The Coronavirus presents us with a significant threat, and it is one we need to respond to carefully, but clearly and urgently.

For most of us it is difficult to know the truth about the threat that the virus presents; while some people are responding to the hype in the media, creating panic buying, there are others who think it is no more serious than the flu.

Regardless of where our opinions lie on this as trade unionists and socialists we need to see this as a trade union and a class issue, as we would any other. The response to the crisis should be driven by the needs of the population, not profit.

While the government have currently taken limited measures to assist workers affected by the virus, allowing SSP to be claimed after day one instead of day three, we know that millions of people in the gig economy will get little support if they are forced to go sick. Our movement is rightly demanding that there should be sick pay available for these people so they don’t continue to work if they, or their family, are sick or self isolating.

In the Civil Service we know that serious preparations are being made for a major pandemic and it’s impact on our workplaces. Yet basic day to day precautions should be taken immediately. Public facing offices have been told that they can use sanitising gels and wipes, but a recent attempt to buy them through the central ordering system in one department found that none were available. We need our employer to act to protect us, not just talk about it. Local offices could hold meetings to discuss what steps we will take if we are not protected adequately.

Many offices complain that there are not enough cleaners. In many front facing offices desks are touched by dozens of hands every day, yet the desks are cleaned just once a week. We could be demanding more cleaners for our offices and should highlight the strikes by ISS cleaners in Bootle, Liverpool and Birmingham who are demanding the living wage.

In one office a member of staff was sent home because they had been in an at risk country, but the cleaning company refused to do a deep clean until the person had been confirmed with the Coronavirus. Fortunately they were clear, but had they not then staff had been exposed for no good reason except that the cleaning agency wanted to save money. We need to demand urgent deep cleaning, with staff advised to stay at home until it is done, wherever there is a possibility of a Coronavirus case.

The Chief Medical Officer has advised that in 2 weeks time people with coughs and colds may be told to self isolate. There is a possibility that schools will be closed. This will have a significant effect on our workplaces. We need to demand that everybody who has to self isolate, or to look after a family member who is self isolating, is guaranteed that no action will be taken against them. We need to demand that there is no increase in workload on those who continue in work.

We should also be raising concerns about unnecessarily exposing staff with vulnerable heart and lung conditions to the public.

As many of our services impact on the public we need to to demand that they don’t lose out. In the job centres if an office suffers from significant staff shortages or is forced to close claimants could lose benefits. This can be resolved by focussing remaining staff work on making sure claims are paid, not the trivia of meeting pointless targets.

Whichever department or office we work in our colleagues will be talking and worrying about Coronavirus. Our job as trade unionists is to work with them to make our offices as safe as possible, and put the PCS at the front of health and safety in the civil service.

At conference last year our Branch Secretary made contact with the people co-ordinating the campaign for ISS cleaners on Merseyside . We discussed if we could get our cleaners to join PCS again as they had all previously left. If we could get them to rejoin could we then get them to a position to where they felt able to take action?

I had previously been in touch with the organiser before on the subject. He kindly offered to come down to speak to the cleaners and I was able to get a few of the cleaners to meet with him.

From that initial meeting two of us agreed to go up to Bootle on 21 June to meet with Phil and some of the cleaners who had been balloted for strike action on 16 &17 July.

Since returning from Bootle I started having regular meetings with the cleaners.The important thing is that we all keep in touch now either through meetings or WhatsApp group which we set up as not all cleaners are able to get to the meetings. We have succeeded in re recruiting them to the PCS.

Staff from the Regional  Office were very supportive.They have attended some of our meetings. We had leafletting session outside the office 16 December with a few of the cleaners to try and raise their profile.

After a few false starts we finally got NDC submission accepted. We had a fantastic turnout and vote to strike.

So now we are looking forward to Monday. We will be leafletting staff from CCH to get them behind us. We will be holding a rally assisted by the Town Committee with PCS President Fran Heathcote, Midlands TUC and  councillors speaking.

This is the first time any of the cleaners have taken action, they are nervous but up for the fight.

ISS cleaners in Birmingham, Bootle and Liverpool will be on strike on Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th March.

https://www.pcs.org.uk/news/iss-members-in-birmingham-bootle-and-liverpool-vote-overwhelmingly-to-strike

26 Whitehall PCS reps and activists met with Mark Serwotka and Fran Heathcote last month to discuss how we build the national campaign in our local area.

