Is there a future in PCS?

This post was originally issued as a e-mail to PCS members today.

At the beginning of December I sent out a note under the title PCS is a broken union in which I made clear that I was (a) withdrawing from the 4themembers group and (b) that PCS was beyond reform. Over the holidays I have had time to reflect on the future for us as PCS members but was unclear whether I should share my current thoughts until today.

I came across a website that was laughably labelled as one produced by the "PCS Young members Network". It is clearly influenced not by trade unionism, but the Socialist Party, the former Militant Tendency who had at one stage completely hijacked the labour Party Young Socialists in the attempt to take over the Labour Party.

Neil Kinnock had the good sense to drive them out of the Labour Party, especially after the Militant used Taxis to deliver redundancy notices to it's own staff following their disastrous tenure in control of Liverpool Council.

Fast forward to today they have taken over PCS, albeit in alliance with what Lenin would have described as "useful idiots" and have succeeded in making PCS weaker than any Civil Service union has ever been.

Well done comrades. I hope you are pleased with yourselves. You have control of the biggest of the Civil Service unions and have used it for your own purposes for most of the last decade.

However the price has been the destruction of the union.

Worse is to come, I'll be writing about that at a later date, but in the mean time we, the subscription paying members have to ask ourselves what will we do next.

The first thing I need to make clear is that in the current climate we certainly do need a trade union, but PCS under the misleadership of Mark Serwotka and his socialist menagerie is not working.

One group of members in the Serious Organised Crime Agency have already left en-mass not that Serwotka and co have ever bothered to tell you. The circumstances in SOCA were quite specific which is why they were able to form an independent trade union.

That's not an option for most of us and in any case having lots of small unions popping up would weaken our ability to organise effectively.

Of course we could all join another union, Prospect would seem the obvious choice, but to be effective we would have to join in large numbers, leaving the idiots behind in charge of the asylum that PCS has now become.

The other option we have is carrying on as we are, at least in the Branches where reps are still able to assist with members personal case work, which appears to be the main reason people join the union these days. A kind of "insurance policy".

Even that may be threatened in time as the union atrophies nationally.

For the time being we will probably have to make the best of what we have.

But what do you think?

That's the important question.

PCS may have been hijacked and wrecked by the political activists of the far left, but at the end of the day the union and it's future belongs in your hands.

Drop me a line with your thoughts and lets see what we can do salvage something out of this mess.

In the mean time I will continue issuing news, information and comment both by e-mail and on my blog.