How public sector union leaders fought to lose over pay

In November the National Union of Teachers (NUT) called off any action on pay. Following a ballot that had run over the October half term holiday, the Executive of the union decided that the turnout was too low to carry strike action, despite the fact that the majority had voted “yes”.

The following day the civil servants union, the PCS suspended their action on pay. In the same month Unison council workers in Scotland narrowly voted to accept a two-year below inflation pay package with 3% in the first year and 3.5% in the second. This was despite a recommendation from the Scottish leadership to reject the deal. This was the last dying ember in terms of Unison of any kind of campaign of action over pay in 2008.

So, why did the public sector pay campaign fall apart?

The campaign in Unison was a disaster almost from the beginning and was beset by what had happened last year. In 2007, rather like the NUT, Unison had a second ballot over the same pay offer of 2.75% and there was a narrow vote in favour of strike action. It was 52%-48% on a turnout of a little under a quarter, broadly similar to the recent NUT ballot.

But this result was against the backdrop of the national postal dispute, where there had been several days of industrial action by CWU membership in Royal Mail, which almost certainly meant that a significant proportion of people probably didn’t get their ballot papers. However, the dispute was called off. The 2.75% offer was imposed by the employers and that helped set the stage for an even worse defeat this year.

The 2008 Unison pay campaign in local government started very late in the day. The settlement date is the 1 April, but the ballot result wasn’t declared until after the conference in the second half of June. Members were told time and time again you will have to strike until the cows come home if you are going to extract any significant concessions from the employers, a stance that demoralised people.

In contrast the 2008 NUT campaign seemed to rapidly achieve success with a national strike on 24 April, when teachers were joined by PCS and college and university staff in the UCU. The problem here was that the original ballot had only called for a one-day strike. This meant a second ballot was necessary to continue the campaign. Since clearly no one believed the government would cave in after one day of strike action, the question is why did the leadership go for such a limited ballot?

In May and June the debate began over when and how to organise the next ballot. Time slipped by and the summer holidays loomed. The Executive decided that it was not possible to ballot and take action before the end of term and the momentum was lost. The next ballot did not happen until the autumn.

Everyone, correctly, wanted the widest possible action involving as many unions as possible. Publicly announced by Gordon Brown, the general attack on pay demanded a collective response, rather than individual unions fighting on their own.

However, the union bureaucrats ensured the dates never coincided  – apart from the action on 24 April. It is quite clear that there has been no serious attempt to coordinate a fightback against a government that has taken on the unions one by one. The demand for unity has been used as an excuse for inaction. The national union leaderships have been an absolute disgrace.

At the same time, however, what happened during the course of 2008 was not just a question of bureaucratic treachery and betrayal. It also revealed that there are some serious basic weaknesses in terms of union density, stewards' organisation and basic trade union consciousness across the public sector.

The employers in the London local authorities are doubtless aware that Unison density is often below 50% of the workforce. And in both local government, the NHS, and to a large degree the civil service, the growth of unorganised workforces and outsourcing of frequently strategic sections of the workforce have made it that much harder to mount effective industrial action.

There is a real gap in terms of trade union consciousness between the white collar, public sector unions and blue collar unions. This isn’t to let the leaderships off the hook, but there is a big contrast between the results in the firefighters union (FBU) in 2002-3 when they struck over their pay and the recent Unison and NUT campaigns. The FBU had a turnout of more than 80% and a similarly huge ‘Yes’ vote. Last year the CWU had a turnout of around two-thirds of the membership and a substantial majority for action.

Whereas in the case of the PCS, NUT or Unison participation rates rarely exceed  one-third of the membership. It seems that in white collar public sector unions there is only a small proportion of the membership which has the kind of trade union consciousness which is still evident in industrial unions like the FBU and RMT and in the post office with the CWU.

So what should militants be doing to address these issues in public sector unions?

In Unison the left is poorly represented in the union leadership at a national level, with fewer than 20 of the 67 seats on the national executive held by “lefts” in the very broadest sense, and the strength of the left varies dramatically between and within regions. The unelected, unaccountable apparatus of the union wields a remarkable degree of power. Against this background there is also an atmosphere of politically motivated witch-hunting in Unison, which has already seen the expulsion of several important left activists including Tony Staunton and Yunus Baksh, and charges brought against the four London-based Socialist Party militants.

Still, there are signs that the left could do rather well in the upcoming elections for the whole of the national executive in the spring of 2009, given there is undoubtedly a substantial minority that is totally fed up with what has happened over pay, among other issues in the past couple of years.

There is, however, a tendency, most explicitly voiced by but not limited to the Socialist Party, that argues that if only the left takes over the executive all will be well, with the converse being that if the current leadership retains a majority on the executive all is gloom and doom for the foreseeable future.

Militants in Unison should look to the experience of the NUT to see the danger of such a strategy. The current acting General Secretary of the NUT, Christine Blower, is a member of the Campaign for a Democratic and Fighting Union and a former election candidate for the London Socialist Alliance. The CDFU, alongside the Socialist Teachers Alliance, now have a majority on the Executive. Yet, as the NUT pay campaign graphically illustrates, there are serious issues around the accountability of those “lefts” who militants work so hard to get elected. Only three Executive members voted to go ahead with the strike action after the last ballot. The other “lefts” voted against following the majority “yes” vote from members.

The problem with the electoral strategy – broad leftism – is that it is counterposed to building the strength of the rank and file, re-building the union at the base, both organisationally and ideologically.

So what could have been done by those on the left – in leaderships and at all levels within the unions -to secure victory in this year’s pay campaigns? To begin, especially in the wake of the policies on public sector pay adopted at successive TUC conferences, we should have demanded that the various leaderships agree on co-ordinated claims across the component parts of the sector, insisting on a single date for settlement of all claims with no union agreeing a deal until all unions had settled and moving towards a date for an effective day of generalised strike action to escalate the struggle.

Of course, the existence of Pay Review Bodies in the NHS and teaching complicates matters, but there should be a clear demand for the scrapping of these bodies and a return to collective bargaining at the bare minimum.
Clearly, we needed more effective links at a local level between militant activists at rank and file level in the various unions committed to democracy and class struggle. But the fact that by and large those were not forged, highlights the problems that persist in terms of the political limitations of the left in the unions.


 

Wed 10, December 2008 @ 17:31