1st April 2008

In the run up to the local elections on May 1st, the Public & Commercial Services Union (PCS) in the South West has written to all candidates in the local elections. They are wanting to see where they stand on the issues of job cuts, low pay and privatisation for more than 23,000 of their SW members, and the negative effects these issues cause to the wider local community. See Green party responses by reading on:

Three questions with the Green party answers:

1. PCS is campaigning for fair pay for its members, meaning that their
pay should increase in line with inflation and be negotiated nationally
instead of 200 separate sets of negotiations. Civil servants in
different departments are often paid at different rates for doing the
same level of work and can receive less pay for being based in the
South West. Do you support PCS’s campaign for fair pay for public
servants?

Greens campaign for fair pay and decent conditions for all workers: in
the EU Greens have paid a key role in legislation like the legal right
to refuse to work for more than 48 hours in any one week and are active
in the Living Wage campaign. We also want to see the repeal of
Thatcher‘s anti-union laws. The government has also failed to take
seriously PCS very real and pressing concerns over pay inequalities and
low pay in the civil service and other bodies. We fully support PCS’s
campaign for greater pay coherence and welcome the campaign to write to
all councillors ahead of the May elections. We hope this will help
ensure more councillors committed to ending Government cuts that are as
PCS says, "ripping the heart out of our public services".

2. The government has proposed to cut over 100,000 civil and public
service jobs, leading to job losses and office closures across the
region [see map attached for details]. They claim these cuts will not
impact service delivery to the public, however every day our members
are seeing how less staff means a poorer service to the public. Where
do you stand on cutting civil and public service jobs?

The Green party has continued to highlight and challenge the
Government's massive, deeply divisive, costly and damaging
privatisation and PFI programmes. Greens support the 'Public Services
Not Private Profit' Campaign launched previously by PCS and other
unions. Greens are the only main party supporting the national
campaign, "Keep our NHS Public" and the only party in Gloucestershire
to raise this issue repeatedly in the local press. We reject
privatisation, free market economics and globalisation, and want
instead public ownership, worker’s rights, economic democracy,
progressive taxation and the redistribution of wealth and power: the
common good before corporate greed, and the public interest before
private profit.

3. PCS is concerned that the government has privatised more of the
civil service since 1997 than the Conservative government did in 18
years. These privatisations are costly and unnecessary as they are
jeopardising services being delivered to people, often the most
vulnerable in our local communities. Where do you stand on privatising public services?

Last year the Gloucestershire Green party issued a statement to the
press backing PCS strike action at the Government's attempt to cut
100,000 jobs. The Green party is wholly against the massive job cuts,
privatisation, office closures, worsening working conditions and lower
pay - including what is effectively a pay cut in real terms for some of
the lowest paid. PCS's Mark Serwotka has in the past received a
standing ovation at Green party conference. The civil service is not
the place for Labour to find its money to pay for war on Iraq, ID cards
or the £76 billion replacement for Trident nuclear weapons.