‘I’ve Never Known It So Bad’: Civil Servants on Why They’re Ready to Strike
This year's pathetic 2% pay offer for civil servants came hot on the heels of a decade of 'pay restraint'. It's not a one-off from the government, it's a pattern – and industrial action is the only way to change it.
‘My colleagues in the office were recently discussing who would cave and put their heating on first,’ says Lucy. ‘I’m not sure if this is a game or a bet, but I do know there are absolutely no winners.’
Lucy has been a civil servant for the past six years, working in the same department in a number of roles. This—treating a warm home as a luxury to be held off to the last possible minute—is the bleak reality in which she and her colleagues find themselves as a gloomy winter sets in.
But in civil service jobs, they’re not anomalies. Earlier this year, the Public and Civil Service union asked its members working at the Department for Work and Pensions to share testimonies about how the cost of living crisis was affecting them. The result was a document of widespread struggle.
‘To work five days out of seven and not feel able to light my flat or have a hot shower is the unimaginable reality in which I have found myself,’ said one respondent, Emma, while another, Clare, said she had struggled to afford her children’s school uniforms before the start of that term. Kate, a work coach, described having to give up her one-bedroom flat and move into her friend’s, where she would share a room with that friend’s toddler, because she could no longer afford to live alone.
Andrea took partial retirement at 50 due to her health. ‘After many years of deciding if I feed myself or pay for my medication, I now have the extra worry of actually turning my oven on, never mind the heating,’ she told her union. ‘It’s a pretty miserable existence to be perfectly honest. I have never known it be so bad. I know I’m not alone.’
Facing the Crisis
‘It’s a common misconception that we have it easy, or that the benefits of the role make up for poor pay,’ Lucy explains, when asked about her civil service work. The reality, as she describes it, is that benefits are being watered down year on year. ‘When you combine it with real-terms pay cuts, the perks of the job are few and far between.’
This year, ministers announced that civil service pay rises would be capped at an average of 2% for the year ahead: against double-digit inflation, a massive real-terms pay cut. Ellie, another civil servant, says managers expect her and her colleagues to be ‘grateful for crumbs.’
But for Joanne, who’s been in the civil service for more than twenty years, that pay cap came as no surprise. ‘We’ve been in this position for years,’ she says: as PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka wrote in Tribune earlier this month, civil servants haven’t seen a real-terms pay rise in more than a decade, leaving them down at least £2,800 per year–and in some cases, leaving the staff who administer Universal Credit, for example, dependent on the same benefit to make their income liveable.
The cost of living crisis has left the consequences clearer than ever before. A survey conducted by PCS in the summer found more than a third of civil servants had skipped meals. One in five had missed work because they couldn’t afford to travel to the office. Many were having to resort to taking out loans just to cover the basics, and more than half were worried about making rent or mortgage payments. As a result, perhaps, well over a third were looking for jobs outside the civil service.
Lucy, for one, is worried about rising energy bills and what she’ll need to sacrifice in order to get them paid on time. Julie, another civil servant at the DWP who provided her testimony to PCS, echoes her feelings, describing spiralling inflation blotting out the light at the end of the tunnel. ‘After 41 years’ service I never ever thought I would be in the position I am now, living from day to day, invariably overdrawn each month and having to watch every penny I spend,’ she says.
Alongside money fears, many civil servants are increasingly concerned about job security, with ministers making a habit of talking up slashing the service. Just this August, Jacob Rees-Mogg announced plans to shrink the service by a fifth—and to add insult to injury, paired it with a plan to cut redundancy pay.
‘We’ve been told to be grateful our jobs are secure, but they aren’t,’ says Lucy. ‘They keep publicly talking about cutting them.’ As a result, many of those already anxious about being unable to make bills or heat their homes this winter fear they might make it to the other side just to find they’re out of what wages they had coming in in the first place.
Fighting Back
It’s this multi-level grinding down that has hardened so many civil servants in favour of taking some action—and made them, as Lucy puts it, ‘ready to fight back.’
The numbers show it: in PCS’s national consultative ballot earlier this year, a massive 80.7% said they would be willing to take industrial action to fight for the pay demand of ten percent. Now, PCS is balloting 150,000 members across the country for industrial action proper, with voting closing on 7 November—although members are being encouraged to post early.
But balloting for strike action, of course, isn’t without its difficulties. Alongside a raft of anti-trade union laws, trade unions have had to adapt to organising within ‘the new normal’, as Lucy describes it, of flexible working.
‘There seems to be an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude at the moment in regard to union presence,’ she says. ‘But reps are working tirelessly to pass this ballot, and if the ground needs to shake in workplaces to send a message, then that’s what we’ll do.’
It’s a sentiment others share. ‘No matter what my voting intentions would usually be, I think in the past I’ve seen an effort to improve things at least for some people in society,’ says Ellie. ‘But all I’m seeing now is a lot of greed and ignoring the plight or future plight of the 99%. I’ve been inspired by seeing strikes constantly, seeing people start to stand up for their rights en masse. I want to be part of the solution.’
For Lucy, workers shouldn’t be satisfied with earning just enough to cover utility bills and then ‘exist miserably for the rest of the month.’ ‘It’s not a game to choose between putting food on the table or putting the fire on. We have to stop settling for the bare minimum of simply being able to afford the basics.’
As well as her own strike ballot, she points to campaigns like Enough is Enough, waging the broader fightback for workers in the civil service and far and wide beyond. ‘We’ve been fighting to survive,’ she adds. ‘We must start fighting to live.’