Gordon Brown could face a series of co-ordinated public sector strikes by millions of civil servants, postal workers, council staff, teachers and health workers if he becomes prime minister, union leaders warned on Wednesday.
Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, the largest public sector union, has called for a meeting with other public sector unions to co-ordinate industrial action against pay and government reforms.
He was responding to an approach by the Public and Commercial Services union, representing more than 200,000 civil servants, which has already staged two one-day strikes this year disrupting court proceedings, benefit and employment offices, museums and passport and customs offices.
Leaders of some of the biggest unions also met earlier this week to discuss the possibility of co-ordinating support candidates in the Labour leadership elections in a bid to exert greater influence over government policies.
Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, said that threat of a public sector wide strike by workers in 2005 had forced ministers to climb down over plans to raise the age at which public sector staff could retire on full pensions. He attacked the chancellor for supporting public sector reforms and imposing a pay award worth an increase of only 1.9 per cent this year for many public sector workers.
“If these measures had been imposed 15 years ago by Norman Lamont [the former Conservative chancellor] Gordon Brown would have opposed them,” he said. “It is to this government’s eternal shame that a Labour government elected in 1997, telling us that things can only get better, has presided over co-ordinated and simultaneous attacks on their own workforce that would have made Mrs Thatcher blush.
Mr Brown’s takeover as prime ministers is already likely to coincide with a flurry of strikes and industrial action over pay. The Royal College of Nursing was due on Wednesday afternoon to decide whether to ballot nurses for industrial action over pay.
A ‘yes’ vote would pave the way for the first nationwide action by the RCN since the organisation was formed in 1916. Postal workers are also balloting for a strike after the Communication Workers Union last week rejected a 2.5 per cent pay offer from Royal Mail. It would be the first national stoppage by postal workers since 1996.
A national conference organised by Unison last month voted to ballot health workers for industrial action “up to and including a strike” while delegates at National Union of Teachers conference backed a call for a public sector wide one day strike over pay.
Mr Prentis in a letter to the PCS, to coincide with the civil service union’s annual conference in Brighton, said that co-ordinated action by unions would have a much bigger impact on government. The PCS’s Mr Serwotka said that he would prefer any action to be co-ordinated by the TUC but that his union was also prepared to work separately with other unions.
The government, he said, had “undertaken more privatisation of civil service work than the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major combined. They are now seeking to impose cuts on living standards of some of the lowest paid civil servants in the UK.”
He claimed that plans to allow charities and religious organisations “to deliver the welfare state to the long term unemployed and single parents” would “turn the clock back 100 years”.
