This pamphlet was written fifteen years ago during the last major strike in the post. We hope the analysis and lessons from the 2007 strike can be applied by militants, reps and rank and file activists in the CWU to make sure we win the ‘strike of our lives’, as Royal Mail bosses launch a full-scale assault on workers’ jobs, the union and the postal service itself.
Royal Mail’s Change Agenda represents an attempt to impose a big real-terms pay cut and ten thousand job losses, slash and burn our terms and conditions, and launch a two tier workforce. It could mean the break-up of the company and sale of GLS, the international operation based on subsidiaries in Europe and North America accumulated by the Royal Mail Group (now renamed International Distribution Services for exactly these purposes). It signals a decisive shift from letters to parcels, including cuts to the USO. The outcome would be a much weakened or busted union and a race to the bottom, to realign postal workers’ jobs with those of the rest of the precarious, privatised delivery sector.
‘Defeat from the jaws of Victory’
The pamphlet is about the 2007 strike so we will only summarise it here. The 2007 strike against efficiency and flexibility workload hikes, and pay and pension cuts, began with a bang but ended in the whimper of a bad deal. Following a court injunction, CWU leaders abandoned the strike to negotiate the Pay and Modernisation agreement. A decision opposed many postal workers who saw the bureaucracy had snatched ‘defeat from the jaws of victory’.
The strike was the culmination of ten years of struggle against a Royal Mail management and New Labour government, both trying to push through flexibility, closures and job losses aimed at preparing the publicly-owned company for privatisation.
A successful first round of action saw mail centres rammed with full yorkies and delivery offices buried under mountains of undelivered mail. Aa management attempt to victimise Glasgow mail centre drivers refusing to cross picketlines saw a rolling unofficial walkout spread from Scotland to northern England, bringing Royal Mail bosses to their knees. They sued for peace and CWU leaders fell for the ploy. Two months of negotiations ensued, killing the strike’s momentum. Just as Royal Mail was about to sign a deal they pulled out and dug in their heels.
In October strikes began again, solid, more bitter but more determined, but then came a judge’s injunction, the leaders’ surrender, and months of negotiations to produce a bad deal. Liverpool in a tremendous act of defiance stayed out for weeks after, but without a rank and file movement built in the run up to the strike, no solidarity was forthcoming.
The only silver lining was a small but unprecedented rank and file campaign to win a no vote. This failed, but worse, the main left groups – Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Socialist Party (SP)– failed to follow through on this and develop a rank and file movement, instead seeking to promote their respective fronts (the Postworker newspaper, CWU Broad Left). Both these ‘broad left’ strategies sought to unite militants with sections of the left bureaucracy and failed the test of struggle.
In particular Postworker collapsed when those ‘left’ officials and leaders (including SWP member and CWU president Jane Loftus) supported the deal cut by the CWU tops and moved back rightwards after the pressure from the membership had receded. Indeed, they had helped build up the credibility of left leaders who then used it to sell the 2007 deal to the members. The result was the dispersal of the left in the CWU, one of the most militant unions in Britain, just when it was desperately needed to fight the creeping advance of privatisation. Today are again feeling the lack of an organised rank and file network, as postal workers’ ability to struggle is tested as never before in the current strike against the union-busting Simon Thompson management.
Broad Left or Rank and File
The history of every broad left strategy, whether openly adhered to (the SP, IMT) or hidden under ‘rank and file’ phrases (SWP, AWL) is ultimately one of failure or betrayal. The 2007 strike is just a particularly sharp example of the bankruptcy of broad leftism.
The supporters of this strategy argue there is no other way forward: we need the maximum unity. We can’t scare off left wing officials by being too radical, and they are needed to increase the left’s influence in the union and open the door to wider struggles, allowing the left at some point to move beyond the left leaders. The real result, again and again, is building organisations that fail the test of struggle, as the left leaders refuse to call for the necessary, militant action, turning to compromise or outright sell-outs. The left covers for these ‘mistakes’, and the organisations built around them lose direction, deteriorate or fall apart.
This is because the union bureaucracy, both left and right, have different material interests than the members. Leaders who are on over £100K a year and have spent decades in full-time positions, insulated from the pressures and dictat of the shop floor, are not exploited. They are not workers and not paid the same as workers. It is possible though unlikely that someone on the CWU Postal Executive (PEC) might go back to being a full-time worker, but Dave Ward, Terry Pullinger and other top leaders will not, whether they retire, go on to a cushy TUC job or become MPs like Alan Johnson did (and a rightwing Labour MP at that!). Those aren’t personal slurs or meant as such, they are simply facts that condition our ability to fight back against the bosses.
