By New Worker correspondent
The three main civil service trade
unions have united to condemn Government proposals to set a low limit on pay
rises this year despite their members going above and beyond the call of
duty in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Customs and Revenue
(HMRC), the Home Office and many other departments.
At a time when
inflation is running at 2.6 per cent ministerial guidance is that pay rises
will be in the range of 1.5–2.5 per cent, which the mathematically minded will
note is an effective wage cut.
Speaking for
PCS, the largest union, General Secretary Mark Serwotka said: “It is
an outrageous swindle that ministers have embarked upon by offering our
members a pay cut in return for their Herculean efforts during
the Corona pandemic. It shows the hypocrisy of ministers who on the one
hand, applaud and praise public sector workers but do not think they are worthy
of a genuine pay rise.”
He noted that
PCS has worked hard to make sure members are kept safe and where possible
working from home to support people accessing benefits, dealing with taxes,
supporting businesses and workers in the furlough scheme, and
protecting our borders.
Further up the
food chain, Prospect’s General Secretary Mike Clancy said: “Responding
to an economic shock on this scale with more austerity and pay cuts for public
servants would be like throwing water on a chip pan fire.
“Slashing the
wages of the public servants who have helped us through this crisis would not
only be immoral, it would only make the situation worse, leading to a spiral of
cuts and unemployment that will hamstring Britain for a decade.
“Ministers must
ignore these proposals and focus government attention on saving jobs, supporting
incomes, and getting the economy firing on all cylinders once it is safe to do
so.”
Speaking for
the mandarins at the top of the tree, Dave Penman, General Secretary of the FDA
deplored that fact the ministers refused to follow their advice to make a
single Civil Service-wide offer this year instead of time-consuming individual
departmental negotiations, saying: “It is unfortunate that the Minister did not
take up our offer of a single settlement, and it is clear that civil service
pay arrangements still fall woefully behind the rest of the public sector,
having remained largely unreformed for a quarter of a century. That said, we
welcome the recognition of the extraordinary work of the civil service and
desire to see timely settlements this year.”
It
does not seem to have dawned on him that a ‘reform’ of the Civil Service under
Boris Johnson might not be entirely desirable, rather than permit a slight
lifting of the 2.5 per cent limit he hoped to breach.
