GOVT WORKERS GET MISERLY OFFER

Mike Orton and his 194,000 fellow-workers in government industrial establishments around the country feel a deep sense of personal insult at the £1.50 pay offer made to them by the Civil Service Department.

With about 800 other delegates from dockyards, ordnance factories, research centres and other state enterprises, Mike lobbied MPs at the House of Commons last week to express his feelings about the offer.

As they waited in the hot sun, penned claustrophobically between metal barriers in the exhaust fumes of busy Old Palace, Yard, Westminster, their chants turned from an occasional 'Why are we waiting?' to a steady "30 bob? Heath out!' The story Mike we waited was typical of many of the lobbyers. And it explains why the men who keep the wheels of government turning are determined that, this year, they are not going to be fobbed off with yet another meagre rise leaving them trailing the increase in the cost of living.

A worker at Portsmouth dockyard, Mike scorned Civil Service Department claims that average earnings in the service range from £20.87 at the lower end of the scale to over £36 a week.

'We don't think we're bad employers,' a spokesman for the Department told me complacently before I went to the lobby. We don't think our offer is too unreasonable.' His statements were greeted with bitter ribaldry down the queue at Old Palace Yard.

Married with two children, Mike Orton is semi-skilled in the middle pay range. For a 40-hour week he takes home the princely sum of £16.50.

Outside London, Portsmouth is one of the highest rented areas in the country. Mike's rent, not by any means one of the highest among his friends at the dockyard, is £8.15 a week. Which leaves him with £8.35 to keep his growing family and transport himself to work.

It's degrading that we've got to be crammed together like this, to demonstrate in the street, just for a decent living wage,' Mike told me.

'It's degrading to the intelligence of grown men that they think we will accept the first measly pittance they offer us.

'We asked for a "substantial" increase at the start of both 1971 and 1972 pay negotiations. Last year we got a few bob-8 per cent.

If they think they can pull the same stroke this year, they're wrong.

"They're trying to exploit loyalty of the government industrial worker. There's been almost no industrial action in the dockyards since the time of Nelson.

'But this time they're trying to push us too far.' Pay negotiations between union national officials and the Civil Service Department kicked off this year on June 1, when, as Mike Orton says, the usual unspecified, 'substantial' increase was asked for.

There have been several meetings since then. But so far the senior civil servants from the Ministries of Defence and the Environment, who constitute the official side of the Joint Co-ordinating Committee, have stuck fast to their first offer.

The offer is: £1.50 a week extra for men, two more days' holiday for almost everyone with ten years' service and a further step towards equal pay for women (bringing them to 92‡ per cent of the men's rate). will hold out for at least that.

Mike Orton and his 194,000 friends seem in no mood to accept just a few pence, however.

They came to London last week from Scotland, York shire, South Wales, the Midlands and the South-West to say no to €1.50.

Most lobbyers I spoke to calculated that as far as they, personally, were concerned anything less than £2.50 would be a cut in their standard of living.

Rory McCarthy, full-time official for the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in Portsmouth, reckoned that his members would continue to demand at least £5.

The Civil Service Department expects to be back in talks with the unions next week. If 87 per cent is to be its bid, it seems certain that guerrilla strike action, at least, will break out in the most militant sections of the service.

Union leaders would be extremely foolish try and block such moves when they meet this Thursday.

The danger is, of course, that they will try and put themselves in the leadership of sead the rank and file off at such limited action only to a later date. lesson ast week's lobby for government industrial workers is: Be on your guard.