PCS members in 2020 face a Boris Johnson government intent on attacking the civil service with Dominic Cummings plotting reorganisation and the most intense pressure ever on services and staff.

PCS is launching a campaign over the attacks expected in the near future:

• further pay freezes
• attacks on redundancy pay
• refusing to pay back the money we are owed for our pensions.

We can’t wait another 5 years and have no choice but to fight these now. We will work with other unions like the FBU who have successfully challenged pensions inequality through the courts. UCU members in universities are taking another 14 days of strike action and CWU are about to re-ballot their postal members.

Harnessing energy from the rank and file

Learning the lessons from our previous campaigns, organising and rebuilding our strength on the ground needs to go hand in hand with campaigning and can’t be done separately.

We want a radical approach to revitalising the rank and file of the union.

Of course we need a lead from the NEC and national officers, but we don’t want a top down union and are calling for campaigning organisation in every area.

It’s up to us as activists on the ground to make this happen, and we want our new reps and advocates to come to the fore.

Getting to know each other!

It had always amazed me that although there are so many PCS members and branches concentrated in the Whitehall area, there were so few links between the branches unless they were in the same group. Activists working just a few hundred yards away from each other didn’t know each other or would only meet at the national Conference if at all!

Like in many areas, the town committee had not been active for a while when PCS launched the national industrial action ballot over pay in 2018. I had just become one of the NEC Liaison Officers for London & SE and decided that getting people together to help organise around the ballot was a key part of my role.

We started meeting informally in the bar of the civil service club, later getting money for a room for more formal meetings. Because people found it useful to meet up with other activists we agreed to meet weekly during the ballot.

There was a lot of good will to help out with leafleting at other branches and organising stunts and other actions, as well as an appetite for discussion about how to take the campaign forward. That side of our networking continued into the second ballot. for example by supporting activists to go desk to desk to try and make contact with all of our members and to try different ways of organising.

A campaigning network

Our network of 150 on email and 70 on a whats app group has been built both as a forum for discussion and through taking action together over various campaigns.

Organising solidarity for strikes, planning ways to take union action over climate, opposing the far right and campaigning during the general election have all brought different activists together at different times.

We have also mapped private sector contracts in the area to roll out the outsourcing action to other workplaces, and would like to organise the new anti-racist training locally.

We now have a core network of activists that know each other and have an idea of the different strengths and weaknesses in our area.

Joint branch committee?

We have experimented with meetings in the evening or at lunchtime. Currently we are trying to encourage branches to organise their branch committees to coincide with our meetings which are 12:30-2pm, with the longer term aim of quarterly joint branch committee meetings in the area. This is something hubs as well as other areas might like to try.

Pensions campaign launch

We are launching the national campaign with a pensions campaign briefing meeting with a q&a session on pensions and a UCU striker.

We then plan to roll this out with the aim of organising similar meetings in every workplace in the area.

Candy Udwin

Candy Udwin is standing for nomination to the NEC as part of the Democracy Alliance

Click on the image to download

On 22^nd February 2020 I attended the Stand Up To Racism Scotland Conference in Adelaides in Glasgow. After attending the planning meetings on behalf of PCS, I was excited to see the finished outcome. I wasn’t disappointed.

The planning committee had decided on the name of the conference prior to the General Election, as we knew that whatever the result there would still be work to be done on tackling racism, however one result would mean a lot more work for us. Unfortunately that was the result we got.

The conference itself was well attended, despite being held on a cold, wet and windy Saturday. We started off with an opening plenary, titled “After Johnson’s election – how can we turn the tide against racism?” with a video of the first speaker from Aufstehen gegen Rassismus, which is an anti-racism and anti-fascism organisation in Germany. We also heard speakers from SUTR Scotland, RMT union, as well as a shopkeeper from Niddrie and Anas Sarwar as convener of the cross party group on tackling Islamophobia.

There were workshops – three before lunch and three after – which featured a number of speakers from various anti-racism organisations, trade unions and university students. The workshops ran at the same times, meaning we had to pick which we wanted to attend, some were in the venue, others were across the road in the Novotel. All looked interesting, however prior to lunch I attended one entitled “Leave or Remain – say no to the hostile environment”. We heard from a Glasgow University Student who had been granted indefinite leave to remain a number of years ago, however changes to this status by Theresa May has led to a long, ongoing legal battle.

