This article is being posted just a few hours in advance of the official announcement of the PCS strike ballot result. We are anticipating a YES vote for action but will post the details of the actual result when we get it later tonight.
STOP PRESS: PCS have confirmed a YES vote – action pencilled in for 8-9th March
The phoney war is over. While the past year has seen
defensive struggles breaking out in particular areas – Waterford Crystal, the
Visteon factories in Enfield, Basildon and Belfast, the bin men of Leeds – the
capitalists and their representatives in the political parties have been preparing a general attack on
the working class. By walking out of talks with the Public and Commercial
Services Union (PCS), having made a derisory offer, the government has
committed itself to the next assault and one of the opening labour struggles of
the next period. At the time of writing PCS is balloting 270,000 workers in the
civil service on strike action against government plans to rip up the CSCS –
the Civil Service Compensation Scheme.
For those unfamiliar with
the CSCS it’s an agreement drawn up as an act of parliament to recompense civil
servants who are laid off. So, in the midst of the current crisis of
capitalism, having forked out mutli-billion pound rescue schemes for
multi-billion pound banks, profits soaring again and workers being told to
carry the can for all of this, the government is now trying to roll the
agreement back – in short, the cheaper it is to lay people off the more people
will then lose their jobs.
As it stands
someone aged 41, earns £24,000p.a. (a good wage in the civil service, usually
at line manager grade - more
representative would be the £16-18,000 paid at the AO/Administrative Officer
grade) with 20 years’ service would receive £50,000 as a redundancy payment
instead of the current £72,000 under the government’s initial plans. PCS
defends the scheme as a fair and decent one for members but it must be
remembered that this New Labour want to cut the redundancy payments of a
Thatcherite scheme by up to a third! (CSCS was passed by parliament in 1972,
then heavily revised by the Thatcher government in 1987).
The mere threat of strike action in the run
up to a general election has since forced the government to up this to a
£60,000 redundancy payment. The government has made much noise about fat-cat
payoffs and the ‘generosity’ of the scheme. The reality is that it is the rank
and file civil servant – office clerks, Jobcentre Plus staffers – who will be
hit hardest by this. Approximately half
of the entire civil service work force earns £18,000 a year or less. The entry
level grade, AA – frequently junior office clerks, mail sorters and data input
positions – pays £12,800 in the first year rising to £13,400 in the second; a
comparable position in the private sector pays around £15,000 a year. The fact
is these aren’t the cushy numbers they are made out to be. These jobs, however,
are the cornerstone of many towns and cities across the UK. In Sunderland
public sector jobs make up 30% of all jobs, Hastings 42%, Belfast 40%, Swansea
38%, Dundee 37%, Cambridge 43%, Plymouth 35%, Newcastle 32%, Glasgow,
Leicester, Middlesbrough 31% and Liverpool 36%.
((http://www.centreforcities.org/assets/files/09-07-16%20Public%20sector%20cities.pdf)).
Many
analysts have projected job losses across the public sector (education, health,
social services as well as civil service) amounting to a quarter of a million –
perhaps even 350,000 starting in 2011 and continuing to 2016. These cuts are
born of the same reasons for the attacks on education as well as other areas –
now the government plans to make faultless people pay a second time for the
greed of the capitalists. The working class cannot absorb an attack on this
scale. The North-east alone was only just beginning to recover from the
Thatcher assault when the recession hit. Now? Now we fight not just our jobs
but our cities, our communities our comrade workers. We strike in the defence
of Newcastle, Sunderland, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff. The
capitalists are attacking us in order to maintain their profits, their
bonuses. Ireland has shown the way! Not one job! Not one penny! Make the
bankers pay!
Click here to read Appalling Attacks on the Civil Service Compensation Scheme
