Today elections for the Group Executive Committee in DWP have opened. Independent Left is supporting a vote for change across the group to deliver for DWP members.
You can find our leaflet below in image and pdf form. If you’d like any delivered to you to give out in your branch or workplace, please contact the campaign:
At present, the joint Independent Left/Broad Left Network candidate standing for DWP President, Bev Laidlaw, will be omitted from the DWP Group Executive Committee ballot paper on the stated grounds that she did not accept the nomination within the deadline.
Bev does not agree with this view and decision. Without going into all the detail here, Bev indicated her acceptance within the deadline, stating “please find attached my election addresses for DWP Elections 2024; DWP Group President and Ordinary GEC member.” On any reasonable reading a candidate stating that are attaching election addresses and identification the posts they cover is a statement that they do accept nomination for those posts.
Supported by IL and BLN colleagues (who are also standing as part of the Coalition for Change in the NEC elections), Bev has challenged this decision, although the “procedure” allowed for challenge is not one we would recommend and the HQ decision, as it stands at present, will mean that the LU candidate will be elected unopposed.
The wider view we take, and that Bev has expressed, is that trade unions should favour the maximisation of democracy, reduce obstacles to candidates standing, and promote contested elections rather than omit candidates for reasons unconnected to the key issues of whether a candidate is in membership, is a member in the relevant constituency, has been properly nominated, and has accepted nomination. Going forward after the election, we will therefore be looking to ensure PCS’ election arrangements reflect these fundamental democratic principles.
In the here and now, it is crucial that everyone of us, who wants change in our union, who is serious about winning on pay and wants democratic, accountable leaders, redouble our efforts to vote for and campaign for BLN/IL/Change candidates in Group and National Executive Committee elections.
You can read our programme here, and see the candidates we endorse here.
Vote for change.
This week supporters from across all nations and groups in the union have been out speaking to members about the joint programme and slate of candidates we are supporting to change the union for the better.
You can find our leaflet below in image and pdf form. If you’d like any delivered to you to give out in your branch or workplace, please contact the campaign:
The fact that civil servants are badly paid is basically axiomatic at this point. The report PCS commissioned Dr Mark Williams to produce on our pay confirmed this categorically.
But what is talked about less is just how much variation there is in how badly civil servants are paid. In-grade pay disparities within the civil service are a systemic and damaging injustice.
Mind the gaps
The Institute for Government’s (IfG) reported that civil service pay in each grade has fallen in real terms by between 12 and 26 percent since 2010 (‘Whitehall Monitor’, 16/01/2024). Pay disparities between different departments are striking. An IfG report (February 2023) showed that median AO/AA pay at MoD was £20,423, over £4,000 less than the median AO/AA salary in the Welsh Government. Pay at DCMS at every grade between AO/AA and SCS consistently lags median civil service pay by thousands of pounds.
The 2023 pay rise and limited sectoral/employer deals do little to unpick these disparities. Within departments, bargaining units, and workplaces, there are huge disparities in individual pay at the same grade and even in the same role.
Gender and disability pay gaps remain, too. Men were, on average, paid 9.1% more than women in 2023, according to Dr Williams’ report. This has shrunk since the mid-2000s but is still inexcusable. Even more worrying is the disability pay gap – 8.4%, and widening.
Aims without plans
Given all this, it is a positive that the PCS 2024/25 pay demands include ‘pay equality across departments on the best possible terms’. This, the current leadership tell us will provide ‘pay coherence’ via an end to delegated negotiations and a return to national pay bargaining, ‘a longstanding aim of PCS’.
There’s an aphorism in one of author and poet Antoine de Saint Exupery’s books that says our ‘task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it’. The leadership may say national pay bargaining is a longstanding aim, and indeed Left Unity members will occasionally mention it in a speech, but evidence of them actually doing anything to enable this aim is scarcer.
While it is progress that our pay claims are no longer a demand with a flat percentile increase and little detail, it is unlikely that making ‘demands’ over departmental pay equalities in pay claims will do much. The government will point at the 1995 Civil Service (transfer of functions) Order and case law to say that departments are separate employers, and so divergence, and local negotiations, are only natural. Dealing with inequality is something we will have to force either on the picket lines or in the court room.
The Law
How does the government legally justify the disaparites in our pay for work of equal value / grading given that all civil servants work for the same employer – the Crown? Salaries, Ts&Cs, and bargaining were delegated from the centre to departments by an Order in Council in 1995 – the employer uses this state of affairs to prove that civil servants in different departments in fact work for different employers.
