Home - SR Editions - Socialist Resistance No.47

“Suspended” postal dispute at crucial point

By a London postal worker

At the time of writing, the main (Royal Mail) postal strikes are still “suspended”, while those at Post Office Counters continue. There are three ongoing postal disputes, the third being in “supply chain” - those who distribute cash to offices. CWU members in all three sectors were balloted at the same time over strike action and initially struck together. The common issue is pay, with all three employers offering below inflation pay increases, but Counters and Royal Mail workers also have much more far-reaching issues over the future of their jobs, conditions and the service to the public. The strikes in the supply chain are also suspended while negotiations take place.

In Counters, the issues are the closure of post offices and the franchising out of Crown Offices to W.H.Smith with the worsening of conditions involved. In Royal Mail the immediate issue is the strings management want to attach to the pay offer, such as later starts (and hence loss of shift allowance) in delivery offices, covering (for no extra pay) for people on holiday, and a host of others. Behind this lie even bigger issues – management’s intention to cut 40,000 jobs and worsen our pension rights.

Despite the healthy information put out by the union in advance of the strike ballot and the excellent vote for strike action, the CWU leadership has seemed reluctant from the start to treat the dispute with the same seriousness as management do.

While management said, “it’s going to be bloody like the Miners’ strike” and “we are prepared to sit out six months of strikes” [in the hope of a drift back to work], the CWU leadership reduced their demand to “getting management to the negotiating table”. They delayed before calling action after the ballot result and delayed again before calling further after the first highly successful strike. Each time the pause was said to be to enable management to “come to its senses”.

When much-needed escalation - to a rolling programme of “functional strikes” eventually took place, it did not take long for management to start making concessions. They put back their date for the unilateral implementation of later starting times and agreed to continue paying the shift allowance to existing workers, although this would have created a two-tier workforce. They agreed to talks.

But instead of pressing on with the strikes to force Royal Mail to drop their whole package, the CWU leadership agreed to a “period of calm” while negotiations take place (the same has happened with the ‘supply chain’ strikes), leaving Counters workers to fight on alone.

Of course, management have been using this to clear the massive backlog of mail which built up, and have also attacked reps and sections of workers. South London postal workers are on strike in the run up to the Bank Holiday weekend because management have been attacking them for ‘doing the job properly’ - not coming in early, not using private cars on delivery, etc.

The root of this attitude is that the CWU leadership believe they can have common ground with management over how the business should be run, instead of bluntly saying that the problems caused by liberalisation of the postal market should not be solved at the expense of the workforce. Thus the leadership has been happy to go along with job losses (and still is), provided “there is something in it” for the workers, i.e. payment. Rumours abound as to whether the talks are going anywhere, but they are committed to being over by September 4th at the latest. Until then there is a blackout on progress.

Chances are that management will only make minor concessions (if that). The question will then be whether the CWU leadership tries to sell such a deal to the membership or moves to reinstate the strikes. However, this will not be an easy matter. The membership have been demobilised, and while many did not understand why the strikes should be suspended, hopes have been built up that something will come out of the talks. If the talks collapse, people will be asking why they lost four (or more) days pay for nothing only to start again all over.

Just because there was a massive “yes” for strike action and overwhelming (98%) support for the strikes, doesn’t mean the membership can be treated like a stage army to be switched off and on at will. Of course, workplace reps will pull out all the stops to win people over, but the leadership’s tactics make their job harder.

If the strikes are reinstated, they must not be on the basis of one day every two weeks. Even the escalation which took place, while welcome, was problematic in that different parts of the network weren’t sure when others were on strike, the union was encouraging people to cross each others picket lines (!), and management found it easier to move office workers and junior managers around from one place to another to give the appearance the strike wasn’t working.

Of course, this, rightly, led to unofficial action in several places, but this merely added to the confusion. Now more than ever a coordination of postal militants is necessary to ensure we are not sold short and we fight with the same determination as management.