'Scientific Service' a History of the Union Of

‘SCIENTIFIC SERVICE’ A HISTORY OF THE UNION OF PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL CIVIL SERVANTS 1920-90 MARTIN MAGUIRE IPA 2010 1 The Foundation of the Institution of Professional Civil Servants (Ireland). Introduction On 25 February 1920, following a meeting in late January to discuss the status and future of the professional civil service in Ireland, a group of professional civil servants met and resolved to form the Institution of Professional Civil Servants (Ireland).1 That an organisation to represent the interests of scientific, professional and technical civil servants was necessary was a belated recognition of the sweeping changes that were transforming the civil service in both Great Britain and Ireland. Despite their title as professional civil servants these officials saw themselves primarily in terms of their professions and only incidentally as servants of the state. Too reliant on their professional status they had been left behind in the rapid evolution of civil service organisation that was now being driven by the administrative and clerical grades, marginalizing the professional and technical staffs. Organisation in the British civil service. Although there was a long history of discontent in the civil service on issues of recruitment, promotion and mobility across departments, pay was the main driving force behind the wave of organisation which the Irish professional grades were now joining. During the First World War the government had allowed inflation to rise. The consequent rise in the cost of food and rent was not matched by rises in wages 1 and salaries. In 1915 two million working days were lost in strikes in Britain as workers fought to protect living standards. Within the civil service agitation for pay increases was led by the postal workers. After the Treasury rejected the post office workers’ demand for a pay increase the government, fearful of strike action, referred the claim to an arbitrator, Sir James Woodhouse. Woodhouse awarded a ‘war bonus’ as a percentage increase on basic pay in compensation for wartime inflation. The war bonus was first awarded in July 1915 to the postal workers but by the end of the year had been extended to all civil servants on the lower pay scales. The war bonus was to make up for the loss of value due to inflation and, it was supposed, would be eventually phased out as prices would return to normal after what was still expected to be a short war. But the war dragged on and inflation continued to rise and so led to applications for further increases in the bonus. By September 1916 the cost of living had increased by fifty per cent since July 1914 and continued its upward rise. The increased pressure for compensation led to the establishment of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board for Government Employees early in 1917. The conciliation and arbitration board formalised a system of hearings on pay issues, awarding thirteen war bonus increases in the period 1917-19. The conciliation and arbitration board was a great advance for civil service trade unionism as it was only through properly organised associations and trade unions that effective and formal applications could be made to the arbitrator. Arbitration gave recognition to the organisations, conceded some influence over their conditions to civil servants and also took the issue of pay out of the control of the Treasury.2 The number of civil service associations and trade unions grew from 80 in 1913 to 194 by the end of the war.3 However this boost to organisation applied only to the clerical and administrative grades below £500 per annum. It was until August 1918 that the 2 higher civil servants of the executive and higher grades over £500 got a modest war bonus on their salaries. A further factor inhibiting organisation amongst professional civil servants was the lack of a bond across the many professions within the civil service and therefore a fragmentation of effort. It seemed that an architect and an agricultural advisor had nothing in common except that they were both employed by government departments. Before the end of the war the British government began to recognise that collective bargaining and trade unions were becoming an established part of the industrial landscape. This was prompted in part by fear of the unofficial ‘Shop Stewart’s Movement’. Originally based in the craft workers in the Clyde war factories this movement of locally elected activists was supported by some workers within the assembly industries who were angry at what they saw as co-operation by official trade union leadership with government attacks on their conditions, especially in undermining craft regulation, and the military conscription of formerly exempt skilled workers. There was also a recognition that the experience of war had shown that a more co-operative system of industrial relations was possible.4 The Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, J.H. Whitley, chaired a committee drawn from the leading industrialists and trade unions, appointed to examine the problem of industrial unrest and to make proposals for ‘securing a permanent improvement in relations between employers and workmen and to recommend ways of systematically reviewing industrial relations in the future’.5 The committee’s recommendation on the creation of joint worker-employer industrial councils did not survive the end of the war so far as industry was concerned. In fact it was never even established in the major sectors of mining, engineering and ship-building. However in the one environment in which it was argued that Whitleyism was completely unsuitable, the 3 civil service, it quickly took root. This success was due to a unified effort across all of the civil service organisations. With the publication of the Whitley committee report the civil service unions demanded that the government should set an example to all other employers by establishing a Whitley council to cure its own industrial ills. At a meeting in April 1919 in Caxton Hall near the Houses of Parliament attended by Austen Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by his Treasury officials the civil service unions united behind the postal workers representative Stuart-Bunning in demanding a Whitley Council for the civil service. Chamberlain reluctantly conceded and in July 1919 a two-tier Whitley Council was agreed with a ‘local’ Departmental Council in each department made up of departmental heads as the official side and local associations as the staff side. There was also an over-arching National Council made up of the senior civil servants (not politicians as the civil servants wished) as the official side and civil service associations and trade unions as the staff side. Civil servants, through their organisations, would now enjoy something more than mere consultation but would have real power in determining their conditions. It brought an end to the tyranny of departmental heads being ‘humbly’ requested to consider petitions of grievances by individual civil servants and compelled them to recognise civil service trade unions. To fully exploit the advantages of Whitleyism civil servants would have to form and join recognised associations and embrace combined action.6 The first issue that the Whitley councils addressed was the cost of living bonus. A Joint Cost of Living Committee of the National Whitley Council agreed a sliding scale of bonus for the civil service. Taking 100 as the base line for the cost of living in July 1914 and 130 as the index figure for 1 March 1920, the committee gave 4 full compensation of 130 percent on the first £91.15s.0d of salary, 60 percent on salaries between £91.15s.0d and £200 and 45 percent on salaries between £200 and £500 per annum. The cost of living figure would be re-calculated every six months and the bonus either increased or decreased by the new figure. The result was a flattening of salaries through the grades of the civil service as the higher paid civil servants, such as professional grades, received less and less compensation for the increased cost of living in comparison to the clerical and administrative grades. The Whitley Council then turned to the question of the reorganisation of the civil service clerical and administrative classes. Each government department had its own classification of work and its own grading tradition. Working from October 1919 to January 1921 the Reorganisation Committee re-organised the civil service classes and grades, re-classified work, revised pay and leave and reformed recruitment. The civil service in each government department was to be assimilated into the new and universal administrative, executive, clerical and writing assistant grades, all on the same pay scales and conditions. This would provide an effective division of labour with maximum flexibility. Civil servants could be redeployed within their grade to any department and could compete for promotion to vacancies in the higher grades across the service. In the rapid development of civil service trade unionism the professional and technical grades found themselves being sidelined. In Great Britain the professional civil servants in the Admiralty were the driving force behind the creation of the Institution of Professional Civil Servants (IPCS) in January 1919. The British Institution had two out of the twenty-five staff side representatives on the National Whitley Council, reflecting the dominance of the post office, clerical and administrative associations. The British IPCS did attempt to secure the same 5 thorough-going investigation into the grading of the professional and technical civil service as the Whitley Reorganisation Committee was putting into the clerical and administrative grades. Eventually the official side did concede three joint committees to consider the cases of the engineers and architects, the valuers, and the analytic chemists. The official side, by taking each profession one by one, was intent to run the inquiry into the ground.7 It was the experience of the civil service trade unions that the official side, made up of the most senior civil servants, were at best reluctant participants in the Whitley process and at worse frankly hostile.

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