Postal workers fight for survival !
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
19 October 2009
It could become the most bitter, titanic conflict since the
1984-5 miners’ strike.
In the words of Dave Ward, Communication
Workers’ Union deputy general
secretary, the battle with Royal Mail is “a dispute on a scale that only
comes along every 50 or 60 years”.
Every worker, every trade unionist, every community, needs to “stand
by their posties” in a potentially vicious battle to defend the very
survival of a public service that is under assault from Royal Mail bosses,
the Labour government and large sections of the media.
Over-paid butchers
Over-paid Royal Mail bosses, with absolutely no history in the postal
service, have used the last two years to prepare for this showdown. In
2007 a national strike forced Royal Mail bosses to the negotiating table
and gave birth to the Pay and Modernization Agreement. The key phrase
in that settlement was that “change will be introduced by agreement”.
The exact opposite has happened ever since, with bullying, intimidation,
threats of disciplinary action, workers taken off pay, becoming the standard
methods of imposing new conditions that have meant catastrophic job losses
and increased workloads for those that remain.
Under this reign of terror, Royal Mail bosses have slashed 60,000 jobs
since 2003 – a 30 per cent cut. And as the CWU has warned this week,
they aim to shed another 60,000 in the next two years. Record profits
(£900,000 a day last year!) in a period of severe recession have resulted
from vastly increased productivity and heavier workloads from drastically
fewer workers. The workers’ reward? Zero pay rise; abolition of the Final
Salary Pension Scheme; ‘absorption’ of extra work into workers’ existing
workload with no extra pay; not a penny reward for increased productivity
… and 60,000 job losses!
Crozier and cronies
Initially, workers got a share of the money saved through all these changes,
but no more; now they are bullied into working harder, but all the savings
go to the bottomless pot that is the bonus system of the very top bosses.
People like Adam Crozier, the highest-paid public sector boss in the
UK, who “earned” over £3m last year (nearly triple his ‘modest’ £1.26m
in 2007), and is driven by a ruthless pleasure in trying to smash the
union, crucify workers’ conditions and prepare Royal Mail for a sell-off
to the private sector sharks – or its rich pickings, to be more exact.
Crozier climbed the career ladder via Saatchi and Saatchi, the outfit
that notoriously supplied PR to Maggie Thatcher. He has presided over
closure of 4,000 post offices and abolition of the second post – or of
the first post in reality, as households no longer get early morning
post delivered!
35,000 scabs
Crozier and his cronies have encouraged provocations that have led to
a rash of localized strikes for several months. Now they are hiring 30,000
temporary workers as scabs, to counter any strike action. That is twice
as many temps as they normally take on for the Xmas rush – and they are
starting them much earlier – whilst pretending in press releases this
has nothing to do with doing strikers’ work!
And this army of potential scabs – recruited from people increasingly
desperate for a few weeks’ work in the midst of the recession – is in
addition to the 5,000 Royal Mail managers who are being deployed to scab
on the actual strike days – with 5 new sorting offices set up to help
the process.
In other words, Royal Mail bosses are spending a fortune (of the public’s
money – it is still a public service) to break the strike, break the
union, break the backs of the workforce, to usher in later privatisation
of the most profitable chunks.
They have shown not even the pretence of interest in reaching a resolution
that would protect workers’ conditions and jobs whilst improving the
service to the public. In the wake of the landslide 76 per cent vote
for national strike action, the CWU wrote to Royal Mail bosses offering
to negotiate a 3-year deal to stabilize the service, to jointly approach
the government for action on the pension fund deficit, and to seek mediation
through ACAS. Royal Mail bosses arrogantly dismissed these approaches
within 2 or 3 hours, showing their contempt for industrial peace.
Bosses launch war
Instead, they have been preparing for war. A secret document, exposed
by BBC Newsnight, shows they are prepared to remove union facilities
as part of the prosecution of their war on postal workers. That is already
the local experience in many areas. As CWU general secretary Billy Hayes
put it, “a cynical attempt to de-recognise the union.”
