The Scottish Socialist Party offers 100% solidarity to PCS members striking for decent pay, job security, pensions justice, and an end to Tory plans to slash jobs on the cheap. We will build solidarity with Passports strikers and build solidarity with others in the wider trade union movement.
We applaud the courage, determination, and unity of 133,000 PCS members who took collective action on Tory Budget Day, alongside half-a-million other workers in universities, schools, London Underground, junior doctors, and BBC England journalists.
“Our union is all about more collective action, more unions taking action, generalising the action – because if we don’t, the Tories will trash the economy. I’m proud to be a socialist, with 40 years’ experience as a civil service union activist, a member of PCS Left Unity, and a member of the Scottish Socialist Party.”
John Jamieson, PCS NEC member
This was a mighty display of power of the working class – a reminder that society would collapse without the efforts of workers, whereas the profiteers could take a prolonged Elon Musk flight ot outer space, and nobody would notice the difference!
It’a a scandalous condemnation of the profit-crazed capitalist system that 25,000 DWP workers face an uplift in wages this month because the national minimum wage – a paltry sum in itself – has marginally increased. It’s outrageous that 40,000 PCS members have used foodbanks to survive, and 47,000 rely on in-work benefits – with countless others not claiming what they are entitled to due to in-work conditionality and the increased risk of benefit sanctions.
There is no excuse for poverty in this fabulously rich economy – the 6th richest on Earth. There’s plenty of wealth, but it is concentrated in the hands of a tiny, grotesquely rich minority. The profits of the 350 biggest companies have rocketed by 89% since COVID-19. In obsene contrast, the average worker is £11,000 worse off now than if wages had kept pace with their levels prior to the bankers crashing the economy in 2008.
“PCS members are fighting doggedly for inflation-proofed pay, as tens of thousands of them get a pay rise this week to drag them up to the paltry new statutory national minimum wage! And in common with the Scottish Socialist Party, they are demanding a £15-an-hour minimum wage.”
Richie Venton, SSP Workplace Organiser
The Tories and capitalist employers want to turn workers into slaves, by effectively banning the right to strike – facing workers with the sack if they refuse to work on strike days, under the mis-named Minimum Services Level Act, a sackers’ charter.
The SSP wholeheartedly agrees with the PCS demands for a £15-an-hour minimum wage; a 10% pay rise; reversal of the pension robbery; an end to the threat of job losses and cuts to redundancy terms.
The SSP have fought for workers’ unity in action, including by building a 24-hour general strike to halt the generalised assault on workers’ wages, jobs, conditions, and human rights.
We have persistently campaigned for measures to tackle the brutal poverty, inequality, and profiteering that is at the very heart of capitalism.
The Scottish Socialist Party demands:
- Pay increases for every worker that at least matches inflation – without a single job loss or a penny cut to public services.
- A £15 minimum wage for all workers aged 16 and upwards – with equal pay for women – rising with average wages or inflation, whichever is the greater.
- A 4-day week on 5 days’ pay: cut hours, not jobs or wages – share out the work.
- Repeal ALL anti-trade union laws – including those introduced by Maggie Thatcher’s Tories and retained by 13 years of New Labour governments.
- Emergency government investment in teams of Council workers to retrofit every home free of charge: insulation, draught-proofing, new eco-boilers and fast broadband, to tackle pollution, cut energy bills, and end fuel poverty.
- Democratic public ownership of all forms of energy to abolish profiteering, end fuel poverty, and urgently create a worker-led Just Transition to green, affordable energy for all.
- Public ownership of public transport to build a vastly expanded, integrated public transport system – free to all age groups. Cut poverty, pollution, and social isolation, whilst creating thousands of green jobs.
- Public ownership of construction and banking to build 100,000 environmentally friendly Council houses for affordable rent.
- Socialist Change not Climate Change – a Socialist Green New Deal which we have proven could create at least 350,000 new, quality, unionised jobs in Scotland alone.
