by Richie Venton, SSP national trade union organiser

Low paid canteen and cleaning staff at Glasgow’s STOW college are staging a series of strikes.
These UNISON members are winning massive support from teaching staff (EIS members) and students, as well as the wider public. Queues form daily to buy their sizzling solidarity sausages, at the elaborately decorated ‘tent’ the pickets have mounted outside the college gates!

In a petty act of intimidation – which entirely backfired and only served to harden the strikers’ resolve – college top management called out the police and then council environmental services, to check if the food was up to hygiene standards! Of course it is; these are catering staff, who know what they’re doing – and are collecting generous donations to sustain their strike, which is what management really object to.
At the heart of the dispute is the struggle for the extremely modest Scottish Living Wage (£7.20 an hour) and against privatisation of cleaning and catering.

As one of the pickets told me, We are taking the selective strike action because the union can afford to pay us on strike days – which goes to show just how low paid we are!

I spoke to a steward about the issues behind the strike, and what fellow-trade unionists can do to help them win a speedy victory.

The context of this is last year’s Budget announcement by John Swinney that low paid workers, as a minimum, should be protected against the worst excesses of the recession. He asked for this to be done by the unions showing pay restraint but with workers employed by public bodies earning under £21,000 being given £250, and the Scottish Living Wage being guarateed, which is now £7.20 an hour.

We have at least 20 members on about £6.63.

Last year STOW college management said they would give the Scottish Living Wage this year and in return we took another below-inflation wage settlement.

UNISON and the EIS jointly proposed a package of savings for the college, including the £80,000 hospitality budget; overseas travel not linked to income (including Board meetings and management taking their families abroad for awards events); bringing the graduation in-house instead of sumptuous affairs at the Royal Concert Hall; contractors and consultants being replaced by our own workers doing the jobs; and an end to Board of management events, with overnight stays, at expensive hotels.

Management’s reply was ‘No’ to all that.

STOW is a college that lost significant numbers of staff. We have faced cuts to courses, carried out under the radar, such as Special Needs Provision being cut by half; fewer part-time student places for people seeking asylum; an end to the part-time photography course.

In this year’s pay round we asked for three things: the Scottish Living Wage immediately; a pay rise for the rest of our members; and guarantees against privatisation of any areas of the service.
‘No’ was the management reply!

They said they don’t have the money now to implement the Scottish Living Wage – which we calculate would cost only £7,000 to £8,000. They also imposed a pay freeze and privatisation of the remainder of cleaning and the canteen.

We showed that this is a nonsense, that it would cost the college money as private companies would take money out of the college, rather than make savings.

For two years UNISON led the Hands Off STOW campaign, to save the college from potential closure, saving the necks of senior management in the process. This is our reward: pay cuts, low pay and privatisation of the people who helped save the place.

So we balloted for industrial action in June, with an overwhelming vote to strike. Management did nothing over the whole summer to find a settlement, so here we are taking strike action.

Last week, after the first day of strike action, management promised a meeting this week to discuss our alternatives to out-sourcing and to seek a resolution to the dispute. But instead of meeting with us, they hit us with the announcement that the cleaners will be out-sourced on 1st November and Catering on 1st January.

Their reasons are cynical. They want to out-source jobs to avoid paying the Scottish Living Wage, as private companies are under no obligation to pay it, and to downgrade and slim down the workforce in preparation for the future. And that is something other colleges will probably try to repeat, with worsened services, terms and conditions eroded … your starter for ten!

We have written an open letter to John Swinney and Mike Russell to intervene.

We have full strike action on 25th and 26th October where we hope supporters will call at our picket lines.
Write to MSPs, MPs and councillors backing our claim, against management who are neither consulting nor negotiating with us, just informing us of their decisions – because nobody is putting the brakes on them.

There are two events in Dundee around May Day.

On Friday 29th April there will be a demo starting from 11:30 in Hilltown park with a rally in the city square at noon.

Mayday2011

Later that night there will be a social in Lyrics in St Andrews Lane from 7:30pm. This will have Music, Raffle and Revolutionary Enjoyment tickets cost £10.

SocialPoster2001

By Richie Venton, SSP National Workplace Organiser

Two further strike days planned by NUJ members at the BBC (15th and 16th November) in defence of their pensions have been suspended, as a result of major breakthroughs in their ongoing battle.

The dispute is far from over, but the impact of united action has put BBC bosses on the back foot.

