AFTER the biggest wave of public-sector strikes in decades, Fran Heathcote, president of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), says 12 months of mobilisations have drawn more women workers into action in the trade union movement and sown the seeds for future struggles.

Heathcote, who is standing as Left Unity candidate to become PCS general secretary when Mark Serwotka retires from the post after a 23-year stint, has seen a new generation of activists emerge.

As with many of Britain’s biggest unions, PCS has a mainly female membership — approximately two-thirds women.

“What we have found during the latest pay claim campaign is a whole new layer of people getting involved, young working women and ethnic minority members who want to do something about the situation they are facing,” she told the Morning Star. “New activists are coming through. Strike action is mobilising many people for the first time.”

On Saturday Heathcote is attending the annual celebration of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the six Dorset agricultural labourers transported to Australia in 1834 for founding a trade union.

Last Saturday she was at the Durham Miners’ Gala with a hefty contingent of PCS members.

“We had delegations from the north-east, Liverpool, London, the north-west and Scotland, travelling from all over to the Gala,” she said.

The PCS members were in good voice at the front of the huge Gala crowd as Heathcote delivered a fiery speech which ended with an impassioned call for “an end to the Tory government and an end to their rotten capitalist society.”

Workers in her own department, the DWP, where she is a union rep, are among the victims of the Tories’ attack on the public sector and the steady and deliberate erosion of public-sector wages. Their jobs involve processing benefit payments to the worst-off people in Britain, including to people who have jobs but who are so badly paid that they struggle to survive.

“The irony is that 40 per cent of the people processing these benefits are also claiming them, or are entitled to claim them,” she said.

She believes that the success of her members’ recent strike action, which has brought concessions from the government, has shown the way ahead for the public sector through the potential for co-ordinated strikes by several unions at once.

“As long as I have been an activist, we have been going to the TUC calling for co-ordinated action, whether or not you use the term ‘general strike’,” she said.

“But when you have us in dispute, teachers, firefighters, nurses, wouldn’t it make sense to have a co-ordinated plan? Working together?

“We had a taste of that in 2011 over pensions. It gave us a glimpse of what is possible when people are prepared to co-ordinate. It is achievable.”

PCS has a socialist left grouping within its membership, PCS Left Unity, as do several other unions. Heathcote believes they can come together.

“Left Unity in PCS do organise with the left in the NEU, Unite, Unison, RMT, to discuss how we might be able to join our campaigns and strengthen the movement,” she said.

“It is quite difficult to achieve. Some people might say too difficult. We do not believe that. It is achievable.”

As for the election of a new PCS general secretary to succeed Mark Serwotka, she said: “I am very happy being president, but with Mark retiring, I have been agreed as the Left Unity candidate.”

Her manifesto is based on listening to members at the grassroots level.

“I come from a background of being an activist, a workplace rep still active in my branch and my region, to national president. That has given me a good grounding. I always stand on a platform of engagement with branches and members, talking, and listening, to members, reps and activists,” she said.

She believes the way has been paved for the next stage in the struggle.

“This last 12 months has seen a whole wave of strikes which has led to a regeneration of the movement and a whole new layer of people coming through,” she said.

“Industrial action in PCS has delivered tangible gains and has shown that our members will stand up for themselves.”

She also believes that struggle is not just about wages. It is about fighting to defend public services which the Tories despise.

“This is a government of liars, people who do not have time for the issues that working-class people feel. They are not interested in public services. Part of what we are about is protecting public services,” she said.

She believes that even when the Tories are defeated, her members will have to fight when Labour is in power.

“We are not affiliated to the Labour Party,” she said. “We will obviously want to hold the Labour Party’s feet to the fire, but we are not under any illusions. We see no commitment from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to stand with working people, to stand on picket lines.

“[Starmer] did say that within 100 days in office, he would repeal anti-union legislation. We had a meeting of our young members and their first question was: which anti-union laws? The devil will be in the detail.

“Obviously when he made the commitment at the TUC there was a big cheer, but it then comes down to, what will he actually do?”

Referring to the period in which the Labour Party was led by Jeremy Corbyn she said: “What that gave working people was hope that there could be something better.

“We will get that back, making sure that trade unions support each other’s struggles, all the campaigns and struggles that we are involved in.

“The message we want to give our members is that industrial action works. When you campaign together you achieve something. If we can get that message across to members that can only make the movement and my union stronger.”