Civil Servants Prepare for Battle

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Box 5277, London WCIN 3XX. Printed by Morning Litho Printers Ltd., Published by Folrose Ltd for the Workers Socialist League, BM Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Workers Socialist League.

Monday 9 March sees the start of what will certainly be a long and bitter fight on pay by half a million trade unionists in the civil service.

On that day all nine civil service unions are calling for a national one day strike and it is clear that there will be an almost total shut-down of government departments.

Even Lord Soames, Minister for Civil Service Affairs, looks like being fairly lonely that day as 149 out of 150 union members in his office will be out (an unprecedented situation in a normally apathetic work place).

Little room

• The government has upped its 6% offer by an insulting 1% in the latest round of negotiations, leaving the trade union bureaucracy with little room for manoeuvre at this stage on the claim for 15% (with a £10 a week underpinning for the lowest paid).

At the heart of the fight will be the 220,000 strong CPSA, covering the main low puid grades of clerical officers and assistants, the SCPS (representing mainly lower management grades) and the Inland Revenue Staff Federation (IRSF).

Each union is also beginning a membership levy to provide 85% strike pay to members in selected centres called out on extended strike, and area coordinating committees are being given special powers to organise local disruptive action.

Watch leaders

But the civil service workers on the picket lines on 9 March must keep a close watch on their leaders in the weeks ahead.

There is an immediate danger that the Council of Civil Service Unions will avoid the kind of action which will bring swift victory and will be looking to exhaust the membership through protracted piecemeal forms of action.

In the IRSF, for example, staff at the two key computer centres voted by an 80% majority to come out immediately but are being "held back in reserve"

Widespread action in the tax offices would obviously hit the government square on in a way that action in the more traditionally militant DHSS cannot do.

However, the strength of feeling in the men bership has clearly been given a boost by the miners' victory and by the determination of the water workers.

The problems for the bureaucracy were ably summed up by a leading CPSA right winger this week when he bitterly complained that Thatcher had "achieved in one blow what the Trots haven't achieved in five years"!

Strikes sheer Socialist Press pamphiet outlining programme of action against the Tory offensive.

Price 45p including postage from WSh, BM, BOx 5277, London WCIN 3Xx. dynamite for the civil service union leaders because members can now begin to see real possibilities for resisting the cuts in all the various government departments:

Civil service union activists must work to extend the strike and to focus power in the local joint committees. Much is at stake in this pay campaign-a defeat for the government on the 6% cash limit in the belly of its own apparatus would be a major boost to the drive to overthrow Thatcher.

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