Only the rank and file workers and reps have an absolute interest in winning the strike’s demands – it is our falling pay, rising workload, unbearable conditions – and only they are capable of the radical forms of action to achieve these – if they are organised. At best the leaders will always delay and do too little too late, drop action at the first hint of a deal, kill the momentum of the strike with drawn out talks and ballots, until the membership is tired enough to vote yes to a deal, or not vote at all. But in today’s strike, Royal Mail’s hardline management isn’t just looking to hold down pay or make us work harder for less, they’re looking to smash the union and completely overhaul the company. Any deal with that management is likely to be a defeat for posties.
The road to privatisation
The CWU leaders then like now argued that there could be ‘mutual interest solutions’ and wanted a ‘successful Royal Mail’. The problem was that Royal Mail suffered under New Labour’s promotion of a parcel market of ruthless, low-pay competitors like TNT. The company was weighed down by a pension scheme sliding into deficit due to a lengthy pension holiday by the Tories in the 1990s, where they didn’t pay into it. The Postcomm pricing system for ‘downstream access’ (DSA) deliberately forced Royal Mail to undercharge for delivering competitors letters ‘the final mile’. Postcomm bosses appointed by Labour were open about wanting to force Royal Mail to attack workers wages and conditions, the origin of Royal Mail bosses’ ‘40% overpaid and underworked’ mantra. The 2013 privatisation proved this, when the Coalition government nationalised the pension scheme and re-adjusted DSA prices to make them reflect true costs for Royal Mail, in order to make it profitable for a sell-off.
But the biggest problem with the CWU stressing its commitment to hiking profits was that the aim of postal bosses, the regulator and the government was to restore Royal Mail to profitability so it could be sold off. Every penny in profit was a step towards a sell-off.
A weak one-day strike in 2009 simply added more ‘transformation’, hiking flexibility for postal workers and slashing door to door (D2D) payments for delivery workers. CWU leaders managed to push the deal through by effectively awarding some of the D2D money to other sections with a pay ‘rise’ that robbed Peter to pay Paul.
The years from 2007-2013 saw scores of delivery offices and mail centres closed and tens of thousands of jobs lost. The victimised Burslem delivery office was left to fight alone, and Oxford Mail Centre was actually blocked from balloting for strike action against closure. Despite pay deals in 2007, 2010, 2014 and 2017, postal workers’ real pay – what it buys, given that prices gradually rise – has been flat for the past decade, while flexibility, workload, and stress have increased.
Privatising profits, socialising gain
New Labour had opened the postal market to competitors in 2006 and took steps towards privatising Royal Mail, but then ran into the 2007 strike and then the 2008 bank crisis. The 2010 Tory-Lib Dem coalition government picked up where Labour had left off, determined to sell off what little of the post-1945 family silver still remained in state hands.
Here the reactionary nature of the British trade union bureaucracy’s sectionalism and legalism was thrown into sharp relief. CWU leaders talked out the months and weeks before Royal Mail’s sell-off, blocking a struggle against it. Despite a series of national meetings which saw reps demanding a fight against privatisation, union leaders did nothing except mount the usual identikit, toothless political campaign of early day motions in parliament, publicity stunts and lobbying MPs and small businesses. Despite mass opposition in society to privatisation of the much-loved Royal Mail, the sell-off went through without a hitch. While public opinion is important, it is not decisive, and strike action was needed. That is a key lesson for today’s strike and for the coming struggle to defend the USO from being cut.
Sold off for a song, the 2013 privatisation was a con from the very start. Hedge funds and bankers made a mint buying and selling the under-priced shares, which skyrocketed to nearly twice their value within a week. Against the argument that privatisation was the only way to bring much needed investment, ‘Investors’ asset-stripped the company of all its lucrative city-centre properties, worth hundreds of millions, and billions were paid out in dividends in the decade after privatisation. The 2014 Agenda for Growth deal, whatever its benefits and pay, was chump change to compared to the scale of what workers lost with privatisation, being thrown in at the deep end of the free market with its cut-throat competition and profit margins. Before privatisation a postal strike was a strike against the government directly responsible for the public service, now it is far easier for the government to wash its hands of Royal Mail as just another business.
