Spring of Discontent Looms in Public Sector
The PCS ballot of its members on the Chancellor's pay cut and compulsory redundancy plans is a reflection of the pent up anger felt by public sector workers at the way they have been treated by the Government in recent times.
There has been a growing sense of grievance resulting particularly from the actions taken by the Chancellor.
How does any Labour Minister expect public service workers to react in the face of a concerted programme launched by the Chancellor over a two year period to cut their jobs and their pay?
How does any Labour Minister expect the PCS to react as a union when these policies are announced by the Chancellor unilaterally, without consultation and contary to repeated assurances given by Ministers about dialogue and co-operation?
As Chair of the PCS Parliamentary Group I have witnessed at first hand the way in which the Government has treated its own staff with a contempt worthy of any ruthless private sector employer.
On job cuts it should be remembered how the Chancellor announced unilaterally in the middle of his 2005 budget speech a cut of over 100,000 civil service jobs.
On pay it should also be recalled how the Chancellor announced in a speech to the City of London that public sector workers are to have a pay cut forced upon them over the next two years.
On privatisation it should be appreciated that as a result of a Treasury driven obsession with privatisation, more public service jobs have now been privatised under New Labour in 10 years than in the 18 years of Tory Government.
The result is not only an increasingly demoralised and angry workforce but also services grinding to a halt in some areas of government. Is it any wonder that when 30,000 jobs are cut in the Department of Work and Pensions there is an 30% increase in the number of pensioners failing to take up the benefits they are entitled to? The one million unopened pieces of post at Inland Revenue and the 2 million unanswered telephone inquiries in government call centres tell a story about the impact of job cuts.
In many departments low pay is endemic and the failure of Government to implement its promised pay coherence policy across the civil service has meant staff doing the same job working on widely differing pay rates. To rub salt in the wound of this grievance, the Government is now attempting in some departments to introduce local pay awards which would allow it to pay staff less in areas where pay rates are lower in the local economy.
The reason compulsory redundancies have become an issue is not because public service workers are refusing to co-operate with changes to the way services are delivered. Far from it, public sector workers have shown a real willingness to change and adapt and indeed enthusiasm for improving the way their services respond to the needs of our community. What is angering our public servants is that it has been demonstrated compulsory redundancies are avoidable with proper consultation and the effective use of redeployment within the civil service and yet the Government seems hell bent on forcing through compulsory redundancies almost as a matter of principle.
Undoubtedly the Government will seek to isolate the PCS and try and portray this dispute as somehow "political." Ministers are already being rolled out into the media to denounce the ballot.
However it is clear that the Government has significantly underestimated the strength of feeling amongst public sector workers and is in danger of drifting into a Spring of discontent.
I urge all trade unionists, especially in the public sector , to give their backing to the PCS and to press Labour MPs to assist in this campaign against cuts in jobs and pay.
The TUC' s lobby of Parliament on 23rd January provides an ideal opportunity to get this message across the MPs and Government Ministers.
I will be using every chance I get to urge the Government to pull back from this prospect of such a damaging dispute but if it comes to industrial action I will be joining PCS picket lines to demonstrate solidarity.
The Government is drifting into a Spring of discontent.
There has been a growing sense of grievance resulting particularly from the actions taken by the Chancellor.
How does any Labour Minister expect public service workers to react in the face of a concerted programme launched by the Chancellor over a two year period to cut their jobs and their pay?
How does any Labour Minister expect the PCS to react as a union when these policies are announced by the Chancellor unilaterally, without consultation and contary to repeated assurances given by Ministers about dialogue and co-operation?
As Chair of the PCS Parliamentary Group I have witnessed at first hand the way in which the Government has treated its own staff with a contempt worthy of any ruthless private sector employer.
On job cuts it should be remembered how the Chancellor announced unilaterally in the middle of his 2005 budget speech a cut of over 100,000 civil service jobs.
On pay it should also be recalled how the Chancellor announced in a speech to the City of London that public sector workers are to have a pay cut forced upon them over the next two years.
On privatisation it should be appreciated that as a result of a Treasury driven obsession with privatisation, more public service jobs have now been privatised under New Labour in 10 years than in the 18 years of Tory Government.
The result is not only an increasingly demoralised and angry workforce but also services grinding to a halt in some areas of government. Is it any wonder that when 30,000 jobs are cut in the Department of Work and Pensions there is an 30% increase in the number of pensioners failing to take up the benefits they are entitled to? The one million unopened pieces of post at Inland Revenue and the 2 million unanswered telephone inquiries in government call centres tell a story about the impact of job cuts.
In many departments low pay is endemic and the failure of Government to implement its promised pay coherence policy across the civil service has meant staff doing the same job working on widely differing pay rates. To rub salt in the wound of this grievance, the Government is now attempting in some departments to introduce local pay awards which would allow it to pay staff less in areas where pay rates are lower in the local economy.
The reason compulsory redundancies have become an issue is not because public service workers are refusing to co-operate with changes to the way services are delivered. Far from it, public sector workers have shown a real willingness to change and adapt and indeed enthusiasm for improving the way their services respond to the needs of our community. What is angering our public servants is that it has been demonstrated compulsory redundancies are avoidable with proper consultation and the effective use of redeployment within the civil service and yet the Government seems hell bent on forcing through compulsory redundancies almost as a matter of principle.