BBC Director Mark Thompson infamously emailed staff prior to the initial 48-hour strike pompously declaring “there will be no further talks, no further offers”. On the contrary, the impact of the strike action led to Thompson and other BBC bosses offering new talks.

After the first strikes, they had victimised three NUJ members based with BBC World Service – giving two of them final warnings, a third being effectively sacked – for taking part in the strike overseas! The NUJ held a UK-wide meeting of Mothers/Fathers of Chapels (shop stewards) which agreed to suspend the strikes on 15/16th, in favour of negotiations, provided the victimisations were withdrawn – which they subsequently have been.

A couple of real life examples illustrate what has fuelled the burning sense of injustice which has driven BBC workers into strikes and a work-to-rule. Andy, a senior broadcast journalist, stood to get a pension of £14,900 at 60 under the existing scheme; under the BBC bosses’ new proposals he would lose £3,900 a year, a 26% cut. Even if Andy worked on ‘til 65, paying in thousands extra in contributions, he would still have his pension slashed by 13%.

Joe, a TV centre worker, stands to lose £5,000 a year – a 30% reduction. And south west of England broadcast journalist Laura would have her pension slashed from £15,500 to £13,200 a year.

Meantime, in the same BBBC but on a different planet, BBC boss Mark Byford is to get a golden handshake of £1million plus an annual pension of £400,000!

Dave Eyre, NUJ Father of the Chapel at the BBC in Glasgow and Edinburgh told me about the issues behind this trade union struggle, and the impact of workers’ initial action.

The existing BBC pension schemes are a mixture of Final Salary and Career Average. These are to be closed off to new members and the amount of any salary increases that folk who remain in the current schemes are allowed to put towards their pension will be pegged at 1 per cent. So for instance if we got a 3per cent pay rise, only 1 per cent of that would contribute to our pension.

The new offer from the BBC – called CAB 2011 – is a career average scheme that is much worse. Folk will have to pay a lot more to get back much less, losing 20% and more in the value of their pension.

The BBC suddenly seems very concerned about the deficit in the Pension Scheme. They weren’t so concerned when a surplus in the scheme in the 1990s allowed them to take a payment holiday.

There is no doubt there is a deficit. But when the BBC first came forward with their proposed cuts to our pensions they claimed the deficit is about £2bn. Since then they backtracked to claims of £1.5bn – and in figures produced for the BBC which have leaked to the NUJ, the estimates are lower still – possibly down to £1bn.
The NUJ and other BBC unions are not trying to ignore the existence of a deficit in the scheme, and we recognise it may mean people having to pay more in contributions to defend their pension levels. We are prepared to talk and negotiate on this. But we first need to know what the actual figures are. By next April the BBC Trustees will carry out their legally required formal assessment of the figures. We say wait ‘til we get the figures then. And we say the BBC must talk to the unions and the Trustees, who have been totally ignored by BBC senior managers so far. Right now we are being asked to buy a pig in a poke – and we’re not buying!

We have serious questions to put to the BBC. Why act now? Why have they decided to cut pensions in the midst of the wider financial crisis – when reports just out this week suggest Final Salary Pension Schemes are bouncing back, recovering from the earlier levels of deficit alongside the mild economic recovery – challenging the argument that the economic downturn means the death of FSPS?

If the BBC’s only concern is to address the deficit in our pension scheme, why not wait until they find out what it is!? Some NUJ members – and I am one of them – are asking if this is being done for other reasons. Are we being used as the thin end of a wedge to implement widespread pension ‘reform’ across the entire public sector, to the detriment of all who work in the public sector?

Many people look at the salary levels of Jonathan Ross and imagine BBC staff are all multi-millionaires, with gold-plated pensions. Well, we’re not! The average BBC pension is about £12,000. That’s not a poverty pension, but it’s also not a millionaire’s pension. However, that average includes massive pensions of £hundreds of thousands that a select group of senior managers do receive and will receive. A big chunk of people get much less than £12,000.
So we’re not fighting for gold-plated pensions, but for fairness in pensions.

The initial strikes had a huge impact, as anyone who regularly watches the news will have noticed. Flagship programmes like Good Morning Scotland, Newsdrive and major Gaelic service programmes were all off the air – as were Today and Newsnight UK-wide. We had an evening bulletin read by someone who normally does a jazz programme, and radio bulletins read by the Head of News.

In the aftermath of the strike, senior managers met with Mark Thompson, where they told him they got programmes out by the skin of their teeth, and they urged him to sit down and talk with the NUJ.
Today (Thurs 11th), after three previous ‘final’ offers, it now appears Mark Thompson is offering further talks if we postpone the industrial action planned for Mon 15th/Tues 16th November.

