MARK SERWOTKA is attending his last TUC Congress as leader of the Civil Service union PCS after 23 years at the helm.

The union has been in the thick of the industrial struggle over the last year, bringing workers out on strike across multiple government departments. Is it a very different union from the one he won the leadership of back in 2000?

“PCS has changed root and branch. I’ve been 44 years in work, and for the first 20 I was an activist in the former union. Then it was run by an incredibly right-wing clique. It never implemented conference decisions, activists were sacked, victimised… when a merger formed PCS the ruling groups expected to create a big, right of centre Civil Service union.

“What they had misjudged was that it was a period when workers were becoming disillusioned with Tony Blair’s government. They were rejecting the notion of partnership with employers and wanted to fight low pay and privatisation.

“And we set about building a more participatory union geared towards struggle and disputes, starting with our first strike in a generation in 2004. Not under the draconian laws we have now — it was easier then.”

But PCS has managed to repeatedly beat Tory ballot thresholds to bring members out on strike even under today’s anti-union laws.

“We routinely beat strike thresholds, we’re winning disputes.”

Though strikes have resulted in higher pay rises than the government initially offered, settlements have mostly still been below inflation. 

“Yes, but it’s a monumental achievement for us, for the first time ever, through strike action to have forced a Tory government to come up with more money. That’s never happened before.

“We are not saying ‘we’ve done well, let’s settle,’ but balloted to say let’s pause strikes, because what you’ve won is not just more money but important talks.

“But if those talks don’t deliver we will reballot for strikes. And any union trying to persuade a worker to go on strike has a better chance if it can look them in the eye and say ‘when we did this last year you won £1,500’ rather than ‘we think we might win but we haven’t got an example of that since 1976.’

“And the ballot we just had with a 90 per cent majority [to support the union’s industrial strategy] shows a leadership that is in touch with the members.”

What is that industrial strategy?

“We’ve had so many strikes in the past that if they were national, hadn’t made breakthroughs.

“We were never able to take the level of industrial action needed to really move the government, because these were generally one-day, set-piece political strikes.

“And when we asked ourselves can we deliver an RMT or CWU-type prolonged strike by everyone for 15, 20, 25 days, the conclusion was our members probably couldn’t, because of the poverty we represented, our members couldn’t sustain it.

“So we compulsorily raised union subs by £5 — £3 for the lowest paid — and that enabled us to pay out millions in strike pay.

“And we combined set-piece action by everyone to get political coverage, with recognition that if you then just go back to work it won’t deliver, because we’re not train drivers who can stop all the trains on a day, with a lot of Civil Service work it takes a while to have an impact.

“So we went for prolonged, all-out strikes by small groups of members that could be funded through everybody’s levy. And that started to really hit them in the Home Office, in the Passport Office, in the DVLA and so on.

“It sent the government a clear message: we could sustain this for months.”

The other key factor in shifting government was the number of sectors where workers were in dispute simultaneously — at the height of the strike wave walkouts were occurring in health, education, transport and the postal service as well as in the Civil Service.

Serwotka has often blamed a lack of union co-ordination for the movement’s failure to halt the tide of cuts and privatisation. Has that changed in the last year?

“There was more co-ordination this year though some of it was accidental, it just happened to emerge!

“Because more unions took action together the outcomes were better but I think they could have been better still.”

Does he see that as a role for the political left, organising across unions to promote common strategies?

“The more that socialists work together across unions the better. Even just sharing experiences and understanding the thinking going on in other unions is valuable.

“But to have real influence the left must root itself in the membership of its own union. When that disappears you see the politics of sectarianism and people putting the interests of their organisation above the members, and we have seen that in PCS in recent months.”

Serwotka is thinking of those who called the settlements a sell-out and rejected the union’s industrial strategy.

“But in our recent vote they got 9 per cent. If you were looking at social media you’d have thought they were going to win.

“And they were vicious and sectarian in a way that undermines the union. People on social media saying we were settling because I wanted a seat in the House of Lords! It’s preposterous — the only seat I want is in Cardiff City Stadium!

“Some of the biggest critics of what the union was doing were activists who didn’t get over the threshold in any of their ballots.”

Serwotka notes that the most recent PCS conference was “the most fractious we’ve had in years, and it shows that when there isn’t an active right wing, people can take things for granted and attack others on the left rather than working for unity.

“That was a tragic thing in the identities debate in recent years, that too many people wanted there to be winners and losers, and they depicted everything as black and white when it was more complicated.

“That only benefits those who want to divide us. There has been too much weaponisation of identity politics.

“I think that is beginning to turn around, but that is only because there were brave women who have been prepared to speak out over four or five years, women who have been victimised, sacked, hounded out of trade unions — for standing up for women’s rights.”

Such internal divisions risk undermining labour movement unity at a time when unions need to speak and act together to counter the rightward march at Westminster.

“Britain is broken, it needs radical surgery, and we’ve got a Labour opposition that is fiscally conservative, wants to keep the two-child benefits cap, talks about tough decisions to hold down spending but won’t make the tough decision to tax the rich.

“Keir Starmer’s keynote speech this week was given to a private dinner [of the TUC general council], he didn’t address the conference, he sent Angela Rayner. He doesn’t want to be associated with the labour movement.”

Increasingly unions themselves are having to campaign for the political change not on offer from Labour. Is he confident PCS will keep at it once he’s retired?

“I hope the union will be led by Fran Heathcote and Paul O’Connor and they have been a really important part of what we have achieved to date.

“Turning PCS into a fighting union, starting to win disputes, these aren’t my achievements, but the result of teamwork, and both of them have been integral to it, will build on it and we will be a stronger union still.”