PCS is the largest civil service union and represents a high proportion of female and part-time workers and a high proportion of members in lower civil service grades (with the FDA mainly organising civil service managers). Union density in the public sector remains relatively high at 45 per cent (BIS, 2014). In PCS, total membership levels have fallen from just over 300,000 in 2008 to 260,000 members in
2011 (Certification Officer 2011). PCS membership constitutes an estimated 54.1 per cent of all civil service employment (PCS National Organising Strategy 2012)
HMRC membership of 57,000 makes up a fifth of the total (PCS op cit). Density levels in HMRC are higher than any other government department at an average of 80 per cent. The public sector has a relatively high level of coverage of collective bargaining, although the proportion of public sector employees covered by collective bargaining fell from 95 per cent in 1984 to 562 per cent in 2011 (van Wanrooy et al op cit). Some of this change is explained by the expansion by the Labour government of the independent pay review system. However, the focus of public sector modernisation under successive Labour and Conservative governments has increased the trend to decentralisation. The emphasis within the Civil Service on decentralisation has led to a fragmentation of pay bargaining and a dismantling of national Whitley arrangements and a shift to departmental level bargaining.
The application of performance management and the introduction of lean, despite PCS’s initial statement of opposition, appear to illustrate a weak response by the union in shaping the introduction of new work regimes. Within HMRC, lean was adopted wholesale (in contrast to DWP where the lean programme was introduced through a series of pilots) with the initial introduction of lean taking place in its processing centres of which one of the case studies was one of the largest. The adoption of lean in the UK Civil Service in the early 2000s and its wholesale adoption by HMRC on its inception (Carter et al., 2011; D. Martin, 2012; Osborne, Radnor, & Nasi, 2013) suggests that New Public Management (NPM) type principles form a central context within which the two HMRC workplace case studies are located. In HMRC a bundle of NPM practices, including lean, operational management and senior leadership programmes were introduced under the heading of the ‘Pacesetter’ programme (Radnor, 2010). Lean principles emphasise streamlining management and harnessing staff knowledge and skills to drive performance and quality improvements (Womack, Jones, & Roos, 1990). This requires new
2 This excludes the Health Sector covered by the Independent Pay Review Body, a process described as ‘a form
of arm’s length collective bargaining’ (Bach & Kolins Givan, 2011). The figure for collective bargaining in the public sector as a whole including the Health Sector was 44 per cent in 2011.
forms of workplace participation. In the HMRC Pacesetter programme this included ‘rapid improvement events’ and ‘lean academy training’ as tools to encourage engagement in lean processes (Radnor 2010).
PCS have been involved in union learning since ULRs were first trained in 1999. A number of local and regional projects were supported by the ULF in these early years HMRC and DWP were the two departments which took the lead on developing union learning activity and were cited by a number of respondents at the national level as leading the learning agenda within the union.
Government learning and skills policy formed the key backdrop to union-management engagement; initially under the New Labour government’s UK skills strategy, the Leitch Review of skills, the (basic) Skills Pledge initiative and the development of the Sector Skills Council action plans (Skills for Government in this sector). Under the Coalition government there became increased emphasis on accreditation and a heightened focus on apprenticeships in England and Wales. At the national level the General Secretary of PCS sits on the TUC’s unionlearn board. AGS1 sat on the Skills for Government SSC board 2007-2010 (the SSC did not receive a re-license from BIS in 2010 and its functions were brought into Civil Service management). A PCS Learning and Skills Strategy group was established to oversee the union learning fund national learning project in 2006 and development of the national learning agreement. In 2006 PCS also appointed regional learning organisers, a role to support branch level activists and provide connection with the national learning structures. In 2006, ULRs were integrated into the national organising strategy. This was augmented with the appointment of (ULF funded) Bargaining Union Learning Organisers (BULOs) in 2008 with a remit to directly support departmental negotiators.
The three main employer-led learning themes that ULR and union learning activity link to (from management’s perspective) are firstly, supporting the ‘Skills Pledge’, secondly, the roll-out of lean processes and thirdly, the implementation of the Professional Development Exercise (PDE, the annual performance review and staff development planning tool). HMRC departmental training has also been
moving learning away from direct delivery to an e-learning model, whereby a suite of (non-accredited) learning was made available on-line and staff were encouraged to learn ‘at a time and pace to suit themselves’ (HMRC). Three key documents were developed and agreed in relation to learning in the period 2006-2011: the CCSU-Cabinet office framework learning agreement (2008), the PCS-FDA-HMRC national learning agreement (2008) and the PCS-HMRC apprenticeship agreement in (2011).