Civil servants are poised to hold their first wave of industrial action for more than a decade.

An internal memo from the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union lists 10 government departments that could be hit with 24-hour strikes by as many as 112,000 members of staff.

These include the departments for culture, media and sport, of trade and industry and for work and pensions, as well as the British Museum, the Passport Agency and Customs and Excise.

Mark Serwotka argues that chancellor Gordon Brown has set a "cap" on ministries' wage bills, a claim that the Treasury has denied.

"The Treasury has not called for a limit on civil service pay. There is no truth in this statement," said a spokesman.

"Under a 1997 agreement, individual departments take full responsibility for their own pay systems.

"As always, there is a need for responsibility in pay bargaining across the civil service to ensure funding leads directly to the improvement of services."

The union expects employers to make a 3.7 per cent pay offer, which will probably be rejected.

But speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Serwotka argued any industrial action would be taken as a last resort.

"We want negotiations. We are desperate to get into that process,'' he said.

"We will only consider industrial action as a last resort.

"But if the government's tight cash limits mean our members have to continue claiming benefits and are on appallingly low wages, and our women members are not getting equal pay 40 years after equal pay legislation, then we will consider all options if we have to."

He described the present situation as "pretty dreadful."

"We have a quarter of Britain's civil servants earning less than £13,000 a year. We have real equal pay problems. Pay rises are not being paid on time," he said.

"Ten thousand people in the Department of Work and Pensions alone are earning less than £10,000 a year.

"Our members do an extraordinarily difficult job delivering all the government's key programmes across the country and are often undervalued.

"It is not acceptable to us that we have a situation where women are earning five per cent less than men for doing the same job and there is endemic low pay.

"We think these fundamental problems have to be addressed."

However, shadow trade secretary Tim Yeo said that the public should not have to be affected by the dispute.

"Our first concern is for the millions of vulnerable people dependent on our public services who will be hit hard by any potential strike action," he said.

"It is simply unacceptable that elderly people and others who are dependent on social services should be made to suffer as a result of a dispute in Whitehall.

"Of course we understand people's anger with the Treasury, not least because Gordon Brown has just imposed another large tax rise on them in the form of increased national insurance contributions. But it isn't fair that innocent people's lives should be hit by this dispute."

The reports come as manufacturing union Amicus plans to march on the Labour Party conference to protest at the fall in manufacturing jobs.

The "March for Manufacturing" will involve 2500 workers, each representing the number of jobs lost in the sector every week, and will take place as Brown makes his keynote speech to delegates on September 29.

"An average of 10,000 jobs have been lost every month in UK manufacturing since 1997," said general secretary Derek Simpson.

"If this continues all that will be left will be the brownfield sites where our industrial plants once stood, now being used for new housing development.

"What's more, former industrial workers who are still without jobs or who have taken jobs in security, call centres or in so-called business and personal services won't even be able to afford to live there."

Amicus plans to survey the 14,000 people who have left manufacturing to discover what employment, if any, they have found since.