We really welcomed the support we got last week from the trade union movement and across the political spectrum. We especially welcomed support from members of other BBC unions who took the decision as a matter of conscience not to cross our pickets.

Demonstrate in Edinburgh, Saturday October 23rd

Called by the Scottish Trades Union Congress

11.00 am: Assemble East Market Street Edinburgh
11.30am: March off
12.30 pm: Rally Ross Bandstand

Unite and Defy Demolition Coalition Cuts

The Twin Tory millionaires’ Cabinet gloated and cheered as Osborne declared war on over 100,000 Scottish jobs; benefits for the most vulnerable; schools and community services; the NHS; workers’ pay and pensions. Slashing Scotland’s block grant by £1.3bn this year spells devastation in local government, construction, education – public and private sector. The vast rise in unemployment will worsen the deficit! The poorest will be hit hardest. The hour has struck for united, decisive action – as well as alternative policies – to stop this slaughter. The thousands marching today are critical to building a rebellion on the scale of the anti-poll tax movement – through your union, community, pensioners’ or students’ organisations – and by building local anti-cuts alliances.

• Demand the SNP government and Councils set ‘No-Cuts’ Defiance budgets that refuse to pass on Westminster’s butchery.

  SNP, Labour and other politicians who claim to oppose the Twin Tories’ cuts now face a stark choice: defy or destroy.

  If the SNP government was serious about defending Scotland, they should set a budget next month without a penny cut in pay or services, not a single job loss, and demand the missing £1.3bn back off the Westminster thieves who stole it to bail out the bankers and billionaires. They should call workers and communities into action in support of their defiance, with rallies, demonstrations, peaceful civil disobedience and industrial action. A nation in rebellion could win back the £1.3bn for next year’s Scottish spending needs.

• Build a mass lobby of Scottish parliament

  Given the SNP’s record so far, they won’t show the spine to do this unless they face a rebellion from below. The STUC should use today’s demo to call a mass lobby of the Scottish parliament to stop tartan butchery next month. If the STUC fail to, public sector unions should call it.

• Make councillors fight

  Councils face the same stark choice: defy or destroy. Bombard councillors with demands for No Cuts budgets, mounting mass campaigns to demand the stolen millions back off Holyrood to balance the books, with no cuts.

• Axe the Council Tax

  Demand an emergency Bill in the Scottish parliament to replace it with the income-based Service Tax; to raise £1.6bn extra in 2011.

• Build a Scottish one-day public sector strike in early 2011

  No cuts are acceptable – or necessary. Neither Coalition cuts, nor lesser, slower Labour or SNP cuts. The STUC should today declare plans for a united one day strike of the entire 600,000-strong public sector in early 2011 – to force back the Scottish butchers, before the council budgets are set in stone. To build the rebellion in the workplaces that would embolden communities too.

The butchers’ Coalition – with 23 millionaires and 4 ex-bankers in a Cabinet of 29 – spew out the monstrous lie that cuts are unavoidable and necessary.

The public debt is mainly the result of the £1.3trillion bankers’ bailout, mass unemployment, loss of taxes. But it is still only 70% of GDP – whereas it never fell below 100% of GDP from 1918 ‘til 1961. Job cuts will massively add to the debt. There are numerous better ways – without a penny cut in pay, benefits, pensions, or the loss of a single job or service – with vast scope to improve the shoddy system we endure already:

• scrapping the unfair, regressive Council Tax and replacing it with a Scottish Service Tax based on income would raise an extra £1.6bn next year – more than Osborne has slashed off the Scottish budget!
• £120bn a year in taxes on the rich and big business are avoided, evaded or uncollected – that’s 75% of the 2009 deficit!
• a modest 10% wealth tax on the richest 1,000 fat-cats would raise £35bn a year – enough to create 1.4 million jobs on a £25,000 wage.
• restoration of tax on the richest elite and Corporations to pre-Thatcher levels (a policy the SSP shares with the PCS union) would raise up to £250bn a year extra.
• scrapping Trident (whilst guaranteeing Faslane workers’ jobs through diversification into peaceful, socially useful work) would save £100bn.
• full and democratic public ownership of the banks would give us access to £560bn in liquid cash and £5trillion in assets.

There is nothing unavoidable or necessary about this Coalition’s butchery.

