Who's afraid of civil servants?
Peter Paterson
A television programme I was involved with recently was trying to depict the main areas of labour trouble facing the Government. Huge photographs were brought into the studio showing miners emerging black faced from a pit, a power station's cooling towers and various other obvious illustrations of industry in action. My list of forthcoming disputes included the civil service, and up from the art department came a group picture of some elegant men in pin-striped suits, carrying furled umbrellas and wearing bowler hats. A caption reading 'Civil Servants — 500,000 — 15% Demand' was pasted acrosi the picture, which was placed in line with the others. The idea was that I should walk UP to each one and read my scripted comments torn the autocue. During one of the long delays which tend to outnumber the working moments in a TV studio, I studied 'the picture and realised that there was something odd about it. The brolly and bowler outfits seemed right as a photo graphic cliche — except that this group was just a little too sleek for civil servants, who nowadays tend to be no smarter than the rest of us. And in the background, soldiers were marching on what seemed to be a Parade ground. Peeping around the back of the picture, I found another, very tiny, caption. In fact, the picture was of Guards officers watching a rehearsal for the Trooping of the Colour. The producer was unmoved by my discov ery — and anyway, the programme was a pilot' not intended for transmission. They look the part,' he said. On Monday, the civil service unions were ohee again trying to puncture the image, still firmly in the public mind, that their members do indeed look like Guards Officers in mufti. According to the Daily Mad, Mr Bill Kendall, secretary of the Council of Civil Service Unions and coordinator of the 24-hour strike, observed: We aim to show we are not just penpushers. Our members fulfil vital roles in the nation and we are sick of being thought of as the Whitehall brolly brigade.' Anyone looking at the televised scenes of Picketing outside the Department of Health and Social Security at Newcastle-upon 'Pie on Monday could see what Mr Kendall was driving at. In Whitehall, too, the militants looked more like cleaning ladies and office boys than your average member of the Reform. Even so, as a media event, the strike was no doubt successful, even if there was something unreal about it. For example, it is a little strange that the greatest impact it achieved was the halting of nearly all civil air transport for the day, for the air traffic controllers were, in effect, 'borrowed' by the civil servants. They are certainly civil service union members, but their salaries and conditions come under a quite separate agreement. Without them, would the strike have looked nearly so effective?
So, there was an element of bravado about Monday's event. For in spite of all their preparations and the morale-boosting meetings, which have been going on for months, the unions are still unsure whether civil servants would be prepared to sustain an all-out strike. The continuing plan is therefore to take what amounts to guerrilla action against particular installations — mainly computer centres — which will hit the Government's revenue, while involving the fewest number of members in industrial action.
Those who are required to strike are to get 85 per cent of their pay made up by the unions, so the obvious strategy for the Government would seem to be to lay off as many non-combatants as possible. In a cash flow struggle, one is not sure which side would crack first.
But how has it reached this stage, with even the elite first division association voting, albeit narrowly, for third division strike action, and thereby enabling Mr Kendall, for the first time, to get all nine civil service unions out at the same time? What is the nature of the outrage the Government have committed?
Civil servants, it scarcely needs emphasising, have until recently been like the rich as seen through the eyes of Scott Fitzgerald: they have been different from the rest of us. Governments have been gradually chipping away at it, but from the mid-Fifties the Service had put together a salary-fixing system of surpassing beauty based partly on the public trough and partly on the concept of comparability. The Pay Research Unit was set up 25 years ago to make detailed comparisons between civil service pay and that of good 'outside' employers. These consisted mainly of blue chip industrial firms like BP, and the exercise took account of items such as company cars, free lunches, length of holidays and pension arrangements, as well as pay, converting the lot into 'true money rates'. For many years, the Unit worked slowly, covering each civil service grade perhaps once every five or six years. So in between, general rises were awarded by the government to keep everyone going.
Unlike Professor Clegg in the dying days of the Callaghan administration, the Pay Research Unit did not recommend any particular increase. It merely provided the data on which the unions could then negotiate with senior civil servants, thus justifying their traditional trade union func, tion and presence. The whole edifice reached its apogee when Mr Heath decreed that civil service pensions should be inflation-proofed.
Two things have happened to erode this trade unionists' paradise. Pay Research had to be speeded up because the old pace was thought to be too leisurely, and dumped too many general awards into the laps of reluctant Ministers. So the whole system 'became comparability-based, making it much more like the annual wage negotiations pursued by ordinary unions. And the onset of incomes policies led to governments continuously reneging on Pay Research findings.
The present Government has clearly decided to scrap the whole system completely, and has acted in a characteristically brutal fashion. Instead of taking the 'neutral' Pay Research figures and saying to the unions, 'Look, we know you claim to be a year behind all the time, but it is politically impossible for us to pay you an extra 15 or 20 per cent when inflation is dropping and the private sector is in ruins,' Lord Soames has simply suppressed the Pay Research report altogether. With the Pay Research figures placed on the Index, and without any Government gesture towards fair play, precedent, or the public spirit of the, civil servants, the unions have fallen back on the annual cost of living, claiming a rise of 15 per cent.
Lord Soames, who once epitomised compromise, says he is sticking to 7 per cent and not a penny more.It has been clumsily done. Nevertheless, let's look at the public sector score sheet so far. Mrs Thatcher has lost humiliatingly against the miners; she has been beaten by the water workers and the firemen, and looks likely to lose to the power workers and the gas workers — if the yardstick remains cash limits in the region of 6 per cent, On the other hand, she has done well against the teachers, local government manual workers, the steel workers and British Leyland. On that record, she is surely entitled to ask, Who's Afraid of Mr Kendall?
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