Undoubtedly the Government will seek to isolate the PCS and try and portray this dispute as somehow "political." Ministers are already being rolled out into the media to denounce the ballot.
However it is clear that the Government has significantly underestimated the strength of feeling amongst public sector workers and is in danger of drifting into a Spring of discontent.
I urge all trade unionists, especially in the public sector , to give their backing to the PCS and to press Labour MPs to assist in this campaign against cuts in jobs and pay.
The TUC' s lobby of Parliament on 23rd January provides an ideal opportunity to get this message across the MPs and Government Ministers.
I will be using every chance I get to urge the Government to pull back from this prospect of such a damaging dispute but if it comes to industrial action I will be joining PCS picket lines to demonstrate solidarity.
The Government is drifting into a Spring of discontent.
posted by John at 8:35 AM
7 Comments:
I couldn't believe what I read O'Donnell had written to civil servants. The sheer cheek of it. Stupid decision as well, not just as an employer but from the point of view of civil service efficiency.
Hopefully the ballot will go in favour. See you on the picket lines.
It's totally outrageous how the government is treating its public servants. These are workers who are providing the much needed public services to so many millions, without them the quality of services will surely slip further.
Even where workers are not being subjected to threats of redundancy (such as the South East Coast Ambulance Service), they are having their terms and conditions of employment altered unilaterally. Trade unions are being sidelined and workers ignored in pursuit of the concept of 'efficiency savings'.
It might be a cliché, but never has it been truer to say that a happy worker is a productive and efficient worker. That's how you make workers efficient, not by threats and attacks.
the Govt should not sideline PCS; it is the main civil service union
I was in it from 1995-7 and have seen how they get rid of staff via redundancies one year and then create new jobs, often applied for by people who are being made redundant from another dept suffering from cuts. When I sat the Civil Service tests there were people there in this situation (a big waste of money is the fact that they still have to sit the same test even though it's exactly the same for an job at each grade,(I sat it twice).
It is a disgrace as obviousy morale will sink to an even lower ebb than it alrady is and some of the civil service jobs are tough enough as it is on the frontline at the benefits and immigration sectors where they have to deal with a lot of stressed and desparate people being confounded by the frustrations inherent in the systemns as it is.
In 1995 when I was a PCS member there was a strike about the cutting down of staff on the immigration night shift and imposition of a very early shift instead to save on staff costs which just meant that when yo ahd to do nights you were dumped in a load of work and it was harder to recover from them in a shift systemn which was crazy anyway including earlies, lates and nights in each two week cycle.Things have not been right as far as I'm aware in the jobs held by many PCS members and the recruitment turnover must be reflecting this but is probably a bit easier to hide as most of it is done by wait for it Crapita!
Morale was so bad when I left Immigration in 1997 that people, often graduates were leaving to do aromatherapy, become travel agents, work for Mars etc etc, anything but work there and I've since heard that the staffing situation got so bad that instead of a month's mentoring new Immigration Officers had to "mentor" themselves which mus teb resulting in soem bad decisions being made.
just to add that John's point about redeployment/natural wastage is correct as in an organisation of this size there will be people willing to take voluntary redunancy for loads of reasons such as a desired career change, deciding not to come back after maternity leave etc
when I needed to claim maternity benefit in 2000-1 it took me two weeks because the person dealing with it din't work afternoons. This was fine by me but no-one told me this and there wasn't an ansafone message at the DHSS explaining this and I had just always phoned in the afternoons from work being busier in the mornings. I don't know if this was due to cutbacks but I suspect it was, I think someone should have at least been answering the maternity benefits dept phone 9-5 and a simple ansafone message could have explained when the office was actually open as with other depts such as jobcentres. By the time I got the money sorted out I hadn't been paid for quite a while as I had been temping which only paid weekly and you just don't need this sort of stress when you are pregnant and indeed too much stress can endanger your health and that of the baby. I don't think it's too much to ask for the govt to keep such depts open during office hours. To be fair the tax credit is open till late and you can go online although it's not as easy as it sounds as you have to wait for them to send you a password in the post. It's also a bit bonkers that tax credits and child benefit are completely separate offices, the latter seems to be permanently engaged as well and you get what your money from these two pots on different days of the month and in differing amounts which makes budgeting harder let alone the problemns you get if you have to pay upfront for childcare if your claim covers this element that have been well detailed in the press. That's why socialists like Tony Benn support univeral benefits yes you will get a few bad apples in the systemn but they will hopefully be found out eventually by the fraud depts which benefits offices do have and penalised and why punish the many for the few as is so often the case these days such as the Tesco sick pay scandal. They tried this at Immigration (erroneously ringing you if you were off sick for more than three days to ask you why but the unions soon pointed out that this was illegal and they stopped but nowadays, nine years after I was there this sort of employment rights violations are going on again as Mark Serwotka has detailed, even for pregnant women who are supposed to be protected in law and so on.
low pay is endemic in many departments as John says yet I don't think workers qualify for subsidised housing as do nurses etc.' and many travel impossibly long distances to work.
as for the forces housing scandal currently in the news, there is also empty forces housing which is scandalous as well as the grim state of repair we saw today
Are the PCS allowed to affiliate? Doing so might give them the influence they crave... but of course, if they think they get that better from the CNWP or SWP/wespec, who am I to judge?
yes they can if their membership votes to; think they have too many member disillusioned with New Labour to want to affiliate at the mo
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