CPSA calls for rejection

Scan page 14

180,000 MEMBERS of the civil service union CPSA are currently voting on the Tory pay offer made to civil service workers two weeks ago.

The CPSA's Broad Left dominated National Executive Committee (NEC) is urging rejection of the offer, worth 4½% to some and less to most, with a campaign of leaflets, town meetings, and posters. It is calling for all strike action from June 1.

The Tories have offered 4 per cent plus £70 for those on the maximum of their scale, and 32% plus £70 for those on lower points. They reckoned this was a concession to the low paid of CPSA sufficient to buy off opposition.

They may be right. But only because the national leaderships of all civil service unions, organised in the Council of Civil Service Unions (COCSU), have pursued the joint pay claim of £12 a week, presented in January this year, only in a token fashion.

Not one single union organised mass meetings to explain the claim and how it could be won.

And worse. The Tories, in top secret negotiations, have softened up the top bureaucrats to accept a modified version of the Megaw report on future civil service pay, and the offer seems to be part of the deal to encourage moves to a permanent pay bargaining system that will tie the rank and file down.

While no campaign was being waged by COCSU, the Tories got on with the job of smashing up the growing opposition from other workers to their plans, and the COCSU leadership made no attempt to link our fight for our claim with the wafer workers' steelworkers' " Or carworkers struggles.

Alone

Now the CPSA NEC is alone in campaigning for rejection of the pay offer. They face an uphill task, since all the other civil service unions have agreed to settle on the offer, or are campaigning in favour of it. (CPSA organises the lower-grace white collar workers. Other grades are organised by otiier unions, such as SCPS).

The general secretary of CPSA, Alistair Graham, is also openly campaigning against the NEC position. His regular column in the union paper Red Tape has been used both to attack the Broad Left NEC and to denounce any idea of a fight on wages.

The NEC must be congratulated on attempting to make a stand, and their campaign to win rejection must be backed. However, the only group within the Broad Left that has been prepared to produce material for the rank and file arguing how it is possible to win, and the politics of why a victory against Thatcher is necessary, has been the Socialist Caucus.