Red Postie

“This is a national agreement they’re breaking, it’s a national union, therefore it requires national action.”

London division officials are demanding the PEC restore the national strike, under pressure from their own members. Finally! It will surprise nobody that London Royal Mail managers have refused to budge on cuts or dismantled scab mail centres.

London postal activists, reps and branches should demand that the calls to lobby the PEC are put into effect by calling a demonstration at the PEC to show national leaders a little bit of the anger – and determination to fight – that exists among posties in London and further afield.

Branches all around the country, especially the 500+ that balloted before the national action began, should send in emergency resolutions to back up London and make sure that we stay united. Royal Mail will try to say, “this is a London thing, the militants are trying to sabotage the agreement”.

Nothing could be further from the truth, all the reports from Bristol, Glasgow and elsewhere show that Royal Mail is not retracting cuts or dragging its feet. The lack of progress after 3 weeks has even leaked out into the press, with one source close to the secret national talks has said “So far, it’s been a case of talks about talks.”

The London call for restarting the national strike has come late but is a welcome move that the rank and file need to push forward. If the PEC does not heed the call, London workers should vote with their feet and walkout.

A wasted month – let’s recover lost ground

The same London officials were quick to line up behind Dave Ward and the PEC to sell the Interim Agreement (IA) three weeks ago. They have argued that the deal isn’t a “sell out”, the local and national ballots are still live, and Xmas strikes could still hit the Royal Mail if it would not seriously negotiate its 2009 local cuts and 2010 modernisation plans. Well if proof was needed, now it’s here!

The truth is this is spin. The London CWU leaders by backing Dave Ward’s strategy have wasted a precious month. The IA has stopped the national strike’s momentum, and undermined the magnificent action of London postal workers who have led the CWU with 18 to 23 days of unpaid strike action. While many London officials have defended the deal, the term sell-out is unavoidable:

1. Royal Mail just wants to play for time

If this agreement came at any other time it would still be wrong because it has allowed the backlog to be cleared in many parts of the country. However this is not just any old six week period. Dropping the strikes at Christmas time, when we are strongest, is downright destructive. Even if the PEC calls a strike this Tuesday, the earliest we will be out is 1 December – four weeks wasted.

In other words, as many postal activists argued, Royal Mail has used the process as they always intended: to delay. Momentum has been broken and a demoralising near silence from the leadership, just like in August-September 2007 where negotiations saw nearly 6 weeks without a peep from the tops. A month has been thrown away to “explore” whether Royal Mail could be trusted. Thousands of angry CWU members, especially in London, have been proven right.

2. The agreement has built in divide-and-rule

The IA is meant to divide London from the rest. RM will bend over backwards to avoid confrontation in some areas, so it can point the finger at London as militants obstructing “modernisation”. If strikes are back on this will be a key part in a media offensive against our union. Some postal workers were already nervous about Christmas strikes thanks to the hysterical squeals by journalists, business groups and government ministers. The pressure will be even worse this time.

The question is, after surrendering once, will our national leaders all of a sudden discover their backbone and call the whole union out in such an atmosphere, especially when some regional officials will no doubt argue behind the scenes against being called out again?

The danger is that we will go back to the situation before the national strike, with stronger areas like London going it alone. That is why it is so important that every branch piles on the disagreement and calls on the leadership to immediately revive the national strike.

What about trust?

Mark Palfrey, a leading London official recently interviewed by the Commune before the IA, laid out how Royal Mail bosses were completely untrustworthy: “Basically, RM completely went back on an agreement they had made – there’s no other way of putting it. They’ve broken their own agreement. They’ve broken the terms of the existing national agreement, and they’ve broken large numbers of the local agreements our branches have… They’ve done this by what they call executive action, which means without agreement.” So why have the same London officials wasted the last few weeks backing Ward’s arguments to give Royal Mail a chance to rebuild trust? Royal Mail was never going to change its spots for the IA – it wasn’t required to!

Palfrey also said, “There’s a war going on…We’re in a war with Royal Mail, a war that we must win.” But what general supports a truce without concessions from the enemy, when our side had the upper hand and was giving them a pounding? The fact is Ward and PEC are looking for any way out of a strike they never wanted to call in the first place.

The London Division leaders have defended the Interim Agreement out of loyalty to Ward – just like they did for the 2007 Pay and Modernisation deal. Their support was crucial to allowing the IA to go ahead. But this has put a dent in the national strikes’ momentum and threatens to divide the union – it therefore hits the interests of their London members most of all.

