As the government prepares to cut civil service jobs, a crisis in the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) has left it unable to respond. Union branches are pushing for a Special Delegate Conference to resolve the leadership deadlock, but in the meantime no strikes or campaigns are initiated, allowing Labour’s attacks to continue unchallenged.
Government attacks
Like other public sector workers, civil servants have suffered significant erosion of their pay packets since the last economic crisis. Years of pay freezes, below-inflation pay rises and the recent cost of living crisis mean that Labour’s offer of a 5% pay rise does nothing to restore pay to pre-2010 levels.
Alongside this, the government also announced a 2% cut to admin budgets, likely leading to job cuts. These are expected to be compounded by further budget cuts announced on 30th October in the Autumn Statement.
In the last months of the Tory administration and in anticipation of another real-terms pay cut, PCS balloted its members for strike action. The results were disappointing but not unexpected. The largest departments – HMRC and DWP – failed to meet the 50% turnout threshold. Several smaller departments were, however, successful, despite the demoralising impact of the leadership’s sell-out of the 2023 pay strike.
In May, union members elected a new National Executive Committee (NEC). Left Unity was ousted after more than twenty years in power, replaced by the Coalition for Change, an alliance of the Independent Left and Broad Left Network factions with a 19:16 majority.
This decision was reinforced at the union’s Annual Delegate Conference (ADC) later that month, where delegates rejected Left Unity’s pay campaign strategy and instead voted to ‘develop a plan for sustained, targeted action across those areas with a mandate’ and to ‘maintain the mood for action in these areas while re-balloting elsewhere commences.’
The crisis at the top of the union
However, this left the union with a divided leadership. Both General Secretary Fran Heathcote and President Martin Cavanagh are loyal to the Left Unity faction, but the NEC is led by the Coalition for Change.
Since the ADC, Heathcote and Cavanagh have used their positions to frustrate the democratic functioning of the union. Cavanagh has used his position as chair of the NEC to give the NEC majority a narrow choice: either agree with the General Secretary or make no decisions at all.
At the NEC meeting on 12 August, Heathcote proposed that the union accept the government’s offer of five per cent despite the job cuts implied in it. The NEC majority’s alternative proposal to reject the pay offer was ruled out of order by Cavanagh and they, of course, voted against the GS’s paper.
Thus, very few decisions have been made since May, to the increasing frustration of union reps and members. The union’s rulebook states that ‘The management and control of the Union, and the handling of its whole affairs, shall be vested in the National Executive Committee (“NEC”).’ However, Heathcote and Cavanagh are using their positions to misapply the rules.
Special Delegate Conference
The NEC majority have been unable to break the deadlock so they have turned to the wider membership to resolve it. In September, they issued a bulletin that stated:
‘We have no choice but to call for a special delegate conference to determine who rules the union. A special delegate conference can break the impasse created by the constant vetoes of the National President… It will hear activists from across PCS putting forward clear demands on pay, jobs and services… It can act to defend union democracy.’
To trigger a Special Delegate Conference, branches representing at least 47,000 members (a quarter of the union’s membership) must write to the General Secretary to demand one. Reports are coming in of some branches already having taken this step, and more are convening emergency members’ meetings.
Bureaucracy
The crisis in PCS raises key issues of union democracy. While it is an extreme example – most unions in most situations accept the idea of ‘majority rules’ – the fact that a minority faction has been able to prevent the majority from ruling demonstrates the problem with relying solely on the union’s official, bureaucratic structures to represent members’ interests.
The Left Unity minority has control of the union’s comms. While the NEC majority had to distribute its bulletin through unofficial channels, Heathcote has repeatedly emailed the union’s full membership with misrepresentations of NEC decisions.
Left Unity not only has control of the comms but the whole union apparatus, and Heathcote has bolstered this control by creating well-paid roles for Left Unity allies who were defeated in recent elections.
She has removed administrative support from the office of the Assistant General Secretary, John Maloney of the Independent Left, and prevented him from making financial reports to the NEC.
The Independent Left has compared the behaviour of the defeated Left Unity faction to that of Barry Reamsbottom’s Moderate faction – the old union leadership defeated by Left Unity more than 20 years ago. The battle against General Secretary Reamsbottom’s constitutional coup is the ‘origin story’ of Left Unity, one they tell and retell to potential recruits. He refused to accept that Left Unity’s Mark Serwotka had won the General Secretary election in 2000 and tried to use the NEC to overturn it and used the union’s apparatus to undermine Serwotka.
It is clear that Left Unity has become the very thing they set out to destroy. This phenomenon is not specific to the Moderates, Left Unity or any other trade union faction; it is the very nature of trade union bureaucracy. This scenario is mirrored in the University College Union, where General Secretary Jo Grady overruled the NEC to ‘pause’ strike action in 2022 and, of course, in the less radical unions like GMB and Unison.
Rank and File
The Coalition for Change was elected off the back of the failed pay strikes of 2023 and union members’ anger at Left Unity’s misleadership of that campaign. However, the NEC majority was not elected on a wave of optimism and engagement – the turnout was a mere 8.6 per cent and their majority is slim.
In 2023, as Left Unity was attempting to wind down the pay campaign, rank and file activists organised to resist the sell-out. They organised a network of branches, reps and members that fought to continue and escalate the strikes. ‘PCS Say No’, like their counterparts in the NHS and Royal Mail, was defeated. Yet, the very fact that so many in PCS organised themselves independently of the union leadership and against the sell-out was an important step.
Rather than build on that model to establish a rank and file organisation capable of winning the next strike vote and resisting the next sell-out, the PCS Say No campaign fell away and activists turned to left-wing factions to overturn the Left Unity majority. Winning such positions is essential, but the past few months has demonstrated that without rank and file organisation from below these positions are precarious. The degeneration of Left Unity over the past twenty years has demonstrated the corroding effect of bureaucracy.
Now the rank and file are being mobilised in the call for a Special Delegate Conference, and all activists should urge their branches to back this proposal. If this conference were to take place, it must aim to reinforce the election results and empower the NEC majority to carry out its programme. Alongside that, it is imperative that we build a rank and file organisation in PCS – comprising the branches backing the Special Delegate Conference – that can ensure victory at the conference, mobilise to win ballots and strikes, and hold the union’s leadership to account.
