Yesterday (June 15th), the Public and Commercial Services Union (the PCS) announced the results of a ballot of it’s members. They were asked whether they wanted to go on strike over changes to public sector pensions that would mean increased contributions (this PCS article goes into more detail). These changes were proposed after recommendations made in a report done by Lord Hutton.

Other organisations support the result of the vote, but I question it’s legitimacy.

PCS logo

Found on Google Image Search (Actual source - Vimeo)

The PCS ballot

The following is a section from this press release:

“In a national ballot 61.1% of PCS’s quarter of a million civil and public service members voted for a strike and 83.6% voted for other forms of industrial action, on a 32.4% turnout.

Meeting this afternoon, PCS’s national executive committee confirmed the union will prepare for a strike on Thursday 30 June and will work with the National Union of Teachers, Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the University and College Union to co-ordinate any action. This will be followed by a month-long ban on overtime.”

Unfortunately, the wording of the opening paragraph is very mangled. It notes that there was a 32.4% turnout, but it also states that 61.1% of all members voted in favour of strikes. This made no sense, so I contacted their press office and confirmed that it was 61.1% of 32.4% who were in favour.

However, lets just think about that for a second. Assuming that they do have 250,000 members, then a 32.4% turnout would be 81,000 people. 61.1% of that is 49,491. That means that a relatively small number (just under 1 in 5) were actually in favour of industrial action. The majority of the membership were apathetic. This indicates they didn’t care about strikes and therefore weren’t particularly annoyed about changes to pensions. If they were really annoyed and didn’t think strikes were the solution – they would have voted ‘no’.

How can the PCS legitimately go on a day long strike and stop overtime for a month based on such a massive wave of apathy?

Nick Pickles correctly points out that the collective percentage of votes that the Coalition parties claimed at the general election is dramatically higher than the percentage of people wanting to strike. He has a quote from Mark Serwotka (PCS General Secretary), where he says that it’s a “clear majority in favour of a strike”. The only thing that’s clear is that he has ignored the very low turnout.

The support of other unions

Occasionally, other trade unions will support industrial action in some way. In this case, the PCS (quickly) received ‘support’ from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (the ATL) and the National Union of Teachers (the NUT).

According to their website, the ATL presently has 160,000 members. In this press release, they noted that 83% voted for a strike. However, that was only 83% of a 35% turnout. 35% of their membership is 56,000 people and 83% of that is 46,480 (close to the same amount of PCS members who were in favour). This low number is not representative of the feeling of their membership.

This was part of their press release about the issue of pension changes:

“NUT members have voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action to defend teachers’ pensions, with a massive 92% in favour of strike action.

We will be campaigning alongside the ATL who have had similar strong results in their ballot of members.

Both NUT and ATL members will take strike action on 30th June.”

The NUT don’t actually tell you what the turnout was for the ballot though, which is a clever move as it makes the ’92%’ seem a lot more representative. However, after calling the NUT I found out that the current membership is roughly 308,000 and the turnout was about 40%. That means 123,200 voted (noticeably more than the other two unions that I’ve mentioned). It also means that the ’92%’ figure I mentioned earlier equates to roughly 113,344. Clearly, that is more than the combined total of the ‘in favour’ people at the ATL and PCS.

Altogether, that means 209,315 people out of the 260,200 that voted wanted strikes. However, that’s 260,200 out of a combined total membership of 718,000. 63.76% of the three unions (combined) were apathetic.

The Government

Daniel Korski (Coffee House) beleives that the unions will be a good quality opponent for David Cameron and more challenging than Ed Miliband. He also thinks that:

“It will allow the government to reiterate its economic plans, and stand up for private-sector workers who, on the whole, feel that public-sector employees have a pretty cushy deal, not least in their final-salary pension schemes.”

I’m not sure how many private sector workers would agree with that statement, but there will be some.

Finally…

A one day strike will cause some disruption (for schools, children, parents and employers), but only in the short term. The same can be said for the month of no overtime. Of course , there could be ballotts for more industrial action if the unions feel that they are necessary.

The government have shown no indication that they will change their stance, so it’s likely that any strike action will be ineffective.

I have nothing against the concept of trade unions as they have stopped many employees from being unfairly treated over the years. However, I do have a problem with senior members who claim that there is a majority of people who support industrial action when the turnout is so noticeably low. The examples I have stated above demostrate that some of the union executives are out of touch with their membership and that they do not do enough negotiation first. In short, they are too reactionary.

So, what do you think?