The cuts are driven by ideological hatred of public services, a ruthless intent to reverse the gains made by past working class struggles – a mission to use the whip of mass unemployment and starvation-level benefits to drive wages down even further, boosting profits even higher.

The ultimate ‘better way’ is a socialist Scotland, independent of the Westminster butchers, with democratic public ownership and control of the vast wealth and resources; an end to war and Trident; and a plan of clean, green production and services, based on people not profit. Join Scotland’s genuine socialist alternative, the SSP, to build that future.

The SSP Campsie podcast has a three parter with Richie Venton discussing the struggle in Liverpool.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

SSP Campsie Radio are proud to host Richie Venton who recalls the titanic struggles that took part in the city of Liverpool against the Thatcher Government in the eighties. Richie was part of the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party.

This is a valuable first-hand account of a struggle that can inform today’s battle against an uncaring Tory/ Liberal Democrat coalition.

From the Dundee TUC

A call to the people of Dundee

• The Tory / Lib Dem Government has proposed massive cuts in services, benefits,
  pensions, jobs and wages as their answer to the deficit created by the banking crisis.
• Dundee City Council is set to cut £40Million over the next four years, and that’s on
  top of local cuts in budgets for Police, Fire, Health, Universities and the Civil Service.
• The poorest are facing a bigger share of the cost of a crisis that was not of their
  making. The bankers, who caused that crisis, are still raking in their bonuses.
• Last year £123 Billion of UK tax was either dodged through loopholes (avoided),
  illegally not paid (evaded) or simply not collected. Google’s UK earnings were £1.6
  Billion. Using loopholes in UK tax law, they paid no Corporation Tax. They should have paid £450 Million. UK Boardroom pay went up 7% and bonuses by 22%.

There is a better way

• The Government’s vicious cuts are not necessary: Current UK debt is only 68% of
  GDP, compared to Greece 115%, Japan 217%, USA 83.2%, Germany 73%, Belgium 97% and France 77%. The average for advanced economies is 77.3%.
• The UK and Argentina are the only G20 countries to withdraw financial stimulus from
  their economies for 2010. The others are investing in infrastructure and growth.
• We should be supporting our economy by investment in jobs, industry, training and
  research. We should be building our way out of this crisis; creating a future for our
  young people by developing our green industries such as offshore wind generation.
• We should be supporting our students and our Schools, Universities and Colleges.

Press release from Dundee Trades Council

Public March & Rally

Dundee, 29th September 2010

The European Trade Union Confederation is staging a European Day of Action on 29 September next. This Day of Action follows a decision by the ETUC Executive Committee on 1 and 2 June. It will be made up of a Euro-demonstration in Brussels and trade union actions in the various European countries. The European trade unions will be demonstrating against the austerity measures adopted recently by many EU countries, and to demand recovery plans in favour of quality jobs and growth.

As Dundee’s contribution to this activity a March & Rally will take place;

Assemble Hilltown Park, 11.30am

March off; 12 noon: Route: Hilltown, Victoria Road, Meadowside, Albert Square (North side), Reform Street to City Square.

Rally: City Square from approx 12.20pm to 1pm.

Called by Dundee Public Services Campaign, comprising Dundee TUC, Dundee Joint Shop Stewards Liaison Committee, Right to Work Campaign (Dundee).

Main parts of our leaflet for EIS conference at the Caird Hall in Dundee.

The election of the Tories – the Twin Tories, with the treacherous Lib Dems joining forces with the Tory Butchers – marks a new threat to education workers, education services and communities. We all face a level of carnage to jobs, conditions and services not experienced since Thatcher at her most rampant.

Cameron and Clegg have lost no time in pronouncing their top priority is to cut public spending.

These upper class butchers want to wield the axe to jobs, pay, pensions, benefits, public services – to enrich their own class even further.

Cameron’s claims that we all face pain for years to come is false to the core.

The bankers who enjoyed a bountiful handout from public funds don’t face ‘pain’ – for instance, 100 of them at the RBS recently awarded themselves a £1m bonus each!

The richest 1,000 fat-cats whose incomes rocketed by 30% last year, to £353billion! – do not face ‘hard choices’ or ‘painful decisions’.

It’s Scotland’s 630,000 public sector workers, alongside workers in the private sector, our families, our communities, who face a massacre – unless a united, determined, militant campaign of resistance is built, starting now!

In resisting the cuts, EIS and other unions need two central guiding principles: unity in action is our best defence – and a convincing set of policies to explode the myth that cuts are unavoidable.