Just as they have led the national action, it is London posties who will have to develop an independent rank and file movement to force the national strike back on track, with or without the leaders, and take back our union from the bureaucrats in order to lead it to victory. London branches against the IA can take the lead and call a national meeting to kick start such an initiative.

Lobby the PEC on Tuesday: restart the national strike!

Tags: 2007 Pay & Modernisation Deal, Dave Ward, London, National Strike, Rank & File Control, Royal Mail, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Postal Workers’ Dispute – London Update 20.11.09 from Shop Stewards Network

At this afternoon’s meeting of the London Divisional Committee it was reported that after some six meetings with London Royal Mail they are still refusing to honour the full terms of the interim agreement.

All they want to do is make more cuts and introduce “absorption” without re-engaging about the changes they have already imposed with regard to job cuts, revisions, part-timers, belated hours, rest day hours, 4-day weeks etc in line with the agreement.

It is clear that London Management want to continue to punish, bully, intimidate and harass our members for daring to stand up to them and defend our terms and conditions.

The London Division has therefore unanimously agreed to demand that the national union, when it meets on Tuesday, announce national strike action. This is a national agreement they’re breaking, it’s a national union, therefore it requires national action.

Tags: Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

Discontent with the “sell-out” Interim Agreement has even leaked out into the Guardian! This shows how widespread the distrust and anger are. Let’s not trust in the leadership that dumped our 2007 strike, a strategy that bins our Xmas trump card, or wait till after New Years’s to start up again – restart the strikes now!

You’re our union, so listen to us posties
A letter to Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union
Roy Mayall – Tuesday 10 Nov, guardian.co.uk,

“Why does modernisation always seem to mean more work for posties and a worse service for customers? The word in the office is “sell out”. I’m going to be more measured and say that I trust you have a good strategy worked out. I’m glad we are not inconveniencing our customers over the Christmas period, but I hope that if a deal isn’t reached in the new year we can hit the corporations and the private mail companies hard by refusing to deliver their bills for them.”

Read the whole letter at the Guardian

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The postal CWU does not have a rank and file movement, or even an organised left like many unions. However it does have Jane Loftus, CWU president, Chair of the Postal Executive Committee, and member of the Socialist Workers Party.

The problem is, the CWU website states “The Postal Executive unanimously endorsed the attached agreement.” Loftus is on the PEC – did she vote for the Interim Agreement, and pulling the national strike for a fake period of calm?

If instead she was absent, then she ducked a fight on the key issue on which the CWU’s fate hinges, the strike going forward. She dropped the opportunity to lead a union-wide resistance against this betrayal from her high-profile, national post – hardly better.

The SWP is silent on the question, even though Loftus wrote a piece in the paper as recently as the 24 October edition. As the SWP calls on postal workers to join them, they need to explain where their leading PEC member stands.

Loftus has never actively organised against any of the crap agreements that the CWU leadership have cut over the last few years, signing away our jobs and conditions for a bit of extra pay. But SWP members have always defended Loftus, stressing she has at least voted the right way and is able to argue on the PEC against sell-outs and backward steps.

But just sitting and voting on committees is what a left-wing bureaucrat does. The Socialist approach, as the slogan goes, is to “Educate, Agitate, Organise” for workers’ interests and against those who would sell them short, not just vote the right way. And this isn’t the first time Loftus has voted the wrong way, since she voted for the 2003/4 Major Change agreement.

Along with the stop-start failure of the SWP front Postworker over the years, the failures to hold Loftus to account shows up the holes in the SWP’s strategy. Without consistently fighting for rank and file control of the strike and the union, they fall into a broad left strategy and an uncritical bloc with leftwing officials – and their own member turns into one.

For instance, not once over the last year of Royal Mail executive action have they sought to use their base to call a conference of the fighting wing of the union, so that we could develop an alternative leadership and avoid just this sort of sell-out occuring.

Now the SWP says nothing about Loftus, and lamely argues that “The only course of action is for union activists to put up the most determined resistance at a local level, while arguing hard for the return of national action.”

In 2004 when two SWP members on the civil servants PCS union executive voted with the Socialist Party to accept a rotten pension deal, the SWP demanded they disown their vote or get kicked out. Loftus is no different.

Of course we should argue for a return to action in our branches, regions and at the upcoming National Briefing for local officials and reps. But these structures are not enough, the militant wing needs to organise itself nationally, and decide on a course of action. Will the SWP and Loftus use their leverage to call and build a conference of every member, rep and branch against the Interim Agreement?

Such a national meeting could debate a strategy to restart the national strike and take it out of the hands of Hayes, Ward, the PEC – and Jane Loftus too unfortunately. The Anticapitalism event next weekend is one place to start such a debate.

