GEC gears up for sell out deal on Jobs & Staffing

HMRC Chief Executive Lin Homer: look who’s smiling now

The latest bulletin from the PCS HMRC Group Executive Committee confirms that there will be no industrial action over jobs and staffing in the near future – and that a sell out is in the offing.

After talks collapsed in October and a leaked document proved that the department was union busting, PCS has again accepted an offer of talks and expressed hope that it will lead to substantial concessions. This view is either deeply cynical or naive in the extreme.

Decrypting the unnecessarily convoluted language of the bulletin, it becomes clear that the union is running scared. We’re told that Mark Serwotka’s exchange with Lin Homer over union busting was “robust” – although beyond the initial letter members have not been permitted to see the actual correspondence – but everything comes back to the withdrawal of check off. We’re told HMRC are helping PCS to make the transition easier, with the implication that if the union rocks the boat too much we’re scared that they’ll actively hinder us instead.

The talks, too, are clearly a mechanism to keep PCS quiet during the SA peak. HMRC are using crisis management, excessive overtime and the temporary abandonment of almost all other work to handle the calls coming in ahead of the Self Assessment deadline and maintain the pretence that they’re not understaffed. This would give us the perfect opportunity to exercise considerable leverage in pursuit of our demands, but senior officials have a seat at the table and so for the moment they’re sated. Much like guard dogs who’ve been chucked a raw steak to gnaw on by burglars.

Fighting union busting in HMRC

At this point, PCS members should be well aware of the leaked paper from HMRC’s Executive Committee (ExCom) revealing their union busting plans.

It is fair to say that this is one of the worst attacks that our union has faced in recent memory. Not only is the department attempting to side-line PCS and disrupt our organising capacity, claiming to have already succeeded with ARC, it has engaged in talks with those attempting to set up a rival union. This is well within the union busting strategy, and such a union will only help to divide the workforce and weaken industrial action.

Members of Your Voice have been and will continue to be heavily involved in efforts to proactively organise against this attack. It is heartening that the GEC now appears to have heeded our previous call to build from the ground up. Reports of members’ meetings across the country voting to support the union against this attack and reinstate the overtime ban as a first step in fighting back are undoubtedly positive.

We can only hope that this trend will continue. The suspension of industrial action was a mistake, as before it was the failure to escalate the action short of a strike, and the long habit of keeping management’s confidence in negotiations and keeping members in the dark has undoubtedly weakened us. The current regrouping is an opportunity to recognise and rectify those mistakes.

We need to come out fighting, and to do that we need to at once be willing to stand together against the bosses and willing to openly and critically debate and evaluate whether the tactics we use work.

Solidarity to each and every one of our fellow workers in HMRC as we fight to smash the union busters!

It’s official: PMR is discriminatory – can we fight it now?

Today, in the Guardian, there is a very interesting article which uses official data in order to demonstrate that Civil Service Performance Management (PMR) is discriminatory against black and minority ethnic (BME), disabled and older staff.

This is something that a lot of us have known for quite some time. In PCS, it has been the subject of motions to Conference and much discussion when considering how to fight this pernicious system. In HMRC, the Assistant Group Secretary taking the lead on PMR made a point of claiming (PDF download) that the receipt of such data was a key concession behind us so rapidly and enthusiastically aborting the Conference-mandated policy of non-cooperation in 2013.

Therefore, it will come as no surprise that the source of this data is the trade union … Prospect.

Lin Homer’s message proves that PCS can’t play the employer’s game

On the HMRC intranet today (29 October), Lin Homer has announced that the Department have withdrawn from talks over Jobs & Staffing.

The talks, which began on 8 October and were scheduled to run until 4 November, were over a number of issues which PCS remains in dispute with the department over. Staff in HMRC are facing job cuts and office closures in a number of areas, alongside the privatisation of work and a draconian performance management system.

PCS had taken strike action in late June and late July, as well as industrial action short of a strike including an overtime ban. The Group Executive Committee voted to suspend action in order to engage in talks without preconditions at the insistence of HMRC, who refused to talk while any action was going on.

Lin Homer’s announcement comes thirteen days after the announcement of considerable job cuts and office closures by HMRC, and only underlines that the department never had any serious intent to resolve the dispute.

