How we can win on pay
PCS members are being hammered financially by the government’s economic illiteracy that masquerades as a deficit reduction plan. PCS policy officer Enrico Tortolano outlines how the union is campaigning against pay austerity:
“Soaring energy bills, increased travel costs, rising food prices, benefit and tax credit cuts, VAT increases, falling wages and increased pension contributions have resulted in massive levels of personal debt for PCS members.
Millions of households are heading for a long period of declining living standards unless we ensure that growth and wealth over the next decade is redistributed to the 99%. Even with a return to steady growth, it is now entirely possible living standards for a large swathe of low and middle households will be no higher by 2020 than they were in 2000.
According to the latest figures from the Commission on Living Standards households in 2020 are set to have an income 15% lower than the equivalent in 2008, a return to income levels not seen since 1993. Yet action can be taken to alter this course.
Campaigning Hard
PCS is campaigning hard on pay.
The regional pay briefing sessions have developed the themes in the recent PCS booklet Inequality: The price of austerity.
Primarily, the presentation outlined PCS pay objectives:
- An end to the pay freeze/pay cap policy
- No pension contribution increases
- Pay progression as a right for all
- National pay bargaining not local pay
- That equality concerns should be the central principle on which pay systems are based and assessed.
However, the talks go further and dispel government myths about the economy and put the pay freeze into an economic as well as an industrial context. We are told there is a deficit crisis in the UK, that we are spending beyond our means, and that the solution to this deficit crisis is to cut public sector pay.
Public spending is actually an investment, not a debt. Public servants deliver vital services. The campaign to drive down public sector pay and vilify public services is motivated by an ideological goal to privatise these vital services. The reality is that there does not need to be a pay freeze or in fact a single penny taken away from any public service, or a single job lost.
Cuts are political
The economy is actually awash with cash. The trouble is it’s all going upwards to the wealthiest 1%. Even within this 1%, inequalities are now enormous.
At the lower end of this tiny group of high earners you find people earning £120,000 a year.
But the richest thousand individuals leave them far behind. They saw their wealth increase on average in 2010 alone by £60 million. That was a 20% gain, following 25% the previous year. The rise left the chief executives with average pay of £4.2m. That was 145 times the average pay of their employees and 162 times the British average wage
So this is not a time of austerity: the pay freeze and public spending cuts are a political choice not an economic necessity. After the success of 20 October a sense of responsibility now rests with UK trade unions to urgently increase the agitation and resistance.
Get active with PCS and help end pay austerity.
