Public sector pay: Fight against the freeze rumbles into autumn

Delegates to the recent annual gathering of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Brighton overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for an escalation of resistance to the Brown government’s imposition of a de facto pay freeze across the whole of the public sector. General secretary after general secretary delivered fiery rhetoric against real pay cuts at a time of sharply rising inflation and pledged to confront the New Labour government as never before.

The composite resolution, backed by the PCS and eventually by Unison, called for industrial action coordinated between the public sector unions along with a national demonstration against the pay freeze and “days of action” under the aegis of the TUC. But, significantly, delegates on a card vote rejected an amendment from the Prison Officers Association (POA) calling for strikes to mark the days of action. Rather curiously, the voting card of the single biggest union, Unite, with a bloc vote of some 1.5 million members, could not be found at the key moment. So Unite abstained despite its delegates supporting the POA amendment in rostrum speeches.

The more battle-hardened union activists might be swift to dismiss TUC debates as an almost irrelevant sideshow, but the arguments and votes in Brighton indicate that pressure from below is percolating to the top of the union bureaucracies. The prospect of a Tory government will not, on its own, stop sections of the movement going into struggle against Brown’s government. Whether those sections can mobilise sufficient strength to drag the most right wing and weightiest elements of the union bureaucracy into a serious confrontation with New Labour is another matter.

Days before the TUC Conference, the executive of the NUT unanimously approved a motion for a new strike ballot in opposition to the framework of real pay cuts imposed by the School Teachers’ Review Body at the start of the year. For the first time the NUT executive has sanctioned a ballot calling for discontinuous action, which allows for the possibility of multiple one-day strikes or extended walkouts.

Having mounted a widely successful strike on 24 April, alongside sections of the PCS and the college lecturers’ union (the UCU), the NUT did not rejoin the fray for the local government strike days in mid-July, called by Unison and Unite, across England and Wales. Now, however, the NUT is the potential catalyst for much wider opposition to the Brown/Darling pay freeze. The NUT ballot starts from 6 October and closes three weeks later.

Meanwhile, the PCS, the union with the most left wing leadership of those centrally involved in the public sector pay battle, has called for ballots among some 270,000 of its members across the Civil Service. General Secretary Mark Serwotka has promised a one-day national strike of the vast majority of PCS members, followed by a rolling programme of industrial action across swathes of the PCS membership over the space of 12 weeks.

Arguably, PCS members, especially in the union’s bastion of the Department of Work and Pensions, have been hardest hit by the pay freeze that has come in tandem with a long-term package of massive job cuts and further privatisation.

The PCS ballot opens on 24 September and concludes on 17 October. This allows for the real possibility of a walkout in conjunction with the NUT on a much larger scale than seen in April.

Ironically, the single biggest strike thus far against the pay freeze came in mid-July and was called by Unison, with a leadership that has been the most reluctant of all to stage a fight and has not given much of a welcome to the prospect of coordinated action with other unions. On 16 and 17 July, Unison and Unite called out some 500,000 members across local councils in England, Wales and the north of Ireland in response to a “final” offer of just 2.45%. The GMB had already railroaded through acceptance of the sub-inflation pay deal.

Support for the two-day strike was uneven but the action was not a disaster, regardless of the claims made by the Unison local government organisation. What has happened since, however, has been little short of disastrous. Predictably, the local authority bosses offered new talks soon after the strike days with “nothing ruled in and nothing ruled out”. In return the leadership of Unison and Unite suspended any further strike action for an indefinite period.

Two days of meetings in August yielded a joint statement announcing a framework for further negotiations to be concluded by December. While Unison officials refuse to confirm that there is no new money on the table from the employers, they have kept members completely in the dark over the space of nearly two months – a surefire recipe for demoralisation and disillusionment when members have not seen even a nominal pay rise since 1 April.

As August drew to a close the union’s national HQ initiated a so-called consultation exercise, ostensibly to measure support for further strike action including selective walkouts by key sections of the workforce. Many activists are rightly suspicious that the consultation, has been designed to allow the Unison leadership to call a halt to the dispute.

At the same time as there is a very real danger of Unison abandoning the local government pay dispute in England and Wales, Unison, Unite and the GMB have called a further one-day strike in Scotland for 24 September over much the same issue for council workers across the 32 Scottish authorities. Perhaps the New Labour-loyal leadership prefers the prospect of conflict with the SNP minority government at Holyrood to a showdown with New Labour at Westminster.

Unison’s complete withdrawal from the fray in England and Wales would certainly be a major blow for the resistance to the pay freeze, not least because the sharp erosion of real wages for the public sector workforce over the last couple of years has created considerable bitterness, especially in the context of hefty bonuses for senior managers and the shares and salaries bonanza for many private sector bosses.

For union militants, whether in Unison or other public sector unions, there are no easy answers. Clearly, for teachers in the NUT and PCS activists the immediate priority is to secure large “yes” votes in the ballots that get underway in coming weeks, and to ensure that effective action goes ahead. The argument needs to be pressed home that while the government has shown few signs of conceding over the pay freeze, it is operating from a position of terrible weakness, and determined action over the next few months could secure real gains. The potential absence of Unison from upcoming battles cannot be allowed to paralyse the struggle against pay cuts elsewhere.

At a local level there need to be renewed efforts to establish effective links across different unions and the public sector through Trades Councils or as local affiliates of the National Shop Stewards’ Network. These bodies should serve as a means of enhancing the prospects for coordinated action in the future and ensuring that there is an element of rank and file control over disputes. They could also act to generate solidarity with other workers’ struggles. In the individual unions militants need to use the struggle to rebuild effective rank and file organisations that can prevent their leaders selling out.

The experience of the past two or more years of fighting the public sector pay freeze has provided some difficult lessons, both about the ability of the union bureaucracies to undermine struggles and the weaknesses, both organisational and ideological, of fighting lefts in the unions. The need for democratically accountable leaderships and fighting rank and file groups in the unions that can transform the unions into fighting organisations is ever more urgent.

Tue 02, December 2008 @ 17:54