This week’s New Statesman includes an interview with Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union and one of the brains behind the mass strike scheduled for 30 June. The PCS will be joining three teachers’ unions in staging a co-ordinated walkout, shutting down schools and government offices in the process, in protest over pension reforms, pay freezes and job losses.
Serwotka tells me that the Conservative-led coalition government is waging “class warfare” against public-sector workers and believes coalition ministers are indifferent to the fate of his members:
I don’t think they give a shit,” he says. “People who have lived in a bubble of privilege all their lives have no concept of what ordinary life is like.”
The PCS leader warns that strikes by public-sector workers could “possibly” continue over the course of this parliament. Does he have a bottom line?
No one should have to pay any extra money unless their pension scheme valuation deems it necessary; there should be no central increase in the pension age and the government should be prepared to negotiate the inflation-indexing of pensions.” But Serwotka doesn’t believe that coalition ministers are interested in negotiations.
He says that, without strikes, the chances of the unions’ negotiations with the government being successful are “nil”. He also says he admires Arthur Scargill: .
“I admire a lot of what Scargill did,” he says. “I don’t share his politics but I admire the bravery of the National Union of Mineworkers leadership and I have no doubt that they were right to do what they did.”
But they lost, I point out. “I don’t take the view that we can’t win,” Serwotka insists.
Read the full interview in this week’s NS, out on the news-stands tomorrow.
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