BY 2010, PCS had become a beacon of resistance in the fight against austerity. It was not just its strength in the workplace and its mass industrial protests that had established its reputation as a fighting union.

Even more important was its willingness to challenge the race to the bottom by posing real alternatives in the shape of universal benefits, public investment, tax justice and the public ownership of banks and utilities.

It was hardly surprising that the union came under sustained attack, first from the coalition government and second from the Tory administration that followed it. If the organisation that represented most of the government’s own employees could not be kept in line, then how could other workers? And if the workers could not be kept in line, how could the government carry forward its austerity agenda?

For PCS, these attacks showed the convergence of interest between the government and the right-wing union leaders who had rejected any idea of a fightback.

There was a further immediate reason to bring PCS to heel. Tory minister Francis Maude’s Civil Service Reform Plan launched in June 2012 envisaged a relentless drive for “efficiency” and “productivity.”

Encouraged by the lack of co-ordinated action by other public-sector unions, he personally orchestrated the assault on the union that posed the most critical barriers to this agenda. The key aim was not simply to silence PCS, but to destroy it. He hoped to achieve this by undermining its financial capacity to function, directing its energies away from fighting the cuts and forcing it to defend its membership base.

Maude’s intention was to bankrupt the union through the removal of the “check-off” system of union dues collection — payments made automatically from a member’s salary. Any attack on this system had the potential to catastrophically damage PCS’s finances, given the inevitable delay and difficulty of signing up members to direct debit payments. He would also press home the attack on other fronts, including a refusal to negotiate at a national level, while continuing to push through cuts in departmental groups on a piecemeal basis. The intention was to drive down wages and conditions across the entire Civil Service while undermining the national union leadership.

With removal of check-off planned to begin in 2014, PCS launched a national campaign that involved organising the sign-up of members to direct debit. This was presented not as some routine, bureaucratic exercise but as critical for survival. Fortunately, PCS had become a well-run union under left leadership, although Maude’s attack was intended to ruthlessly expose any weaknesses.

Alongside the hard slog of signing up members, PCS began to challenge the government over check-off in a series of successful court cases. The first left the Department for Communities and Local Government in September 2013 with a legal bill of nearly £100,000.

Further victories were won with the DWP and other departments ordered to pay millions in compensation, but at appeal the judges denied the union compensation, cynically claiming that while these departments breached staff contracts, they were not intended to be enforceable by PCS.

The union’s appeal to the Supreme Court was upheld in November 2024. So, after a 10-year campaign, PCS can now sue the departments who refused to accept responsibility for their attempt to bankrupt a free and independent trade union; compensation will run potentially to several millions of pounds.

Far from preventing the union co-ordinating industrial resistance and promoting a socialist alternative to austerity, Maude’s attack fostered a tremendous sense of solidarity among members, deepening their contempt for the government.

Vital practical support was also evident from across the trade union movement. Membership levels did drop, but some of the union’s largest departmental groups recovered very quickly. In 2010 the union had just under 300,000 members, but cuts and job losses had already reduced this number before the check-off assault reduced it still further.

By the end of 2019, membership was just under 200,000, but it started to rise thereafter. Financially, this meant that more had to be done with less, a reality that would become weaponised in later internal conflicts.

Surviving such a direct government attack was a real achievement, confirming that a leadership willing to fight for its members was the firmest foundation upon which a union could be built. Although it would take four to five years to fully recover in terms of financial stability, Maude’s plan to bankrupt PCS had failed. His dream of breaking the union had exactly the opposite effect.

John McInally, long-time vice-president of the PCS, is author of the newly published book A State of Struggle (Manifesto Press), with an introduction by Mark Serwotka. It traces the history of the Civil Service trade union movement, detailing the sharp battles between the rising Broad Left and the state-backed Moderates, the struggle to build a fighting democratic union, the pensions battle, the conflicts with both Labour and Tory governments and the role of PCS as a beacon of resistance to austerity, cuts, discrimination and imperialist war. Part V of this serialisation will appear next weekend.

To buy the book visit the Morning Star shop at shop.morningstaronline.co.uk.