Say no to workfare in HMRC

Following small scale pilots between May and July, HMRC is now rolling out the Movement to Work programme across the department. This scheme is just one incarnation of the workfare schemes the government is using to force claimants into unpaid work and needs to be opposed.

The scheme is specifically aimed at young people between the ages of 18 and 24, and sees them put to work for their Job Seekers’ Allowance for 4-6 weeks. There is an official target of providing job opportunities for 50% of participants, and the scheme is sold as an ‘opportunity to develop employability skills.’ However, as with all workfare, the hype and the reality are worlds apart.

All workfare schemes operate on the basis that claimants must perform certain work activities in order to ‘earn’ their benefits. As well as undermining the basic concept of social security by marking benefits out as something that needs to be earned rather than a basic safety net when people are out of work, this allows employers to exploit free labour and undermine the conditions of their own staff.

Jobs & Staffing: where did the campaign go?

After the most recent tranche of rolling strike action, the GEC announced that action short of strike would then be used to ramp up the pressure on the employer. A good call, and a way to maintain momentum without lots of sporadic one day strikes. Except that it hasn’t actually happened.

True enough, we’ve got an indefinite overtime ban and an indefinite work to rule (erroneously labelled as a good work strike), but there’s been no escalation whatsoever.

The overtime ban, after being dropped when we were falsely told that the Enabling Agreement of 2012 won us all the things we’re in fact still fighting for in the Jobs & Staffing Campaign, has been ongoing for a long time already. The only difference is that instead of being renewed for short periods in fits and starts, it’s now on til we win – as it should have been already.

Day two of Conference not as raucous, just as vital

Day two of Revenue & Customs Group Conference opened with the debate on the Jobs & Staffing Campaign. This saw motions moved by the Group Executive Committee and by those pesky kids in Bootle Taxes Branch.

The GEC motion was straightforward enough, in essence affirming the aims and strategy that they had already agreed for the Jobs & Staffing Campaign. More vital was the Bootle motion, penned by a member of Your Voice, which was about keeping control of the dispute in members’ hands and safeguarding against a sell out. Naturally, the GEC tried to oppose it.

Your Voice sets the agenda at first day of R&C Group Conference

The first day of the Revenue & Customs Group Conference was not a quiet one. It was a long and full day of business, whose highlights included delegates led by members of Your Voice giving the Group Executive Committee an absolute hiding.

Arriving in Brighton the previous day, there was some outcry over the fact that the Standing Orders Committee had retroactively ruled motions which called for ballots as ‘out of order’ if the issues that they addressed came under the remit of the Jobs & Staffing Campaign. However it soon became clear that this was as a result not of the SOC’s machinations, as the self-styled Masters of the Dark Arts had resolved to give branches the Conference that they wanted but were under pressure from the Group Executive Committee.

Privatisation – it’s past time to fight dirty

Yesterday (8 May) HMRC has announced that private “outsourcing solutions” company Concentrix has been awarded a contract. They will be taking on Error and Fraud work in the Benefits & Credits directorate as part of a retrenchment of the department’s “adding capacity” trial.

For all the spin from directors, there should be no mistake that this is about privatisation and replacing jobs. Benefits & Credits is second only to Personal Tax in terms of the attacks levelled at it by HMRC senior management, and the fact is that a private company will be doing work while directly employed, permanent jobs are shed. While the department insists that this isn’t about replacing jobs, it ploughs ahead with doing exactly that.

PT Ops offer – reject ‘jam tomorrow’

This piece has been written in response to Conference Paper A submitted by the Group Executive Committee, regarding the ‘offer’ received from Personal Tax Operations over various issues. (Download a copy of the paper in .doc format here.)

The offer put forward does not give enough substantive gains to be supported. Further, much of the bargaining agenda instructed by reps through last year’s emergency summit remains unresolved and there are too many threats hanging over members’ heads for the union to realistically present itself as ‘in agreement’ with management on any level.

The model emergency motion at the end of this piece is for branches to submit in opposition to those made by Conference Paper A. Although we will discuss below what has gone wrong in the past year, from a position critical of the GEC, the model motion has been drafted in the spirit of offering a proactive strategy from this point on rather than simply navel gazing and dwelling on what could have been.