Civil servants prepare to join pay action

3 Jul 08
Representatives of up to 100,000 civil servants were this week discussing plans to stage walkouts over pay to coincide with the local government strike on July 16-17.

04 July 2008

Representatives of up to 100,000 civil servants were this week discussing plans to stage walkouts over pay to coincide with the local government strike on July 16-17.

The Public and Commercial Services union has also confirmed that it will hold a strike ballot of all 280,000 civil service members in mid-September – when members of the National Union of Teachers will also vote on industrial action.

PCS representatives from the Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Transport and its agencies were due to meet on July 3 to discuss whether to join this month's local government action, a move 'strongly urged' by the union's national executive committee.

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS, said: 'If ministers don't respond to our concerns, and change the disgraceful policy of driving down the living standards of public sector workers, it is clear to many trade unionists that public sector unions must unite and campaign together.'

The PCS wrote to Chief Secretary to the Treasury Yvette Cooper in June, seeking 'changes to the Treasury's remit guidance that will permit increases to basic pay of at least the level of inflation measured by RPI', but had not received a positive response, a union bulletin says.

The escalation of the PCS pay campaign came just days after Unite confirmed that its 40,000 local government members would join around 600,000 Unison members on strike next month, after a three-to-one vote in favour. Members of both unions have rejected a 2.45% pay offer.

Unite national secretary Peter Allenson echoed Unison's earlier signal that workers were digging in for a major battle, saying his members had voted for 'sustained action' to defend their living standards.

Speaking at the Local Government Association's annual conference in Bournemouth on July 1, LGA chair Sir Simon Milton said: 'We all agree that hard-working staff should be fairly rewarded for their commitment – at every level. But after the toughest grant settlement in a decade, we cannot pay what we do not have.'

Pay analysts Incomes Data Services this week reported that private sector settlements were running on average a little over 1% above those in the public sector, at 3.8% compared with 2.7% for the three months to the end of May.

 

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