Transcript of Mark Serwotka interview

PLEASE NOTE "THE ANDREW MARR SHOW" MUST BE CREDITED IF ANY PART OF THIS TRANSCRIPT IS USED

Andrew Marr interviewed General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union Mark Serwotka on June 19th 2011.

ANDREW MARR:

Work longer and pay more. That was the message from the treasury to public service workers last week. Union leaders have accused the government of "megaphone diplomacy" and of going over their heads while still in negotiations. Well I'm joined now by Mark Serwotka, Head of the PCS Civil Service Union. Welcome.

MARK SERWOTKA:

Good morning.

ANDREW MARR:

Now yourself and other union leaders have warned of waves of strikes later this month after the ballot. It's been compared to 1926, the General Strike, which seems wildly over the top.

MARK SERWOTKA:

Well that's not language I have been using, but the fact is there will be three quarters of a million teachers, lecturers, civil servants and public sector workers on strike in ten days time. I think if the government isn't prepared to change course in the negotiations that we're having, after that strike we will see unions representing millions more, move to ballot their members for strikes in the autumn. Now I think that could be in the millions, but we'll wait and see.

ANDREW MARR:

So that would in fact be the biggest such action since 1926?

MARK SERWOTKA:

I think historically that clearly would be the case, but unions still have to ballot before they get to that conclusion. But four unions have already balloted and will be striking in ten days time.

ANDREW MARR:

Now there's an economic or moral case against the strikes being made, and a political one. But let's start with the first, which is that it is actually unfair now for public sector workers to get more generous pension contributions than private sector workers. In the old days they were paid less. Now, on average, they're actually paid more than private sector workers and yet they have these more generous pensions. Why should taxpayers have to subsidise your members in that way?

MARK SERWOTKA:

Well I think what's unfair is that the people who quite clearly didn't cause any of the economic problems are being asked to pay the biggest price. In my union, the civil service, we face losing 100,000 jobs, we've had two years of pay freezes when inflation's at 5%. And now we're being told our pensions, which we negotiated only 5 years ago with the Labour government, that the National Audit Office and indeed Lord Hutton himself says are costing the taxpayer less over the next 40 years as a proportion of GDP, they should not be sacrificed on this altar of deficit reduction because it's unfair.

ANDREW MARR:

But there is a huge unfunded deficit coming up to pay for these pensions. In the old days when you know people stopped work at 65 or 60, they very often didn't live much longer. People now live until 80. Working until 66 is just an absolutely inevitable fact of life, isn't it, for most people?

MARK SERWOTKA:

When I was brought up, my father told me when I was young that as technology developed and the world got richer, that actually people should share in some of those benefits. You know my grandfather worked so long that when he finally retired, he died in less than a year. Now I actually think we should be for a better society than that.

ANDREW MARR:

Well mine too.

MARK SERWOTKA:

What I certainly don't think, Andrew, is that if you made contractual promises, if you've already made the changes that take into account longer life expectancy, we shouldn't fall for that's what this is about. This is a crude effort to make public sector workers pay for deficit reduction and fundamentally I think that's unfair.

ANDREW MARR:

Is there room for negotiation on the subject of the average salary idea; that you don't get your pension on the basis of your final salary, but on the average salary you earn during your life?

MARK SERWOTKA:

Well this is an interesting one because in the civil service we actually agreed that 5 years ago. We have career averaging because we accepted …

ANDREW MARR:

So that's not a big issue?

MARK SERWOTKA:

Well for us it's not because through the predominantly woman workforce, we accepted the equality arguments. But I tell you what is an issue - is what the government are doing is not introducing career averaging like we have it. They want to double the accrual rates which halve the values of people's pensions. So this is about a race to the bottom, not about fairness.

ANDREW MARR:

Okay. The political case, which Ed Balls has described this morning, is that you are walking straight into a government trap; that you are bound to be defeated in these strikes eventually, and that this is exactly what the coalition government wants. They want to take on people like you rather than defend the results of their economic strategy.

MARK SERWOTKA:

Well they may want to do that. They have no mandate for what they're doing. But the problem I think with what Ed is saying is this. If he's me representing people - many of whom are on £15,000 a year, they work hard, they're on poverty pay, they don't look forward to a very big pension - if all of that's being taken away and you work longer, pay more and get less, what frankly are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to sit back and say it's unfair but do nothing?

ANDREW MARR:

And would you call these strikes … Is there any way that these strikes at the end of this month, on the 30th, they're going to be called off? What would the government have to do to achieve that?

MARK SERWOTKA:

The government would have to say that they're prepared to seriously negotiate, that they're not going to tell us in advance that everything is going to be worse, that they're prepared to look in a different direction. I think the chances of that between now and the 30th June, if I'm honest, on a scale of 1 to 10 are fewer than 1. But I hope that the demonstration on the 30th of hundreds of thousands of professional public sector workers will show them the anger that exists and actually tell Francis Maude and the others - who frankly are very well off personally - they can't be right to make the poorest, most vulnerable and most hardworking pay an extraordinarily high price to solve a crisis that they did nothing to create.

ANDREW MARR:

Alright. Mark Serwotka, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

MARK SERWOTKA:

Thank you.

INTERVIEW ENDS

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