Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union, has announced his retirement early next year.
Serwotka said: “It’s been an honour and a privilege to serve as PCS general secretary for 23 years. I have endeavoured to represent PCS members to the best of my ability and to fight for their interests.
“We have led the way within the trade union movement on challenging the political consensus that working people must accept cuts in their jobs, pay and public services.”
My mother told me to get into the Civil Service as I would have a job for life, a fantastic pension, and people in the community would look up to me. Finding out my mother had lied three times in one sentence was quite a difficult start to my working life” – Personnel Today interview, 2007
Serwotka, 60, has been the general secretary of PCS since 2000, having been re-elected four times. He has been a member of the TUC general council since 2002, its executive committee since 2003 and was TUC president in 2019.
He said: “Today, PCS is in the best place it has been for many years. We have withstood attacks on our union from Conservative governments and we are now growing. We are winning historically high votes in industrial action ballots which beat the Tory ballot threshold and we have developed an effective industrial action strategy for the future.
“We have young members coming forward to become a new layer of activists. Our financial position is the best it has been in years.”
In an interview with Personnel Today in 2007, Serwotka said he regarded HR professionals as fellow victims of the government’s agenda.
“We’re defending people in the Civil Service from losing their jobs and we recognise that HR people have a more difficult role to play there. I admire the job that many HR people do,” he said at the time.
Serwotka started work at the age of 16 as a clerical officer at the Department of Health and Social Security, now the Department for Work and Pensions, in Pontypridd, south Wales.
“My mother told me to get into the Civil Service as I would have a job for life, a fantastic pension, and people in the community would look up to me. Finding out my mother had lied three times in one sentence was quite a difficult start to my working life,” he joked in the interview.
Despite being at the forefront of the union movement, family priorities and work-life balance have always been important to him.
He was one of the first people to take his children with him to the TUC conference. “I always come home rather than stay away and I still try and take the kids to school when I can,” he once said.
In 2010 he contracted a virus and his heart failed and he had a pump fitted; this then developed a clot in 2016 and he was placed on an urgent transplant list.
Yesterday he said: “People will be aware that I have had serious health issues resulting in a heart transplant in 2016. Such issues need to be considered in making decisions about the future. Taking into account what is right for myself, my family and the union, I have decided that now is the time to announce my retirement.”
Serwotka will retire on 31 January 2024, with an election for a new general secretary and assistant general secretary taking place over the autumn.
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