‘We will use all the means at our disposal to fight,’ PCS civil service union General Secretary Mark Serwotka declared yesterday.
He accused the government of ‘breathtaking arrogance’ after Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced the Tory-Lib Dem government plans to change the law and slash redundancy pay to hundreds of thousands of civil servants it intends to sack.
Serwotka said: ‘PCS successfully proved that it was unlawful to impose cuts to rights that staff have earned through their service, so the government’s complaint that this has held up negotiations is just a smokescreen to allow it to force on civil servants worse conditions than anywhere else in the public sector.
‘Following the High Court ruling we wrote to the Cabinet Office offering further negotiations to agree a fair and legal deal, so Francis Maude’s announcement today betrays a breathtaking arrogance and a contempt for his own workforce.’
He warned: ‘If this so-called “fair and progressive” coalition government get away with this, it would lay waste to communities across the UK where people rely on the services that our members and other public servants provide’.
He added that ‘if ministers are determined to make low-paid public servants pay for a crisis caused by bankers and traders, we will use all the means at our disposal to fight them’.
Maude announced that the maximum payment to those forced into compulsory redundancy will be 12 months’ pay, while those taking ‘voluntary’ redundancy would get 15 months’.
In a letter to the Council of Civil Service Unions, Maude said the proposed steps were ‘necessary’ due to the PCS union’s ‘unilateral action in contesting the previous government’s scheme’.
Under the scheme Maude is abolishing, redundancy payments are calculated according to length of service and age, with the average being the equivalent of three years’ salary.
Yesterday Unite and the GMB, whose leaderships both agreed with the previous Labour government to the abolition of the scheme, condemned the Tory-Lib Dems for their ‘betrayal’.
Unite represents 15,000 workers at the MOD. It stated that 500 of its members at St Athans maintenance hangar ‘now face substantial cuts in their redundancy pay, with the site due to close in the near future.’
Sharon Holder, GMB National Officer, said: ‘These new proposals are far worse than the changes to severance terms and conditions that were agreed by GMB members and introduced earlier this year until they were struck down in the High Court.’
She added: ‘I will now go back to our members and consult them on this issue. I will also report on these new proposals to our Central Executive Council which meets next week.’
