Andrea Egan and the left of Unison have much to learn, both auspicious and cautionary, from Mark Serwotka. In 2000, Serwotka was elected General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, PCS, which represents civil servants as well as workers in the arms-length and privatised functions of central government. Serwotka was the candidate of the insurgent left, and survived threats - political, industrial, and personal - to go on and be elected a further four times (twice unopposed) prior to retiring in a valedictorian mode in 2024.

To understand the positives and negatives of Serwotka’s leadership, and its legacy, it is necessary to delve into the industrial, political and, alas, factional history of PCS in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.¹

Coups, bureaucrats and triumphs

PCS was formed in 1998 by a merger of two other civil service unions, the Public Services, Tax and Commerce Union (PTC) and the Civil and Public Services Association (CPSA).² Civil service trade unionism had never been particularly left-wing, and while both unions maintained a fighting fund and entertained the possibility of industrial action, they were mostly controlled by moderates or the right. However, in 1986 Militant member John Macreadie did win CPSA’s general secretary election, only for it to be overturned due to ‘irregularities’. The right, a friend of the Thatcher government behind closed doors, won the re-run.³

After the merger, John Sheldon and the right-winger Barry Reamsbottom, general secretaries of the PTC and CPSA, respectively, were appointed co-general secretaries of PCS. Sheldon retired in 2000. Reamsbottom had promised an election, but then tried to avoid one, but was forced by conference.

Left Unity (LU), the Socialist Party (SP) dominated broad left of PCS (the successors to Macreadie’s tendency in the CPSA), initially backed Hugh Lanning, a soft-left full timer, as the candidate to defeat Reamsbottom. Serwotka, a job centre clerk and Socialist Organiser member who pledged member democracy, a fighting industrial strategy, and to take a worker’s wage, was dismissed as a quixotic vote-splitter. But when it transpired Reamsbottom had not got enough branch nominations to run, LU became supportive of Serwotka, and he beat Lanning.

Reamsbottom was not having it. He would stay on, he said, and he got the right majority of the NEC (LU had a foothold) to rubber stamp his coup. While Serwotka was in his early days of office, Reamsbottom would countermand his orders to fulltimers, many of them right-wing. The Sun was delighted (“Union lefties KO’d”). But Serwotka and the left’s presidential candidate, Janice Godrich, successfully challenged Reamsbottom’s undemocratic move in the High Court.⁴

Reamsbottom was gone, but right-wing fulltimers remained, a threat to Serwotka’s successful implementation of his left programme. This is a challenge that Egan faces, too. Faced with an often indifferent or even hostile staff, Serwotka called an all staff meeting and set out, as Notes from Below has noted before, exactly what his internal and external political vision was. He offered a clean start for those willing to assist, and payouts for those who wanted to leave. Many did, and Serwotka was able to swell the ranks of the bureaucracy with political allies. PCS became more radical, shaking off the right’s addiction to Whitleyism and poor compromise over productive dispute, and its view of the membership as an inconvenience.⁵ Serwotka had political control of the union, but a massive industrial challenge remained.

Industrial challenges

You might think that, industrially, the civil service is relatively homogenous. After all, we all work for the same people and work together. Departments often share office buildings. But, since 1995, our employer has pretended that this is not the case. The Major government ‘delegated’ pay and terms and conditions to departments, even while the Treasury and Cabinet Office kept those on a tight leash. But pay bargaining was delegated too. Serwotka inherited a membership of some 390,000, all working for the same people within a centrally decreed grading, pay, and competency structure, yet the employer and the law treated them as an archipelago of dozens of discrete employers.⁶

Delegated bargaining, by design, divided and weakened labour power in the civil service. It has created gaps of thousands of pounds between people doing the same work in different departments, and led to a race to the bottom on salaries.⁷ This has hampered attempts to agitate the whole civil service, which is infected with an industrial parochialism. Delegated negotiators, quite understandably, focus on improving pay in the short and medium term within their delegated area, often trading good terms and conditions for a little more money.⁸

2000-2005, a failure of radicalism

A return to national pay rates, and national pay bargaining, was a key demand of the Serwotka campaign. But he failed, it is still in place now. Despite his promises, his strategy was neither bold nor creative.

In the early-2000s activists in various departments took local action and made legal claims over pay inequalities. However, Serwotka and LU were against selective action by some parts of the service in aid of the national campaign on principle, claiming it would undermine the national union’s unity.

