New Labour faces no let up in industrial unrest by public sector workers in 2004. Last year we saw firefighters, postal workers and council workers all in dispute.
By the end of January 2004, over 100,000 Civil Servants may be on strike seeking better pay from the Government. The PCS (the civil servants' union) is balloting workers in several government Departments (Department for Work and Pensions, Home Office, Department for Constitutional Affairs etc.) for industrial action after they have been subject to derisory, imposed pay offers. • PCS members in the largest Civil Service department, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) have already rejected the employer's pay offer by 40615 to 2974.
This spectacular ballot result caused the employer to withdraw from its offer a plan to reduce performance pay for employees who have more than five days off (for anything other than bank holidays and annual leave).
This plan was aimed at lowering sickness leave, but would have penalised workers on jury service, maternity leave and Territorial Army duty as well.
Although this u-turn by the employer is welcome, it does not alter the fact that overall the money it is offering remains unacceptable.
Anyway the PCS was confident it would have been able to legally challenge this aspect of the offer and seeks to scrap discriminatory performance pay.
Bosses in the DWP and other departments claim they can offer no more money to civil servants, due to a Treasury cap of 3.7% on pay increases.
Although Gordon Brown may claim inflation is below 3.7%, workers face higher increases than 3.7% in their taxes, transport costs and utility bills, etc.
Also departments are paying offers late or in stages, reducing the real amount workers receive. As in the 1979 Winter of Discontent, a Labour Government is trying to freeze workers' wages and workers are fighting back.
Blair claims one of his top priorities is to improve the public sector. However little of the money going to government departments is reaching the pockets of civil servants, whilst private computer companies are paid fortunes to create chaos with our passports, tax credits and courts
Icy: they are fed up with Blair's reactionary reforms of the public sector. PCS members in the DWP are as angry about staffing cuts, office closures and extended opening as they are about their poor pay.
As a result of such policies, Blair is beginning to lose the political support of public sector workers that helped New Labour achieve its recent electoral successes. If a civil service strike goes ahead, the divide between New Labour and civil servants will deepen.
Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the PCS, has been a prominent advocate of the need for a new political force to the left of Labour, firstly by supporting the Socialist Alliance, and now by backing RESPECT.
Soon PCS members will be asked agair whether they want a political fund.
Hopefully members will support such a fund and begin to use it in support of RESPECT candidates fighting for PCS policy. New Labour has lost any claim to union support and funds.
Since the hard left has taken control of the PCS Executive, it has sought to coordinate action by civil servants across departments. It has held a series of meetings up and down the country on pay and pensions open to all PCS members.
In 2004 the union wishes to submit one pay claim to the government for the whole of the civil service. Yet a January strike will be the first real test of its strategy of linking up civil servants' struggles.
It must ensure the different sections of it membership in dispute work together to pu maximum pressure on the government.
As this struggle is so important, the whok union must be mobilised to ensure it is won. T he left must also ensure union:
work together over pay. How muct more could be achieved if firefight ers, postal workers, council workers an civil servants struck together over pay?
The Trade Union Convention of the Lef offers union activists the opportunity to dis cuss future joint action and the political fund
New Labour is trying to reduce a budge deficit. Public sector workers should not foo the bill for the increasing cost of the Iraq war We should make Blair pay a political price for his attacks on British and Iraqi workers.
Trade unionists should support strikin civil servants and build a political alternative to New Labour.
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10 socla Asylum rights and anti-fascism ice January 2004