And they are in collusion with the Labour government on this! Lord
Mandelson, arch privatiser, whose scheme to offload parts of Royal Mail
to the private sector earlier this year was shelved in the face of public
uproar and the threat of strikes, is out for revenge. He has publicly
denounced strikes – legally balloted for according to his Labour government’s
vicious anti-union laws – as “suicidal”. And when interviewed on TV,
he showed an incriminatingly detailed knowledge of the secret Royal Mail
document, homing in on how much union facility time costs Royal Mail,
which suggested he had either written it - or at the very least been
in cahoots with Crozier and his crew.
Labour government collusion
Indeed Labour government ministers have been quoted as saying this could
be “our miners’ strike”. In other words, they want to egg on Royal Mail bosses
to confront and defeat one of the country’s largest unions, to casualise
the workforce with vastly increased numbers of part-timers, as part of
their anti-working class mission to create armies of cheap labour in
a de-regulated labour market that maximises profits.
New Labour’s vision of Royal Mail’s future seems to be the Dutch model,
where private profiteers TNT run the postal service. They are overwhelmingly
a part-time workforce; 86 per cent are on contracts of 16 hours a week
or less. Mail is delivered at 4pm – hardly the ‘modernised’ service that
Royal Mail bosses and their Labour backers bang on about!
The Labour government is the sole shareholder in Royal Mail, so they
have the power to settle this dispute in defense of the workforce and
the public they serve, but instead they encourage vicious hysteria in
the press against the CWU – such as reports of riot cops preparing for
battles between strikers and scabs.
They let Royal Mail bosses enjoy a 13-year pension fund holiday, where they paid nothing into it, leading to a record pension fund deficit, which the workers are being punished for.
Don’t feed the hand that bites you!
New Labour has never been innocent by-standers in this long-running
conflict, contrary to their protestations – and in stark contrast to
the mind-boggling continuation of funding of New Labour by the CWU. Last
year alone the CWU gave their arch enemies over £1million. No wonder
a recent consultative ballot of London CWU members voted 96 per cent
in favour of withdrawing funding from New Labour. The national union
should unreservedly declare an end to this crazy support for the party
that is butchering CWU members, as one strand to the current war for
survival. As we first wrote in SSP workplace bulletins in January 1999:
“make the break from New Labour’s New Tories – don’t feed the hand that
bites you!”
Members of the Scottish Socialist Party inside the CWU played their full
part in winning the landslide majority for unified national strike action.
The SSP does not hesitate in giving full-blooded support to CWU members
forced to strike against the decimation of jobs, public services, pay,
pensions and union rights. We will do all we can to build public support
for their strike action, until they win a decent deal that defends jobs,
services, conditions and workplace rights.
And we will do what we can to press the leadership of UNITE to call on
their members not to be used as organised scabs.
UNITE – stop scabs!
Royal Mail managers used to be in a union called CMA, which has now merged
into UNITE. Top dogs in Royal Mail prayed in vain for a NO vote, or at
least a poor turnout in the strike ballot, but lost no time in organizing
managers to be deployed as scabs to sustain the pretence of a postal
service just in case CWU members had the audacity to vote YES!
They have regularly jetted managers into local offices on strike, usually
taking care to deploy them from far-flung places, to reduce the likelihood
of them taking sympathy action with CWU members they already know.
Leaders of UNITE should instruct their members to do their normal duties,
not other people’s jobs, and start a campaign for a strike ballot of
their own members in Royal Mail – many of whose jobs are also on an extremely
shaky nail.
Other unions, and the TUC/STUC, should call and build mass solidarity
marches. And if Royal Mail and the Labour government raise the stakes
even higher, for instance by taking court action, they should call members
out in defiant days of solidarity strike action to help win this critical
battle.
Stand by your posties – victory to the CWU!