The public sector pensions dispute is at a crucial juncture. The outcome is of huge importance to the working class. A victory would fuel the resurgence of working class confidence and organisation and encourage wider resistance to the Con-Dem government’s austerity programme.

The assault which we face is essentially about who should pay for the crisis: the bankers and the rich, the famous 1%, or the rest of us, the 99%. Especially vulnerable are those in society who are already being hit through savage cuts in benefits, pay, unemployment, and so on.  Yet as Polly Toynbee pointed out recently in The Guardian, only 6% of these cuts have been implemented so far: there are another 94% to come. In that context a defeat over the public sector pensions issue – an unnecessary defeat, it should be emphasised – would set us all back.

The government’s “final offer”

It quickly became clear that the 19th December proposals  contained few concessions on the government’s original  intentions in relation to the scheme proposals themselves, and they leave completely untouched the projected increases in pension contributions due to be imposed from April 1st which will increase our monthly contributions by 50% over the next three years. The employers’ proportion of the contributions will drop in real terms. This alone would mean big pay cuts for our members.

Also untouched is the shift in indexation of pensions in payment from RPI to the lower CPI, a cumulative cut in benefits, and the equalisation of occupational retirement age and state retirement age. Many more lecturers will die in service and never get to receive their pensions.

The actuarial analysis of the proposals to shift our current Final Salary TPS scheme to a Career Average which was commissioned by UCU showed that the proposals will entrench financial detriment for most members, especially the younger ones, such that they will need to work years longer to get the same benefits.

We will, therefore, still be paying more, getting less, and working longer. All the so-called concessions in the various Heads of Agreement of 19th December are redistributions within the government’s imposed cost ceiling and amount to robbing Paula to pay Paul. Given the rhetoric of some union leaders in the run up to N30 it is incredible that they can now argue for acceptance of the proposals. You cannot, as they say in Yorkshire, polish a turd, and a turd is precisely what we are being told we must accept.

And all this not to rectify some projected shortfall in the TPS (or any of the public sector pension schemes) but quite explicitly to extract billions from us to be used by government  to pour into the debt hole created by the bankers. No wonder public sector workers are telling government to stuff it.

We are also deeply suspicious of the attempts to drive us onto a CARE scheme. Many of us see this as the political and ideological oiling of the wheels towards greater privatisation through making future costs and liabilities more predictable for employers and further transferring pension responsibility away from the notion of collective provision towards individual personal responsibility.

Our own unofficial briefings and models (these can be viewed for example on the UCU Left website alongside a set of FAQs which have been widely circulated in the union) demonstrate that lecturers stand to lose not just tens of thousands of pounds in pension entitlements over their working and retirement lifetimes, but up to £200,000.

The HoA offer to protect some members from scheme changes in their last 13 years before retirement is not only a crude attempt at divide and rule, asking older scheme members to sell the pass to younger ones, it could also spell serious problems for the viability of the scheme if implemented.  The scheme is currently in good shape, but how long before those on lower incomes will start to drop out of it because they cannot afford the contributions?

Conflicts within the trade union movement

If N30 marked a magnificent high point in the pensions dispute and in the resurgence of working class mass action on a scale not seen for many decades, then the acceptance by a number of unions on December 19th of the government’s Heads of Agreement proposals marked a low point just three weeks later.

Thank goodness for Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS, who stood on the steps of Congress House and in angry and defiant terms brilliantly mauled the complacent and duplicitous words of TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber as he tried in effect to shut down the dispute on the government’s terms. It was absolutely crucial that PCS stood firm at that point and Mark Serwotka deserves lasting credit for having ensured that the PCS did precisely that.

In the past seven weeks there has been a series of tussles in the trade union movement about how the proposals should be interpreted and what to do next. The tussles and manoeuvring  have been between rejectionist unions and those arguing to accept; between some union leaderships that want to accept and many activists who want to reject;  and on the Left, among the rejectionists, about how best to reinstate action.
All this provides illustration of the inherent conflicts which exist in the trade union movement between the bureaucracy and the rank and file, between left and right elements of the union bureaucracies, and between the strategies of what might be called the hard and the soft Left.

Renewed opposition

So where are we now? After a period of indecision lasting around seven weeks, sections of the trade union movement have now hardened their opposition to the attacks on our pensions.

On February 9th the national executives of the PCS and the NUT each unanimously agreed to support renewed strike action on March 28th and to campaign among their memberships for support for this position with campaigning consultative e-surveys.

On 10th February the national executive of the UCU also unanimously adopted an almost identical strategy and supported the strike proposal for March 28th. It is important to recall that the political logjam which existed a month ago – ie. that none of the rejectionist unions was prepared to ‘name the day’ – was broken by the UCU national executive on January 20th  . UCU’s NEC got the ball rolling on the date for strike action by voting to reject the TPS HoA (Heads of Agreement) proposals and naming a strike day for March 1st.

Contrary to what some in our own union have tried to argue since the National Executive meeting of January 20th the majority of UCU’s NEC always regarded March 1st as a flexible proposal to put to other rejectionist trade unions.  While 28th March is quite late for us in being very close to the Easter shutdown, we were happy to support it for the sake of unity in action.

The situation is further complicated in UCU in that many of our members in the pre-92 universities are in a separate USS pension scheme, which until two weeks ago was also in dispute. Members in many institutions were working to contract, and incidentally discovering that it is possible in such circumstances to recapture a more favourable work/life balance!