In 2005, this approach was upheld in the Court of Appeal in Robertson & Others v DEFRA, a case in which the PCS supported male AOs and EOs at DEFRA making an equal pay claim on the basis that women at DETR earned more for work of equal value. They brought the claim not under the Equal Pay Act, but Article 141 of the European Community Treaty, which placed a duty on states to enforce equal pay not just within an establishment, but across an entire employer – the ‘single source’ of employees pay inequalities, and the authority capable of remedying it.
However, the presiding judge, John Mummery, ruled that while the ‘general proposition’ that the Crown was the ‘single source’ of civil servants pay, terms and conditions had ‘considerable force’ (paragraph 31), he ultimately found that because of delegated negotiations, ‘neither the Treasury nor the Cabinet Office is involved in the negotiations and their approval of settlements is not required. There is no co-ordination between the different sets of negotiations’ and so the Crown was therefore not the single source (paragraph 35).
No similar test case has been brought since. But a lot has changed in 20 years – bar a sectoral/flexibility deal (approved by Treasury), and some limited tinkering around how a headline percentage increase is distributed, civil service pay remits and set in stone by the centre, as any local negotiator will know. Terms and conditions are also delegated, but dictats from the centre like the 60% attendance policy show that this departmental independence is a fiction that can be done away with if need be.
In 2013 a Supreme Court judgement noted that the EHRC believed that Robertson was wrongly decided, ‘because it did lie within the power of the Crown to put matters right’ – there is a need to support branches via legal services to allow challenges on this and less novel disparities within departments and establishments. One victory could benefit every member.
Industrial options
Trade unionists and socialists would be wise to not have any illusions who the law is made for, though. As Marx and Engels remarked, it is just another tool through which the ‘ruling class assert their common interests’. Industrial power remains our greatest weapon.
Given the sheer scale of inequalities between and within departments, it remains unfathomable that the leadership has not sought to mobilise groups, departments, regions, and branches in the union to take industrial action against pay inequalities. GMB is currently pursuing such a course with the members it represents in ASDA (where shop workers are paid £3 less an hour than those in distribution centres), and with care workers employed by different Scottish councils (where the Scottish government is the ultimate arbiter of their pay). Both these campaigns are generating significant publicity, engaging members in action (including winning strike ballots) and exerting significant industrial pressure on the employers. Why isn’t PCS agitating for similar disputes in the civil service?
IL’s motion, legal services and pay policy provide a way – vote for us
One of the more memorable slogans of the Paris revolutionaries in May 1968 was, “be realistic, demand the impossible!” The current PCS leadership has seemingly heeded the second part of this advice in their recent pay claim but decided to ignore the concurrent requirement for realism. Expressing a desire for pay coherence means nothing without a coherent plan of how it will be achieved.
IL candidates are standing for NEC elections this year as part of a coalition for change in PCS including the BLN and other independent groups. We have a manifesto and strategy that will begin to create the conditions, industrial and legal, in which PCS can fight pay disparities.
Our platform is committed to assisting and empowering reps to pursue disputes and cases over discrimination and inequalities, to build pay claims which seek to address the detrimental pay, terms, and conditions on which newer members of staff have been recruited. To support such claims, we will strengthen and open up PCS’ legal services, also a key priority of the recently re-elected, IL backed, assistant general secretary, John Moloney.
To help fulfil these ambitions, IL members have submitted motion A4 to this year’s conference. It instructs the the NEC to collect and make available granular data on pay inequalities, empower to reps to agitate, mobilise, and rise disputes industrial and legal.
But all the motions in the world will be insufficient if we continue to have a leadership set on repeating the same failed industrial strategy again and again. We need a new, radical leadership. The IL/BLN slate offers just that.
Left Unity consider themselves to be the natural rulers of PCS. Don’t take our word for it, you have it from the horse’s mouth: on 25 January, LU published their NEC nomination recommendations on their website, encouraging support for their Democracy Alliance.
In this post, LU made their position on how they think the union should operate clear:
‘Our role must continue to be, to build the confidence and aspirations of our members and to be at the vanguard’.
Vanguardism, Vladimir Lenin’s name for telling workers that they weren’t advanced to run their own revolution, isn’t really in vogue in Britain nowadays, but is apparently alive and well in LU. Members are all well and good, but it is for Left Unity to set strategy and to lead.
False narratives?
Last year, PCS members received one of the worst pay rises in the public sector, despite an unprecedented wave of industrial action and campaigning. The Left Unity majority NEC conceded despite a live strike ballot, spinning a pay cut, and the same fruitless talks about low pay we’ve had for years into a victory.