We also heard from an International Officer from Edinburgh UCU, who talked about the points based immigration policy, which he said is already in place but would now include EU citizens. This would be pitting skilled workers against unskilled, however as one of the speakers had pointed out there is no such thing as an unskilled worker. There would also be a requirement of a minimum £25,000 annual salary, which is more than a large number of the government’s own staff earn. He talked about how low attendance can affect an immigrant student’s visa, how he needs to keep attendance for that reason. If UCU was to take strike action and an immigrant student’s class wasn’t cancelled due to the lecturer not being a union member, that student would be forced to cross a picket line or be marked as absent. One attendee talked about universities using GPS trackers in phones to record attendance, and that information could eventually be used by potential employers.

We heard from someone who had moved to Scotland from Nigeria to study. He was completely blind and had been promised a guide and specialist equipment. He paid 3 times that of a Scottish student, only to arrive to equipment that didn’t work and be told that he would be able to work out how to get around the university. After complaining he was thrown out, and only remains in the country thanks to UCU and Positive Action in Housing.

After lunch I attended a workshop entitled “Organising against racism in the workplace” which PCS NEC member and Left Unity West of Scotland convener John Jamieson was one of the speakers at, along with a women’s & equalities officer from Unite. John passed on solidarity wishes from Mark Serwotka, Fran Heathcote and the NEC. He spoke about how PCS tackles racism, the fight we have ahead due to the election result and how over the past few years personal cases involving racism have increased. The Unite speaker was fairly new to the role, however talked about educating members, as well as looking at the make up of workplaces and union committees and seeing how representative they are, particularly regarding BAME members. She said that she had recently got 3 BAME members more active just by approaching them and inviting them to meetings, which she found was easier than getting women involved.

We heard a story of how a Polish member of staff at a high school had sat at a table which had swastikas etched into it. The management tried to clean the desk but they were so deep into the woodwork that the table had to be thrown out. When a complaint was made, HR said it was low priority. It was pointed out that this is a hate crime that has essentially been covered up.

This workshop was particularly interesting as it was mainly trade unionists in attendance, however it could have been held over a whole day and we would still have been able to continue talking about these issues.

Other workshops covered islamophobia, antisemitism, climate justice, refugees welcome, institutional racism and cultural racism.

There was then the closing plenary, entitled “#WorldAgainstRacism – mobilising for UN Anti Racism Day demonstration”, during which we heard from speakers from Scottish Youth Climate Strike, Unison Scotland, All Under One Banner and Stand Up To Racism. This was mainly to inform attendees about the Stand Up To Racism march and demonstration in Glasgow on 21^st March 2020 – 11am at George Square.

Following this conference I have joined up to SUTR Scotland, and fully intend to become more involved. Racism is unfortunately on the rise, and we must fight back against it. We must tackle it in our workplaces and in our communities.

Liz McGachey

See also Making PCS central to anti racism in our communities

click on the image below for demo details

UCU union lecturers at Manchester University started 14 days of strikes last week picketing in heavy rain so I joined them with other trade unionists and students in solidarity. People who don’t work in universities tend to think that academics are well paid, work in lovely buildings and get paid to read books and think. But the reality for most of them is long hours, heavy workloads, poor pay and insecure contracts ─ familiar conditions to many public sector workers.

I met some academics from the Spanish state who teach degrees in Spanish. They are paid just £20,000 a year and wouldn’t qualify to come to Britain under Boris Johnson’s racist immigration plans.  It is obvious that the only people responsible for these low wages are senior management in Manchester University.

I met another young academic who would have been on strike but their teaching has been cut this semester, so they was there in solidarity.

From Monday 24 February there will be 74 colleges and universities on strike.

The strikers need solidarity from other unions and Manchester Trades Union Council has organised a UCU Strike Solidarity Day this Tuesday 25 February from 8.30am. They are asking trade unionists to join strikers and students and bring branch banners, TU flags and solidarity collections because nothing says we support you like cards full of signatures and money.

We should be building support for the UCU strikes across the trade union movement.

Meet at 8.30am, Tuesday 25 February, University Place, Oxford Road, Manchester.

https://www.facebook.com/events/478668839471454/?active_tab=about

Sarah Ensor, branch sec IOPC (pc)