Maude will remember his own frugality in government with pride, which he says has saved the taxpayer £14bn over the years. It’s fair to say the 90,000 people who have lost their civil service jobs under his watch might see things a little differently. What many others will remember is his parting gesture: sticking it to the unions and thereby discreetly undermining Britain’s ability to call itself a free and democratic country.
On 20 December 2013, Maude circulated a letter to all civil service departments advising them to review “check-off” – the system by which employees’ trade union subscriptions are automatically taken from payslips. Removing check-off will require employees to sign up proactively to their union and arrange their own payment methods: a change likely to cause a lot of people to drop off the books. In the letter, Maude observes that it is “not desirable for the civil service to provide a service to trade unions”. And so, at the end of last year, the Home Office became the first major department to remove check-off. The Department of Work and Pensions follows at the end of March, as will HM Revenue and Customs in April.
In this ostensibly trivial bureaucratic tinkering lies a major threat to democracy: evidence that the state itself has become a union-buster. The Conservative party should know that removing check-off is an enormous problem for the Public and Commercial Services union – PCS, the civil service union – which could lose a significant chunk of its membership. Without urgent action from PCS representatives and employees, the results could cripple the union, leaving government employees unrepresented, and thus vulnerable to exploitation, deteriorating conditions and job losses. As the TUC’s Matt Dykes put it: “Our movement represents millions of working people and their families and communities … That this kind of union-busting can occur at the very heart of the government – which is supposed to serve all citizens’ interests – is deeply worrying.”
Maude cited finance as the rationale for removing check-off – a fatuous explanation given that administrative costs are minimal, and PCS has already offered to pay them anyway. Of course you don’t have to take my word for it; you can listen to those notorious Trotskyists the Lib Dems, who are opposing the plan on the grounds that they view it as an ideological attempt to neuter trade unions. Danny Alexander wrote a letter to Whitehall departments arguing that there is “no fiscal [or] public policy case” for such a move.
Maude has also, bizarrely, argued that PCS is secretly in favour of removing check-off because the union has done such an impeccable job of ensuring that civil service employees maintain their membership – a bit like saying that film producer Jack Woltz in The Godfather just loved doing the mafia’s bidding, and the severed horse head in his bed was merely a coincidence.
But possibly the most troubling aspect of this whole saga is the role of HMRC. It is the only major government department run by a civil servant – Lin Homer, its chief executive – as opposed to a minister, so we can assume it hasn’t had ministers like Iain Duncan Smith hovering over it. And yet, in November 2014 a memo was leaked in which Jonathan Donovan, HMRC’s deputy director for employee relations, stated that the department’s “business interests” were best served by “[reducing] the influence of the unions”, and advised “proactively targeting” key union activists. In light of this, you have to wonder whether it is coincidence that HMRC plans to remove check-off just a week before the general election, when a Labour government could be elected and put the kibosh on Maude’s plans.
This concerted attack on organised labour by the British state puts it in some pretty ignoble company. Other state union-busters include the de facto absolute monarchy of Bahrain, which recently attempted to undermine an independent trade union and establish a pro-government federation, Fiji’s military regime, which prevents trade unionists from taking part in politics, and South Korea, which has launched attacks on its civil service union. (Sound familiar?)
Of course it would be absurd to argue that Britain is a dictatorial regime like Fiji or Bahrain, but surely these examples demonstrate that state union-busting is the sort of behaviour that does not befit a supposedly advanced democracy. Indeed, if you’re looking for something a bit closer to home, you could cite the fact that the UK has some of the worst collective bargaining rights in Europe – in fact it’s fifth from the bottom, sandwiched between Latvia and Hungary.
The Conservatives are probably hoping the removal of check-off is too fiddly and bureaucratic for the public to recognise the extent to which it is an egregious assault on the rights of working people. But anyone who cares about ordinary people’s rights should be extremely worried about Maude’s legacy. A state that allows the government and big businesses to organise in their own interests, while attempting to remove those same rights for workers, is treading a worrying path.