After the easy profits were gone, there was nothing for Royal Mail bosses to do but go for the hundreds of millions locked in workers’ jobs, wages, pensions, terms and conditions. A series of attacks, disputes and strike ballots centred on the CWU’s ‘Four Pillars’ commenced from 2017 to the present day. This is the reward for privatisation, a never-ending battle to defend our jobs against ever more ferocious competition in the postal market, with multinational giant Amazon driving a race to the bottom that the USO only partly protects us from – for now.
Four Pillars
The 2018 Four Pillars agreement, signed off after the first initial post-privatisation dispute, got a massive yes vote (90.1%, on a low 55% turnout however). It had much in it that was progressive – the 35 hour week to block walks getting bigger and bigger, one pension for all, legal protections against zero hours contracts and breaking up the company. Those gains deserve to be defended.
But the pension scheme while advertised as a ‘wage in retirement’ is reliant on high-risk investments and the market, and the CWU, having helped design it, will be on the hook if it fails. While raising new workers’ retirement funds and ending a two-tier scheme agreed in a previous rotten compromise, it lowered those for longer-established workers. Under a heavy coating of ‘mutual interest’ rhetoric the FPA also incorporated the union into joint working bodies to agree piecemeal change, and as always after such agreements saw officials pushing for its implementation even where workers or reps protested that it undermined their position. It was a no-strike agreement, in the sense that its clauses inhibited strike action because any substantial strike action would mean Royal Mail could pull out of the agreement. Its protections were only as good as long as we didn’t go into dispute.
This deal lasted only six weeks before the Royal Mail appointed the union-busting, GLS boss Rico Back as CEO, who immediately cancelled parts of the deal and began a campaign to defeat the CWU and its power in the workplace. Ultimately the pandemic’s boost to the parcel market, with tens of millions of testing kits being delivered, made Royal Mail temporarily back down, but not without the threat of workers’ action. Rico moved in Spring 2020 to impose shift changes, stepping up his campaign against the union. CWU leaders, pushed into a corner, called on workers to carry on with their old shift patters, effectively to defying Rico and potentially detonating a mass unofficial walkout. Royal Mail sacked Rico and the ‘nice’ Simon Thompson came in promising to work with the union, signing up to the Pathway to Change agreement. As promised he worked with the CWU, for a year – until the parcel market profits slowed down.
The Rico episode showed our shopfloor strength is our key asset. We have the power – if we can organise to unleash it. The problem is the CWU leaders won’t do that 99.9% of the time, especially faced with the anti-union laws and injunctions, and because they are afraid that such a struggle would get out of their control.
Back to the Future
Now we face a full-spectrum assault on our terms and conditions aiming to bust our union. While CWU leaders Terry Pullinger and Dave Ward have fired up the membership like never before, with an expert use of social media, online meetings and gate meetings, the strike has seen workers increasingly worried about the strategy to win it.
Workers have waited half a year for this battle, which is hitting its most powerful point in the run-up to Christmas. But despite calls for escalation, the union never escalated beyond widely-spaced strike days to rolling strikes once per week up to Cyber Monday, one strike day per week per worker, and now two days every week up to Christmas. This is not enough to decisively defeat Thompson and get the deal we need.
Moves to set up a proper hardship fund to support impoverished members came late, in October, and even now has not been truly rolled out. Yet this is essential support for an industrial union with all its sections out – BT/Openreach and the Post Office are also in dispute – and which is not large enough to pay strike pay.
Enough is Enough, pushed by the CWU and supported by the RMT rail workers union to create an anti-cost of living crisis movement, was a great initiative with a brilliantly successful first day of action on 1 October, but then completely dropped. It could have helped build solidarity with the strike, established links between the militants of the different unions joining in the growing strike wave, and helped support our goals, from funds for hardship to raising the banner of renationalisation of Royal Mail and rail, the ultimate solution to many of the issues behind both disputes.
Reps and activists are loyal to the leadership for leading the charge for the last five years, firing up the workers for the current strike. But many are now questioning whether the action is enough and increasingly erratic, damaging tactics. When Royal Mail threatened an injunction on 31 October, CWU leaders binned two weeks of strikes in the crucial month of November. Then when Thompson gave a ‘new’ offer that was the same proposal with a bit more pay, they dropped another ten days of action for a ballot! Then he offered to lead talks at ACAS, to have a smooth run up to the 17 November company statement to the financial press, and another week was dropped. Workers need to come together to reject that, and get organised to fight on if any injunction is imposed, calling on solidarity from the entire organised labour movement.