Tags: Interim Agreement, Jane Loftus, SWP, Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

After weeks of closed talks, the Postal Executive met yesterday afternoon and voted to call off the strikes scheduled for today and Monday. Post workers must demand to immediately see all the details of the latest offer and have a chance, this Sunday, to meet, discuss the deal and decide for themselves what is the way forward.

Otherwise they run the risk of being fobbed off by Royal Mail bosses, who could get the backlog and Christmas out of the way before returning to the attack. As we all know, the Tories are talking to private companies about privatising the service – and breaking the Communication Workers Union is a precondition for that.

According to the BBC’s Greg Wood, “If the strike is called off, it does not mean that the dispute has been resolved.” Instead, he added, it would amount to “a framework for proper talks, instituting a period of calm during which they can take place”. More ominously, the BBC quotes postal expert David Stubbs, from Europe Economics: “An agreement on a national level does not necessarily mean an agreement on a local level…and that could sow the seeds for a future dispute.”

The deal on offer agrees a “period of calm” until the end of the year. Royal Mail claims it will resolve all the issues currently in dispute at local level. At the same time, Royal Mail will open up new talks on “modernisation”.

The central question of job losses, workloads, loss of pay through reduction of hours has therefore not been progressed an inch.

Yes, Dave Ward claims the union has been promised a central role in this process. But that was also the case in 2007, the last time posties brought management to their knees. And the bosses broke first the spirit, then the letter of the agreement, leading to the current strike action. What would stop them doing it again?

Ward said, “It will take exceptional efforts to rebuild trust” because of the “bitter” nature of the dispute. But who is he kidding? Royal Mail management has spent the past six months bullying strikers, favouring scabs, mucking about with their shifts and hours, and imposing other changes. They don’t want to rebuild trust. They want to break the CWU.

The only reason Adam Crozier and Peter Mandelson have signed this new deal is because they know the CWU’s trump card is the period up to Christmas.

The worst thing that could happen for our side is that the 30,000 temps are used to clear the backlog. The busiest time of the year, during which businesses need the delivery service to get mail and internet orders delivered, comes and goes. Then millionaire Adam Crozier swans into the negotiating room and declares that, after all, they do have a different vision of “modernisation” to the union after all, and the executive action starts all over again.

What a criminal waste of every postie’s sacrifice that would be!

In fact, this whole ploy is a union-busting exercise. Royal Mail tried to break us before Christmas, but we were too strong. They now calculate that, if they attack us again in the New Year, many postal workers will be too broke to strike again, and that their sprit will be broken, too. But they have miscalculated before – and maybe this time too, if rank and file postal workers act fast!

Postal workers should demand the union immediately reinstate the action unless and until the members vote to call it off. It was the decision of 120,000 postal CWU members to call the action. Only they, the striking members, can rightfully decide whether to call it off, not 19 members on the Postal Executive or Brendan Barber of the TUC!

Districts and regions, like London, Edinburgh and Bristol, which have their own strike ballots to fall back on, should use them to continue the action. Others that don’t should demand the strikes are reinstated or – where possible – walk out anyway. By doing this, rank and file postal workers would also send the strongest possible signal to Royal Mail bosses that the only way they can get us back to working normally before Christmas is to
• Guarantee no job losses to bring in the new machines, but a 35 hour week with no loss of pay
• Repudiate privatisation
• Unwind all the executive action taken since April
• Drop the charges against all members disciplined and reinstate all those sacked during the strike
• Force the government to underwrite the pension fund.

Emergency branch meetings all over the country could be held this Sunday. All sides should be heard, not just the leadership’s. The full details of the deal should be printed off so everyone knows what is and what is not on offer. Branches should vote to demand the strike action continues and an immediate recall conference is convened – with or without Billy Hayes, Dave Ward and the Postal Executive Committee – to discuss how to win this dispute.

Let Royal Mail – and the CWU leadership – know: we don’t need a “period of calm” to chew over vague forms of words, but a storm of strikes, unless Royal Mail concedes to our demands for a quality service delivered by a decently paid and treated workforce.

Victory to the post workers!

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The Mirror has leaked a story of typical Royal Mail bullying. A woman worker has been bullied into work after being viciously bitten by an alsatian – her manager drove thirty miles to her house to force her, crying, to come in! Royal Mail’s response is familiar: “”We would never force people to come to work when they are not well.” Do they even bother to rewrite their press releases before they press send?

