PRIME Minister Gordon Brown insisted yesterday that meagre pay rises, that are phased in and amount to a pay cut, will be imposed by the government on public sector workers.
He made his statement after the first national strike by the 32,000-strong Prison Officers Association against having their 2.5 per cent pay rise paid in two installments, 1.5 per cent in April and one per cent in November.
Wednesday’s strike, affecting 141 prisons, took place because the government had refused to talk to the union about their grievance at having the pay award phased in.
Brown said: ‘We have succeeded in tackling inflation and having a stable economy because of discipline in pay over the past 10 years. That discipline will have to continue.’ He added that staging public sector pay awards was an ‘essential part’ of controlling inflation.
The government is trying to impose pay deals of about 2.5 per cent on all public sector workers – nurses, council workers, civil servants, teachers, postal workers, firefighters and prison officers. This amounts to a pay cut in real terms as inflation is running at nearly five per cent.
Justice Secretary Jack Straw demonstrated on Wednesday what Brown means when he declared that ‘discipline will have to continue’.
Within hours of POA members beginning their lightening strike at 7am, Justice Ministry lawyers were in court getting an injunction to illegalise the strike, with its consequent threat of fines and possibly jail for union members if they defied it.
Mr Justice Ramsay said he was granting the injunction as the union had breached an industrial relations agreement barring its members from strike action. Under the Tory government strikes by prison officers were illegalised in 1994. The POA agreed to a voluntary no-strike deal in 2005 in order to get this legal ban lifted, but it withdrew from this agreement in May.
All public sector workers know they are in the same boat as POA members and their union leaders acknowledged this on Wednesday.
The civil servants union, the PCS, expressed their support for striking prison officers. Mark Serwotka, the PCS General Secretary, said: ‘We understand and support the motivation behind today’s industrial action by POA members.’
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) said: ‘The FBU has sent messages of support and FBU members have been visiting prison officers’ picket lines. The POA is fully entitled to restore union rights and normal industrial relations procedures that are available to everyone else.’
Following Brown’s statement yesterday, Colin Moses, the Chair of the POA responded. He said: ‘When we were awarded a 2.5-per-cent pay award by an independent pay review body, he (Brown) staged it. He called on Brown to ‘sit round the negotiating table’.
The POA strike, and the reaction of Brown and Straw to it, has revealed that battle lines have been drawn.
More than three million public sector workers cannot live with pay cuts and are demanding a public sector alliance to coordinate all-out strike action to smash these deals.
At the same time, the government has demonstrated that it will do anything to impose its pay cuts, including using the courts and the Tory anti-union laws, resulting in huge fines on the unions and their members facing jail.
So it is clearly time for the public sector unions to establish that alliance and call an all-out strike to smash these pay cuts and defend the unions against the anti-union laws.
However, most union leaders are opposed to such a struggle, because they know it means bringing down the Brown government and replacing it with a workers’ government that will implement socialist policies to living standards.
No union leaders were willing to say they would stand shoulder to shoulder with the POA if its funds were sequestrated.
A new leadership must be built in the unions to replace these leaders. The Workers Revolutionary Party is building such a leadership, so join it today!