Unsurprisingly, those talks have once again led to nothing, and lay activists are left scrambling to energize a confused membership to vote for another mandate in a new dispute.
But, LU tells us, we have always been at dispute, it was only paused, and anything that has gone wrong is their opponents fault for pushing, ‘false narratives’.
In an article on their website, ‘PCS National Campaign – Left Unity leadership keeps its word’ (29 February), LU make a number of spurious claims that are worth unpicking.
Speaking about the terrible deal they ‘paused’ for, Left Unity accuse IL and the Broad Left Network (BLN), of ‘set[ting] about deliberately misleading our membership and making false claims that the campaign had been abandoned’, as well as going round telling our members that, “nothing had been won”.
Let’s be frank here – in real terms, nothing was won – despite a slight increase in the remit, members were still worse off in this financial year than they were the last one.
What we said at the time remains true – the £1,500 unconsolidated payment was unconditional and discretionary for departments, the 4.5% with 0.5% to address the lowest paid was risible and a long way from the realistic 10% we demanded. At the very least, the leadership should have demanded these offers be funded by the Treasury, as other public sector unions had done. But they couldn’t even manage that. The Cabinet Office must have been rubbing their hands.
They trumpet their consultative ballot ‘victory’ to, having worded its question so that whether you voted yes or no, the NEC would still abandon the dispute.
We said at the time that a ‘Yes’ vote in the ballot would in effect mean that nothing was done until the 2024/25 pay remit was looming. And we were proven right.
The problem with IL, according to the leadership, is that we are too pessimistic. We risk ‘demoralising’ the membership.
We are accused of going into ‘overdrive to dismiss the decision to consult members’. Bear in mind here that the NEC decided to ‘pause’ campaigning immediately after obtaining the ultimate consultative result from members for the 10% pay demand, a strike mandate with which nothing was done.
‘Leaking’
Dr Mark William’s report is sobering, but would not come as a surprise to any of our members – low pay is endemic in the civil service, salaries have been eroded in such a way that they are, in real terms, where they were two decades ago, massive increases are needed to restore them, and inequality remains a problem. IL have drawn LU’s ire once again though, by having the temerity to share its damning findings with members and the public.
This is despite the fact that the report was distributed to activists across the union by a manager’s action brief (MAB), billed as ‘extremely useful … for use in general campaigning and for agitational purposes.’
Now, LU accuse us of undermining the union’s negotiating strategy by making the data available to the government, and ‘demoralising’ members. Our members aren’t stupid – they, and the public already know civil servants are being screwed. Their subs paid for it, we’re currently asking them to vote to go on strike, why wouldn’t we share it with them?
Again, we suspect it’s because we distributed it to inform and empower lay reps, whereas LU was cautioning activists to only tell their ‘constituencies’ (members to you and I) once they’d been told what the strategy was by the NEC.
It’s LU’s union, we just pay for it.
An un-democratic alliance?
LU has been in control of PCS for 23 years now, and they have failed on their own terms again and again. They believe the PCS is their personal fief. The real reason they dislike IL so much is that we dare to question them, and have the temerity to stand in elections against them.
Incredibly, LU’s own website seemingly claims that other factions standing against them (so, contested elections) are a problem. While, they concede, ‘there is nothing wrong’ with ‘in principle … offering members a legitimate choice in the direction they want their union to take’, apparently in our case the ‘nature’ of our opposition to them renders our democratic participation an unprincipled game.
Not content with sabotaging consultative ballots, LU now believe they have the right to stand unopposed if their opponents are critical of their grand strategy.
A coalition for change
IL members are working flat out in their workplaces to win the current strike ballot. We must succeed. However, loyalty should not come at the expense of recognising the need for drastic change in the leadership of PCS.
IL is putting forward candidates for NEC as part of a coalition for change with other groups and independents.
We have a radical program for a NEC that will adopt new policies and practices, show greater energy, creativity, and engagement with members. We will put pay restoration, and an end to low pay, at the heart of our campaign, with clearly expressed pay increase demands, and a rational and democratically agreed plan of national and selective strike action and action short of a strike.
You can read our programme here, and see the candidates we endorse here.
Vote for change.
The coalition of reps and members standing in this years NEC and Group elections for positive change in the union have organised a launch meeting.
Come and hear from our Presidential and NEC candidates about our vision and how we believe we can win on pay, pensions, jobs and re-build the union.
Join the Zoom meeting gat 19:00 on the 17th of April. Link below.
PCS Independent Left 