did not know whether they could win a ballot for discontinuous action. So they went for the safe bet of a one-day strike.

What is clear is that a series of one-day actions or even two-day actions will not bring the results. People return to work afterwards and then have to deal with the backlog. There needs to be, in addition to further national strikes, selective action in given departments, with a national levy to fund it. It is not necessarily a question of where you can get the most people out, but where you can hurt the government the most.
For example, there are problems with tax credits, so taking people out in the inland revenue might be effective, as would strikes which could have the effect of stopping particular targets being reached.

Another shortcoming is the lack of involvement of the ordinary members. They are not being mobilised to participate in the campaigning, the leafleting and talking to the public.

It is vital to have other unions on board and I look forward to joint action. But, first we must try to involve our own membership more. That would put us in the best position to link up for united action with teachers and local government workers.

What is essential is that the ordinary members, not just the traditional activists, are involved in the decision-making and the running of the dispute. Every single member must be involved.