But the real scandal is that being tough on dog bites is the flagship policy of Royal Mail’s recent health and safety blitz, along with cycle helmets and slips and trips. This exposes how this is all just spin.

Why spin? Royal Mail has been desperate to show that despite its imposed cuts programme it is talking to the union over the last year and cares for its employees. This is to hide the reality that Royal Mail’s cuts and flexibility drive will massively harm our health. It is also covers the fact that they haven’t talked to our union about anything over the last year! Except lifting the 3.5 hour health and safety limit on deliveries, they are pretty keen on that.

So how has our health and safety worsened over the last two years since the 2007 Pay and Modernisation agreement?

The flexibility drive forces us to rush to complete our work, and then to deliver mail over the 3.5 hour delivery limit. This despite postal workers accounting for 10 per cent of all skeletal-muscular disorders in the UK, a rate far above the average. Flexibility will only increase such injuries.

The 2007 pension cuts will make us work till 65 and due to reduced pension benefits even work beyond that, collecting trolleys on Tesco parking lots. Add in the flexibility speed-ups, and it means working many of us into an early grave. Senior managers don’t care though, they got pension contribution hikes of 100% this year!

To hide their culpability for accidents due to this speed-up, Royal Mail managers have adopted a blame-the-worker culture. Any accident is deemed the worker’s fault regardless – whether we are slipping, tripping, falling down stairs, it is always because we are reading mail while walking or not paying attention. They weren’t there to witness the accident but after all they’re the boss so it must be true! This practice keeps RM’s stats down and helps speed full-time workers out of a job. If the worker is to blame, rather than Royal Mail, it is easier to force the employee back to work, whether they are ready or not, or onto the attendance procedure’s stages – stage one, two, three and you’re out of a job.

Royal Mail doesn’t want to talk about the health and safety implications of any of its current policies. But it does really really care (really) about dog bites and slips and trips! And cycle helmets, but then it plans to abolish postal bicycle deliveries anyway.

It’s pretty obvious that all this is small change, public relations spin, compared to the real sources of accidents and long term health risks for a postal worker, which are Royal Mail’s policies. Royal Mail’s bark is bad but their bite is worse.

Tags: Flexibility, Health & Safety // 1 Comment »

Thanks to the Unison activist who sent in this report, from a protest at the Dartford scab mail centre:

I went to the Dartford scab mail centre in Kent this morning with the aim of trying to organise the agency workers organised to undermine the national postal strike, and convince some to reject scabbing and help organise against it. The action was organised by the Socialist Workers Party through Right To Work.

Around 20 solidarity activists and trade unionists made it out at 5 AM to Dartford. Charlie Kimber (SWP) spoke about the importance of action. Our aim was to flag up the issue of the scab mail centres through this action, and try to win a hearing from workers and persuade them to tell their labour agency that they don’t want to do scab work. By taking action the aim is to convince CWU workers and the wider trade union movement to develop a strategy to deal with the centres if the strike is not won quickly.

We got to the mail centre around 5:20 and began to leaflet workers. We explained we were there in solidarity with postal workers, that the work they were being asked to do was undermining the strike and we were asking workers not to do it. One worker stopped to talk to us, explaining he was made redundant a year ago, and just looking for work like everyone else. He said they were offered jobs with possibility of permanent work in future. Charlie explained of course they would say this but really there wouldn’t be any permanent jobs, workers would just be discarded after the strike is finished. In the end the worker said fair enough but he had to work. He wouldn’t actually say what they were doing inside.

[a Guardian reporter has showed what is going on inside at the Bristol scab centre, parcel basketball!]

We tried to leaflet everyone. I estimate around a third to a half took a leaflet. The response was hostile from some workers who said they just wanted to work. Many said they were unemployed and trying to feed their families. One gave a short interview to the reporter from ITV who questioned him about the fact he was strikebreaking and he said he had a wife and kid to feed and needed to work. When confronted with the argument that that was what postal workers would say, he just said he didn’t care, he had to look after his family.

Workers did stop and talk more if they were approached out in the parking lot rather than in front of the doorway where a manager was standing, no doubt to intimidate any from speaking to us. Several seriously listened to the arguments, and one activist reported that he had got the phone number of a worker who would be willing to talk with Right To Work and discuss possible action, which is a great development if we can follow through on it. Fundamentally these workers have been enlisted in Royal Mail’s scab army by unemployment and no doubt Agency threats that if they don’t take the job, they won’t get another.

One activist found a letter in one of the rubbish bags which one of the workers had obviously binned was it had no postcode showing casualised labour, means slipshod work with no checks and no regard for peoples mail.

