Supporting the strikes

The Tories, CBI and Liberal Democrats have been quick to question and undermine the current PCS strike over civil service redundancy changes. Credit must go to the Welsh Government AMs from Labour and Plaid Cymru for backing the workers in their dispute with the UK Government. We are now entering a crucial political period in which issues of principle are more important than ever. A focus on process issues (like the delay in Assembly business) or on dividing public sector workers against private sector workers risks completely distracting peoples' attention from the wider issue at hand which is New Labour's ongoing war against civil servants. An FSB spokesperson tweeted that he was unhappy that the Western Mail had run a headline saying the FSB had 'no sympathy' with public sector workers over this dispute. The FSB do not support the strike (nor is it in their remit to do so) but they certainly wouldn't want to be dividing workers against each other or fuelling the myths that the public sector is some kind of gold-plated workers' paradise. It's an economic recession not a cattle auction. If too many salaries are lost from the public sector, it will have a knock-on effect on the wider economy and surely that won't be good for private business.

There is still some waste in the public sector that can and needs to be reduced, but those kind of cuts are only acceptable if done in line with cutting the highest salaries of the questionable non-jobs that appear to have proliferated during the past ten years (as Dr. Eurfyl ap Gwilym argued). That more balanced approach would surely go down alot better with PCS members, who are hardly taking industrial action for no reason. Any discussion about the validity of the strike should also recognise that the scrapping of these civil service redundancy packages (packages hard-won by some of the lowest paid workers who traditionally supported the party which is now abolishing them) was planned before the financial crisis, before the recession and before there was any question of public expenditure being cut.

It's entirely justifiable for Assembly business to be disrupted momentarily in order to show solidarity with these workers. The debate about cuts is one that needs these kind of actions to remind us of what is at stake. The few conditions that workers do enjoy in the UK have been won by this kind of industrial action being available. The Tories and Lib Dems are wrong in arguing that politicians should not support these strikes, but that should be no surprise.