By a CWU rep
Earlier this month, 500 full-time Communication Workers Union reps and officials, gathered in London for an emergency “policy forum”. They voted unanimously for a national strike ballot.
Pending further negotiations, the leadership is committed to doing so no later than September 2013. The CWU is on course for its first national strike since 2009, threatening to wreck the government’s plans to privatise Royal Mail.
General Secretary Billy Hayes and Deputy General Secretary-Postal Dave Ward sent a briefing to members on 26 July, explaining their aims and strategy. The union is demanding greater guarantees on jobs and conditions if privatisation goes ahead, but the question of a sell-off dominates the ballot’s other issues too – pay, pensions, workplace speedups, cuts and management bullying. In order to puff up profits for a sell-off, Royal Mail bosses have refused to even discuss a pay rise, despite profits having doubled, and insisted that workers accept cuts to their future pension. Rising workplace attacks are part of the same drive to prepare the company for privatisation.
Privatisation
Each of these issues alone would justify a national strike. But most reps and members, worried about future attacks under privatisation, are looking at the big picture and see a strike is a way of fending off privatisation, by making the company unsellable.
Privatisation will see Royal Mail’s new bosses slash services, hike stamp prices and attack the current workforce’s pay, pension, jobs and conditions. They will certainly try to flood the service with casualised staff, in a race to the bottom to compete with private sector rivals like the giant multinational TNT, which has just launched a delivery service in London with workers on zero hour contracts and wages far below those of Royal Mail staff.
Worse, privatisation will threaten the postal service itself, with huge pressure to water down the Universal Service Obligation at its heart – the guarantee of mail going everywhere in the UK for the same price, six days a week – as private companies say they can’t afford it.
Ministers, like Michael Fallon and Vince Cable, are trying to bribe postal workers with £2,000 in “free” shares – and threatening to take them away if there’s a strike and the sell-off on the stock market becomes impossible. That’s the real reason behind the propaganda blitz; it’s not just to fool workers, it’s a bluff – they are trying to convince postal workers not to strike, because they are terrified it will spoil the sell-off.
Postal workers can win
The moves so far for a strike are firmly down to pressure from below, with activists and more militant areas demanding the leadership organises a ballot. Ballot requests for local action have piled up and strikes and unofficial walkouts have taken place as anger deepened.
Many of us have learned the lessons of previous strikes in 2007 and 2009; stop-start strikes, rolling strikes, one-day actions all leave the initiative in the hands of the bosses, who organise scabbing operations and victimise our militants in between strikes, and full time officers, who call off strikes at the merest whiff of a court injunction or offer of secret “talks” in return for calling off the action. Why should we stagger our action, shifting the backlog in between strikes, just to call it all off when the strikes are beginning to strike.
All this indicates how important it is for rank and file postal workers, through electing their own strike committees, to control the strike from day one. It’s time for a new strategy.
If postal workers escalate the struggle to an all-out strike to defeat privatisation, they can save the postal service and their jobs and conditions with it. The hated coalition government would suffer a sharp defeat and possibly splinter, while it would be a huge boost to the trade union movement and all workers, including the one million on zero hour contracts.
The People’s Assemblies springing up around the country could play a really active role in building solidarity with the CWU action, like the miners’ solidarity committees did in the great 1984-85 strike. Dave Ward has called for a national demonstration on the first day of the strike. Great idea – let’s build for it.
CWU activists should campaign for the strike to be run as part of the wider class struggle, not a sectional dispute that is solely the property of union officials. We need a rank and file, unofficial “policy forum” of our own to discuss what form of strike action is needed – rolling, escalating or all-out to win – and what goals the strike should have. Most importantly, we need to work out how to watch our leaders and organise to take control of the dispute from below if necessary.
We call on all branches, activists and postie supporters – including those, like Bridgwater Delivery Office, already in dispute – who see the need to organise from below to support a national meeting to discuss the way forward and coordinate our efforts. As part of this process we propose the following.
A programme of action to stop privatisation