The rank and file solution
Only rank and file organisation can resolve these questions.
Strike committees elected by mass meetings in every workplace can harness the militants’ energy and dedication and keep morale and picketlines solid.
Unless reps push for it, official reps’ section committees don’t meet often enough to coordinate the dispute. Broken up by function they can’t coordinate delivery offices, hubs and mail centres, and are constrained by undemocratic, initiative-killing branch rules. Only city-wide and regional delegate committees of recallable delegates elected from the workplaces can.
Ultimately a rank-and-file movement in the CWU should campaign for class struggle policies in our disputes as well as full union democracy: annual elections, the skilled worker’s wage for our leaders and full recallability for all elected officers. That way we can dissolve the bureaucratic structures of the union and place it in the hands of the members, unleashing our power for the fight. All negotiations should be open, not secret, and controlled by the members too. A new militant leadership, built out of these struggles can replace the old bankrupt leaders but with a completely different relationship to the members, with workers democracy for its basis.
We can win this strike if we escalate, and the rank and file take the lead. But so long as Royal Mail is privatised, with GLS growing at its expense, rampant parcels competition from the big international companies, and the letters market in slow decline, our jobs and wages will never be secure. The only solution is of course the full renationalisation of Royal Mail, without a penny in compensation except to small shareholders, run under workers and consumers’ control.
To safeguard the USO and democratically plan the development of an environmentally sustainable, high tech delivery service fit for the 21st century, whole sector should be so nationalised – DPD, Evri, and Amazon – and folded into a state-owned, democratically controlled company. We can start with a mass organising drive, coordinated with other unions, to organise the sector and place a floor under its precarious, gig-economy conditions and pay. Like all trade union bureaucracies, the sectionalism of the CWU leadership means it has never even attempted this crucial task.
The CWU should demand that Labour backs our strikes, our picketlines, our policies and renationalisation, or start to agitate among the other unions, particularly at their base, for a new workers’ party, on a socialist programme. In 2007 (and in the pamphlet) the demand for a new workers party was already to the forefront, given the expulsion of the RMT rail union by Blair, the departure of the defeated FBU firefighters union, and 200,000 members leaving Labour over the Iraq War. A whole generation was turning away from Labour, in the context of a weak and divided Tory party. Today the necessity of a break from a rightward moving Labour Party and building of a new workers’ party remains, but the forces for that for that are much weaker and diffuse. Sectarianism towards Labour, with its working class vote and its union base may mean workers have to vote for it at election time ‘holding our nose’ because no real alternative has been built. But that means the left and militants need to fight to bring the unions’ weight to bear on the question, demanding a debate on political representation while fighting not just for a new party but one a revolutionary, anti-capitalist programme as its basis.
Learning from experience
There is no better way to summarise the pamphlet then quoting its own introduction:
‘This pamphlet is meant to draw together these lessons, not just for militants and socialists in the CWU, but also for trade unionists and activists in the wider working class movement. It is a contribution towards the urgent task of renovating our unions and creating a new political party of the working class that together can wage effective struggles in defence of the jobs and gains of the working class, currently under wholesale attack, but also to show how we can open up a perspective of getting rid of market madness altogether and build a socialist society.
If our criticisms of the leadership are not posed in a diplomatic tone it is because we believe the issues are urgent ones – ones where the fighting capacity of the CWU, and other militant unions, is at stake. We fully welcome any comments and criticisms in return – such a debate is sorely needed on the left and in the unions.’
As Karl Marx said, ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’, and only those whose livelihoods are directly threatened by Royal Mail’s change agenda can power a sustained struggle to defend them. Hopefully postal workers old and new can take their own experience of the last few months of struggle, looked at through the lens of previous struggles and in the harsh light of Simon Thompson’s hardline tactics. The timid, too-little-and-late strategy of the current CWU leaders is aimed at cutting a deal that concedes the fundamental restructure of Royal Mail. If the militant wing of the union can organise itself, break with this strategy and fight for control of the strike, it can unleash the full power of over 110,000 postal and Parcelforce workers, creating the best chance for a victory or the best deal possible. This would be the best start to the struggle to defend the USO and fight for renationalisation.
Standing at the crossroads of two different futures, a successful struggle for our jobs or defeat and a race to the bottom, rank and file organisation is the key to unlocking our power.