WORKERS are facing their worst-ever winter amid a national crisis of poverty, Britain’s biggest Civil Service union warned today as it launched the largest strike action ballot in its history.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said his members have no choice but to act after Tory ministers “ignored our demands for a fair pay rise” and offered a significantly below-inflation wage boost of just 2 per cent.

The country is now seeing its biggest wave of industrial action in a generation, with the government urging pay restraint for most workers while cutting tax for the wealthiest and abolishing the cap on bankers’ bonuses. 

PCS’s six-week vote until November 7 is open to more than 150,000 members of the union, which represents junior civil and public servants alongside private-sector workers on government contracts.

Some 85 per cent of the union’s members told a recent internal survey that the mounting cost-of-living crisis is affecting their physical or mental health — about a third said they were skipping meals because they cannot afford food and almost one in 10 — 8 per cent — are using foodbanks.

Mr Serwokta said: “In 41 years of working in and around the Civil Service, I have never seen such a shocking situation.

“This is the worst it has ever been — a crisis of monumental proportions, the biggest cut in living standards civil servants have ever known.”

The government’s threat to return to already-low pre-Brexit 2016 staffing levels by slashing 91,000 jobs in the sector has only added to the trauma, he warned. 

The union is calling for an inflation-proof 10 per cent pay rise, an immediate 2 per cent cut in pensions contributions that have been overpaid since 2018, no further cuts to redundancy terms, which have been slashed by about a third, and a job security agreement. 

Mr Serwotka said his “angry members have had enough of being treated with contempt.

“They’re not bowler-hatted mandarins: they’re the people who, unobtrusively, have kept the country running during the pandemic.  

“They work in communities the length and breadth of the UK. They deliver universal credit in every jobcentre, police the national minimum wage, issue passports and driving licences, keep our motorways safe, inspect goods at borders, supervise payments to farmers and work in education and the justice system.

“When they vote ‘yes’ for strike action, the government will see how critical our members are in delivering key public services.  

“The government will have to explain to the public why our ports, airports, roads, courts, the benefit system, planning, pensions, the government itself, are all affected.”

Mr Serwotka criticised Labour for failing to send a shadow cabinet representative to the union’s fringe meeting at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool today despite previous commitments to do so.

Communication Workers Union head Dave Ward warned the meeting that Labour will struggle to win the next general election — due by 2024 — if it fails to throw its weight behind strikers.

He said: “We’re not interested any more in people who want power without any principles to change things.

“There are too many serious issues — and you can’t sit on the fence: if you do so, you get splinters.”

He urged Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to overturn his ban on shadow ministers attending picket lines and to demonstrate that Labour is the party of working people.