In the mid-2000s the industrial situation became more serious. The Blair government were not benevolent employers, but the economy was good and they were not quite so enamoured with union-bashing as the Tories. But as the decade drew on, the economy faltered, and Labour drifted right, they decided to ‘rationalise’ (cut) and ‘modernise’ (enshittify) the civil service and public sector and their pensions.

PCS took action in LU’s preferred way, one or two days of strike action, ideally coordinated with other unions, as a prelude to condition free talks. In March 2005 the union was due to do just that, having balloted over pension cuts (ignoring the threat of 10,000 job cuts and crap pay) for action on 23 March. But their dispute only concerned pensions, not jobs or pay. But when the employer relented on a determination not to negotiate, the union cancelled its strike, entering talks despite no concessions being made.⁹

With regard to jobs and pay, Serwotka made much of a 2005 letter to PCS from Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary, which promised to ‘seek to avoid compulsory redundancies and relocations’ and committing to continue ‘the progress we have begun to develop a more coherent pay system for the Civil Service’. Serwotka spun these warm words as victories on jobs and pay and a vindication of his industrial strategy.

But they were just words, and not significant ones. By October 2005, ‘coherence talks’ had been ongoing for 14 months, and had achieved only the promise of further discussions. As I write, nearly 21 years later, Serwotka’s successor is still informing members she has ‘some cautious optimism’ for the progress of talks on the very same topic.

The Definition of Insanity

Despite the incoherence of these coherence talks, and the arrival of further ‘belt tightening’ after the financial crash of 2007-2008, PCS continued in the same vein. Serwotka abandoned the 2008/9 pay dispute when another Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, promised condition-free national pay talks and the ability for departments to use ‘efficiency’ savings (cuts) for better pay (they mostly didn’t). Serwotka again hailed this as a “breakthrough”, but materially it achieved nothing.

In 2010 the Tories gained power for the first time since 1997. Industrial relations changed in the civil service. Labour governments have long been content to talk to the unions and give them anything they wanted, so long as they asked for nothing. But the Cameron administration more or less abandoned even talks about talks.

PCS staged one- or two-day strikes in 2010 and 2011 respectively against threats to jobs and pensions, but the numbers of ballots returned, and members striking, were lower than expected.

Why was Serwotka’s industrial strategy so timid? The failures were financial, industrial, and political. Financially, the union was not able to afford any sustained, large-scale action. Its fighting fund remains too small to do so now, and LU have resisted and politicised any way to sustainably build it, while staff costs have remained around a third of the union’s income, if one is generous and only includes salaries. Industrially, Serwotka and his allies were possessed by a belief that PCS would be weakened by being an outlier. In 2005 the FDA (the union of senior civil servants) and Prospect (technicians) agreed to pension talks. LU argued that PCS would be ‘isolated’ if it continued to take action. This explanation became memetic, adjusted once the British Medical Association made their militant turn to describe them as an incomparable exception, despite the results.

Politically – to quote a stalwart’s recent memoir – LU’s electoral success meant that its members became concentrated nationally, robbing the union of vibrant, radical branch-based action, while a new generation of activists were seduced by the ‘collaborationist’ ‘shibboleth’ of Whitleyism, and a cosy and unproductive relationship with management.¹⁰

Things fall apart

In the mid-2010s both PCS and Serwotka personally faced their demise. Serwotka caught a rare viral infection in 2013. He had to be fitted with a battery-powered ventricular assist device. He developed complications and in 2016 had a heart transplant. Despite being gravely ill for much of this period, and no doubt extremely tired, Serwotka worked throughout, including from hospital. As a recent recruit to the civil service and the union, I found his perseverance and commitment admirable and inspiring.

PCS was in trouble, too. In 2013 the government removed check-off, the mechanism by which union dues were deducted from salaries by the employer and transferred to the union. This was a deliberate move to bankrupt PCS. It has also proved to be unlawful. The union survived, but it was touch-and-go. In 2014 Serwotka and his NEC proposed that PCS merge into Unite, to secure its financial future (and its senior staffs’ jobs), cancelling annual NEC elections in the meantime. However, this merger was not approved by the union’s annual delegate conference, the sovereign body of the union. Though PCS survived, the removal of check-off and years of job cuts greatly reduced its membership. In 2000 there were about 390,000 members; today there are about 170,000.

The thoroughly anti-democratic Trade Union Act of 2016, which imposed a 50% turnout threshold on industrial action ballots, further harmed PCS. They were unable to breach it successively when balloting the whole civil service as one. However, Serwotka remained immune to calls for disaggregated ballots and selective action. Until he wasn’t.

