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.
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