A delegate conference of UCU’s USS branches on 31st January voted to suspend the action in order to return to negotiations after the employers had made some concessions. That means that USS members will be unlikely to be part of strike action on 28th March (as they had been for the three strikes last year) but ironically these members have an on-going interest in the outcome of the TPS dispute because what they have had imposed on them in the USS scheme is a lot worse than what was in the HoA TPS proposals in December.

Following the unanimous NEC decision on 10th February UCU will now carry out a campaigning consultation of members mainly by e-survey in which members will be strongly urged to vote for rejection of the TPS HoA and for renewed strike action alongside other unions. The National Executive will meet again on 16th March to consider the results of that consultation.

Hopefully other unions will now get behind 28th March.  EIS, UCAC, Nipsa and the FBU could join and it looks likely that Unite’s health sector will do so. That means that we can already see the prospect of strike action on 28th March on the scale of June 30th last year when around 800,000 workers walked out. Can that be the lever which then racks up the pressure in the big public sector unions to get back into the ring against the government?

It has not been easy to achieve the current situation, and of course things could still go wrong. There has been a lot of discussion within the TU movement since 20th December proposals were presented in parliament by Danny Alexander and consultations, surveys and discussions continue. Alexander’s triumphalist but tactically stupid speech caused an immediate and angry response from some of the unions which had signed up to the HoA proposals in the various pension schemes such as Unison and Unite, and Unite subsequently withdrew its support in its health and civil service sections.

The Left also moved quickly to attempt to forestall a sellout by the leaderships of Unison and the GMB and some of the more right wing smaller unions.  PCS Left Unity and Unite the Resistance both organised emergency conferences of activists on 7th and 14th January respectively.

Lasting effect of N30

The strength of the action on N30 has had a lasting effect, however, making it harder for some of the union leaderships to sell the deal to their memberships. The leaders have a deep pessimism about the potential which exists to beat the government, combined with a basic allegiance to Labour’s ideological acceptance of the inevitability of austerity measures in the face of debt and deficit.

Some of these leaders were also more than a little frightened of the resurgence of rank and file combativity that the scale and energy of N30 represented. We have not seen 2.5 million workers on strike since the General Strike of 1926. While rank and file union organisation and confidence is not yet anywhere near what it was at the height of union membership perhaps 40 years ago, it is growing. 100,000 people joined trade unions in the run up to N30. UCU’s membership, at a little over 120,000, despite significant loss of members through redundancies in the past few years, has shown overall growth as people join a union that they see as standing up to the tsunami of cuts and privatisation that we face.

The resistance of rank and file trade union members has not yet been able to reverse or completely block the desire of some union leaders to treat N30 as merely a pensions protest and so march everyone back down the hill until Labour gets elected next time round. It has, however, been sufficient to ensure either that those union leaderships have not been able to sign up to the HoAs willy-nilly or, where they have done so, to mount a meaningful resistance to the process of sellout.

The most notable examples of this were the reversals forced on the Unite leadership in the union’s civil service and health sections. PCS’s resistance provided the benchmark in the civil service scheme, and in health the opposition was led by socialists on the service group executive and other activists who mobilised opposition on a scale which the leadership was unable to ignore.

The Executives of the various ‘rejectionist’ unions have also been aware that other organisations have rejected the offers – the BMA rejected the health pension proposals by 90% in a ballot; the EIS (Educational Institute of Scotland) had recently also rejected cuts to pensions, as had NIPSA, the Northern Ireland Public Services Association and others. Again in Scotland Unison (pdf) have entered separate negotiations from England and Wales, and are opposing (pdf) the health service deal.

The RCN and the GMB are going to ballot their members over the next few weeks. Some unions have already carried out membership surveys as distinct from full membership industrial action ballots.  It is important to make this distinction which is lost on some sections of the Press and also can cause confusion among union members.

All the unions which took action on N30 have ‘live’ industrial action ballots delivered as a result of  majority votes in favour of action as required by the trade union laws in full postal ballots.  None of the rejectionist unions, nor any of those which have signed up to the HoAs, have re-balloted their members in this way, but most of them have carried out consultations and surveys to gauge membership opinions on the proposals for the sector schemes.

There was some confusion a couple of weeks ago when the media announced that the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (a union not noted for its militancy - N30 was its first strike in 127 years of its existence!) had voted 90% in favour of accepting the TPS HoA in a ballot. It turned out that the ‘ballot’ was an e-survey of only 5.7% of the total membership in which the leadership had recommended acceptance of the proposals as the best that could be achieved.

What we now need throughout the movement is for other activists to try to build pressure on their leaderships to back the strike on 28th March. Where that is not successful they need to find ways to support the strike – unofficial action, refusal to cross picket lines, lunchtime stoppages and support for rallies and so on. What would also be fantastic is joint action with private sector workers like those in Unilever and Shell who are facing similar attacks by fabulously wealthy corporations who want to gut their Final Salary pension schemes, of which there are few left in the private sector.

The government has retreated over its HE White Paper. It is in serious trouble over the NHS bill. The fight to defend our pensions is a fight that can be won against a government that is very, very nasty but weak and beset with problems.

Laura Miles is an LGBT representative on UCU's National Executive and also a member of UCU Left. She is a Senior Lecturer in Social Science at Bradford College.