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Britain’s biggest civil service union was on the verge of collapse following Conservative-led changes to how its members paid their union dues, Byline Times has been told.
But the 190,000-strong Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union is now set to receive millions in settlements from the Government following a ten-year court battle.
The union lost between 35,000 and 50,000 members in the wake of Conservative-Lib Dem coalition Government scrapping the so-called ‘check off’ rules in a number of major departments, including HMRC, the Home Office, and the Department for Work and Pensions in 2014.
Until then, the system meant workers’ union subs were paid directly through people’s pay packets. When that ended, the union faced a desperate scramble to get tens of thousands of staff to sign up to Direct Debit.
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The union argued the move tore up pre-existing agreements unilaterally, as a “naked attempt by the coalition Government to bankrupt our union, thereby denying PCS members a collective voice in the workplace”.
The move to scrap the system of paying union subs via employers’ payroll followed major strikes in 2011, led by the PCS union, over reforms to civil service pensions.
On Wednesday, the union won a decade-long legal battle, securing a unanimous victory in the Supreme Court against three Government departments that stopped workers paying their union dues directly from their salary.
The victory opens the door for the union to claim back that money, plus legal costs, through compensation. The total is likely to be in the tens of millions, since a previously-made settlement with just one department led to a £3 million payout.
PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote told Byline Times: “We’re incredibly chuffed with the result and the fact that it was unanimous. It will never be overturned.
The Tories didn’t do it by accident. It was an attack on us to weaken our effectiveness, because we were a union that was taking action. We were a union that was challenging their narrative around austerity, and we were the union that pursued that pensions dispute, which got all unions striking together in 2011
Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary
Heathcote added: “I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing any money anytime soon, but it does at least mean that they’ve lost big time, and the fact that we’ll be able to use that money to build the union is quite ironic, really, given what they tried to do.”
Deliberate Attack
Heathcote has revealed how the changes proved an “existential threat” to her union, explaining: “There was no doubt that it was done as a way to finish us off. We had to cancel a lot of things: we cancelled elections, we cancelled our conference, we cancelled our affiliations to a lot of organisations.
“It was designed to break us, and clearly it really hurt us.”
The Unite union, then led by left-winger Len McCluskey, were “brilliant” in supporting them, Heathcote says. “They waived the rent on our regional offices for the period of time it took us to try and rebuild the union…The unions rallied around us and gave us solidarity.”
Another thing that made a key difference in trying to survive was getting lost members signed back up. It was a huge operation.
“Initially, we targeted all our staff resources in the Home Office, and said: ‘Go and recruit in the Home Office’.
“Then check off was scrapped in the Department for Work and Pensions. So we were taking people away from the Home Office to say: ‘Go and organise in DWP’”. The DWP is the second biggest Government department, with around 85,000 staff.
“Then came HMRC – the third-biggest Government department with around 68,000 staff.
“All that time, we’re moving our staff resources around to try and deal with all these attacks at once. It was an existential threat…We’ll be eternally indebted to Unite who waived the rent for our [regional] offices,” former DWP worker Heathcote told Byline Times.
While some staff used the change as a chance to cancel their union membership, there were a lot of members who were “really, really angry” at what the Government was doing, and realised the only way to “teach them a lesson” was for the PCS to survive, Heathcote says. For others, it took a lot more time and effort: “It was painstaking work.”
“In a Job Centre of 30 people, [recruiting] is one thing. But when you’re in a Benefits Office of five thousand staff, walking around with a piece of paper, crossing each worker off individually as they sign up – it’s not easy, and it really tested our levels of organisation,” she adds.
However, Heathcote says that ten years on, the union has “come out of it stronger”. It means the Government no longer knows the union’s strength in each department, and it meant the union had to strengthen its relationship with every single office and its reps. There will be no going back to the old check-off system now.
While membership numbers are about 100,000 down on their 2010 levels of 290,000, the union appears to be growing again.
There are around 510,000 civil servants across the UK, with the vast majority working in ‘operational’ front line roles, from customs agents to border officials and Job Centre staff.
The Supreme Court win has received little attention, with Heathcote saying the Government is reluctant to talk about it.
“I’ve seen a message from one [Government] chief executive to his trade union side this morning, saying, ‘This department will not be publicising the result.’ And I thought, ‘No, I bet you’re not…’”
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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.
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