Once most of the staff had gone in a couple of us rummaged through the bins by the main entrance. They were stuffed full of mail tags showing where all the mail was diverted from. Lots was from London but there were plenty of tags from places like Belfast, Bradford and Edinburgh showing the mail was being diverted from all over the country. Almost all of it seemed to be international mail from placesoutside Britain. Places mail was coming from were Australia, Poland, Hong Kong, Singapore, France and plenty more. I grabbed a handful of tags to show to postal workers on picket lines and at solidarity meetings.

It is worth mentioning that while it doesn’t matter where a worker (or scab) is from, the hysterical headlines about migrant workers was shown to be a typical media spin. In reality the workforce was very mixed and not a migrant majority by any means. Lots of young white men and women, most working-class, a few who looked like students.

M, Unison and Workers Power

Tags: Scabs, Solidarity Committees, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

or almost at least. Here’s a few meetings coming up in London, forwarded by a Unison activist active in this growing solidarity movement with our strike:

Battersea and Wandsworth TUC: 7.30 pm 9th November
PCS Headquarters, Falcon Road, Clapham Junction

Lambeth solidarity meeting: 7 pm 2 November
Karibu Centre, 7 Gresham Rd, Brixton

Southwark TUC:6.30 pm 28 October
Unison Office 179 Walworth Rd E&C

This is a great development which will greatly strengthen the strike:

“If solidarity committees are established in every town, city and borough, like those initiated in Bristol and by Brent Trades Council in London, then postal workers would not be isolated but could pull the trade union movement and working class public around them as a shield. These could raise funds and spread the word, pressing the postal workers’ case and puncturing Royal Mail and government spin. Solidarity committees could also begin to coordinate post workers’ action with other strikers, such as college lecturers, refuse workers, firefighters, Fujitsu workers and more, all moving into dispute.” Workers Power bulletin

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The national postal strike has been a brilliant success with a massive turnout across the country. Even the North East Division, which has seen few strikes in the run up to the Oct 22-23 national action is reported to have seen a 98% turnout. Mail centres ground to a halt, the HGVs sat idle in the Distribution hub lots, wet but jubilant posties picketed at delivery office gates. One postal rep summed up the feeling with “Finally we’ve all come out”. Meanwhile a few scabs and managers tried to shift the yorkie jams and nibble away at the mountains of mail. WE WIN THE FIRST ROUND.

Royal Mail “revealed” in its new mouthpiece the BBC that the strikes backlogged only about 30 million letters, 40% of a typical day’s post – which is just unbelievable considering two days of solid strikes, and many delivery offices reporting that managers were struggling to get the special deliveries out! The CWU itself reckons the figure was more like 65 million or a whopping 85% of mail, which is much more realistic. Even Royal Mail’s figure of one out of five workers coming in on Friday seems like an exageration.

Now Royal Mail aims to clear the backlog before the next round of strikes announced for Thurs-Sat 29-31 October. We’ll see. If we work to our time and do the job properly, we can slow them down. It does show the need to escalate the strikes quickly up to an all-out action so that we don’t undermine our own efforts.

There is another reason to go all out and that is to remove Royal Mail’s last excuse for using their scabforce, which the Mail on Sunday undercover journalist revealed was used during strike days:

“The next day the strike had started and we had to cross the picket line. A crowd of post workers waited outside the gates, shouting as people approached…Once inside, there were only 30 temporary workers to tackle the day’s sorting of post. Senior managers were on duty to try to help.”

We need a massive campaign to get every TUC union to support a legal challenge to this, and demand Labour sacks Mandelson and Crozier to end this scab operation. We will have to rely on building our strength – our picketlines, rank and file organisation, and solidarity committees – to prepare to do it ourselves if as is likely the bosses’ courts protect the scabs.

Meantime experts predict that by early November the backlog could be a 300 million Mount Everest of a backlog with ten day delays. As one said on BBC news, “Royal Mail’s plans to cope are doomed to fail.” Even their scabforce can’t shift that amount of mail, Crozier Higson and Co. are screwed and they (and their government backers) know it. Let’s escalate the strike and really force them to their knees.

Tags: National Strike, Scabs, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Notice for strike action has been served to Royal Mail for the following days next week:

Thursday from 4am

43,700 staff across the UK in mail centres, delivery units in mail centres, network logistic drivers and garage staff.

Friday:

MDECs (400 people in three sites – Plymouth, Stockport, Stoke. These workers assist mail centres by reading and entering mail addresses.)

Saturday:

77,000 delivery and collection staff across the UK.

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