After three aggregated ballots failed, PCS put forward a disaggregated ballot of each department or bargaining unit in the service during the “hot strike summer” of 2022. Some larger departments failed to meet the threshold, but many did, along with smaller organisations. The union had a mandate for the first time in nearly a decade. However, little action, selective or national, was taken. In June 2024 the union “welcomed” the Treasury’s pay remit of 4.5% and a £1,500 ‘cost of living payment’ which was taxable, pro-rata’d and affected universal credit payments. It was, categorically, the worst pay offer in the public sector. Serwotka and Left Unity “paused” the national campaign for it, never to restart it, hailing yet another ‘breakthrough’.

A democratic deficit

Behind all of these failures was the political and democratic degradation of PCS, Serwotka, and LU. On his first election, Serwotka pledged to democratise PCS. While certainly in his early years as general secretary there was a more vibrant democratic culture and active left than there had been in the CPSA, this was slowly eroded. Turnouts in NEC elections dwindled dramatically. In 2023, the last NEC election before his retirement, only 7.6% members voted. Only 11.5% of members voted in the election of his successor. Low turnouts were a symptom of member disengagement from the union’s political culture, but they also served to perpetuate Left Unity’s dominance of elected positions in the lay structures of the union. This gave them a liberty to treat the union as their own – NEC elections could be abandoned, instructions from conference motions on policy or practicalities were safely ignored, campaigns were abandoned. Slowly but surely the officialdom of the union became full of Left Unity members, with those who were also part of the Socialist Party (SP) being favoured initially. The bureaucrats might now be ostensibly left wing, but they remain bureaucrats. Serwotka no longer spoke about taking a worker’s wage, and by 2010 he was only donating £2,000 of a £87,656 salary back to the union.

LU was once a genuinely broad left – it was open, democratic, and argumentative, while maintaining something like Leninist or Luxemburgian Discipline, once arguments were settled. You can see their democratic degradation by the way they have reacted to splits. In 2007 Socialist Caucus, an LU tendency, split over Serwotka’s timid industrial strategy. LU’s website spoke to their desire to engage in dialogue with the Caucus, reaffirming their ability to advocate alternative policy within LU and the wider union, while still inside the tent.¹² In 2018, when the once supreme SP element of LU split over Serwotka backing president Janice Godrich for assistant general secretary over the incumbent SP stalwart Chris Baugh, the new dominant force in LU, ‘Socialist View’ (comprised mostly of very recent members of the SP) mocked them for their lack of internal support in LU, rather than encouraging dialogue and contention for better policy.¹³ When the SP was in the tent they were fond of calling Socialist Caucus ‘ultra-left’ for advocating more strike action. Now LU do the same to them, too, as well as describing their opponents as the agitators of external political groups in election literature, in an uncouth foray into red-baiting. LU now effectively consists of ‘Socialist View’ and their junior partners in the Democracy Alliance electoral commission, the Democrats, the remnants of the old soft-left/wet-right of the union, as well as few Revolutionary Communist Party and Community Party of Britain folk.¹⁴

Conclusion

The lessons of Serwotka for Egan and the left of Unison then are twofold, one industrial, one political. Industrially, the left in Unison need to grasp that the historically exceptional era of capital permitting cooperation with labour in a project of reformism and amelioration, is over. Performative short-term action, followed by good-faith talks, are increasingly unlikely to achieve anything other than short-term, bad faith compromises. We must return to the radical agitation and action of our predecessors, lest we lose their bitterly fought gains, while harnessing the agility and hybrid digital/physical organising exemplified by younger, insurgent activists, and those organising amongst marginalised workers.

Politically, Egan and the left must prevent their project becoming merely a changing of the guard, as the union’s former labour aristocracy is replaced by a new one, thus becoming more focused on maintaining office, with all its graces and favours, than transforming the union and winning. Demand term limits in senior positions. Demand the election of full-timers with negotiating responsibilities. Create and defend powerful lay structures. Demand radical transparency in the union’s political and financial affairs. Demand these things now, even while the union fights on other fronts, or risk them never materialising, and the likely consequences for the industrial and agitational power of your union.

In the end, Godrich withdrew from the AGS election due to ill health. Baugh ran, as did Serwotka’s new chosen one, full-timer Lynn Henderson. John Moloney, the Independent Left candidate, won the 2019 AGS election, taking a worker’s wage. Moloney was re-elected in 2024, he has returned tens of thousands of pounds of his wages to the union. Henderson got a promotion.