Teachers, civil servants, council and NHS workers have marched and taken strike action against cuts.

It would be fatal if these fights were kept separate and apart, or if any union adopted the notion that cuts are inevitable – but ‘not in our service’. That would weaken the resistance and guarantee cuts to all services.

So SSP members in the EIS (and in all other unions) strongly advocate united action – across all public sector unions and alongside community groups, anti-cuts campaigns, Save Our Schools campaigns…

EIS and other unions should build a united public rally on Saturday 26th June, after new levels of carnage are announced in the 22nd June Butchers’ Budget – as a springboard for building a mass march in the autumn, when even more cuts will be announced in the government’s Spending Review.

Such events would help build the fighting morale of tens of thousands who right now are terrified of what the future holds.

Equally important in building a rebellion against cuts from a government that has no mandate in Scotland – with 85% voting against the Tories – is a convincing set of policies that exposes the lie that cuts are necessary and unavoidable – a monstrous lie peddled not only by the Tories and Lib Dems, but also New Labour and the SNP! Otherwise many people will fall for the argument that there’s not enough money to defend jobs and services, that cuts are a necessary evil – and then fall out amongst themselves over where the cuts should occur.

That divide-and-conquer trickery lies behind the Tory plan to consult people over what to cut! There is no need for any cuts! There are oceans of wealth swilling around – but in the hands of the bankers. billionaires and boardrooms of oil companies – not in the hands of the public.

The SSP fights for alternatives that would create jobs, improve services, protect conditions. Commit EIS to action against the cuts – alongside other unions – and argue for socialist policies that would fund the expansion of jobs and services. And join the SSP – for an independent socialist Scotland.

Twenty’s Plenty in a class

The Scottish Socialist Party has an unrivalled track record of standing up for kids, communities and education. We have consistently fought school closures that lead to larger classes, job losses, increased stress for staff, worse education.

We have led several Save Our Schools campaigns, uniting parents, communities and trade unionists – demanding smaller classes and investment in community-based schools within easy, safe reach of children’s homes.

We led the mass opposition to Labour’s school closures in Glasgow last year. During that campaign we popularised the slogan Twenty’s Plenty in any class, and lobbied the SNP government to pass legislation to limit classes to 20 for all age groups.

At the recent STUC Congress, SSP members pushed this policy and won the backing of the conference for a campaign for classes of 20 maximum for all.

In East Dunbartonshire, when the Labour-Tory Coalition announced closure of 8 primaries last week,the SSP called a protest demo and public meeting to set up a Save Our Schools campaign.

150 local people joined the demo, the councillors took fright, and shelved their butchery – for now!

EIS shares the SSP’s policy of 20 max in a class. The time is rotten-ripe for the EIS leadership to lead action in support of this policy – including industrial action.

Stop The Cuts

Professional Firefighters in Tayside are on the Threshold of taking Industrial Action to Protect Your Community from cuts to Your Front Line Emergency Fire Cover.

Join us on Saturday 20th March 2010
Protest Once Again Against the Chief Fire Officer’s Proposals

Speakers include
Matt Wrack, FBU General Secretary
Jim Malone, FBU Regional Organiser
Local Tayside Politicians

Assemble 12.30 Castle Green, Broughty Ferry
March Begins at 13.00.
Rally at St Aidens Hall.

CUTS COSTS LIVES – YOURS

March will be led by the Mains of Fintry Pipe Band

For more information see the campaign site

By Richie Venton, SSP National Workplace Organiser

The Scottish Socialist Party offers unqualified support to CWU members forced to strike against bully-boy bosses and their Labour government backers. They are out to crush the union, crucify jobs and rights at work – in the hope they can sell off Royal Mail to greedy profiteers at Jumble Sale prices.

Every worker, trade unionist and community needs to stand by their posties in a potentially vicious battle to defend the very survival of a public service under assault from Royal Mail bosses, the Labour government and large sections of the media.

Over-paid butchers knife jobs, services and rights

Over-paid Royal Mail bosses, with absolutely no history in the postal service, have prepared for this showdown since the 2007 strike settlement. The key phrase in the Pay & Modernisation Agreement was change will be introduced by agreement. The exact opposite has happened. Bullying, intimidation, threats of disciplinary action, workers taken off pay, have become the standard methods of imposing new conditions that have meant catastrophic job losses and unbearable workloads.

With this reign of terror, Royal Mail bosses have slashed 60,000 jobs since 2003 – and they aim to shed another 60,000 in the next 2 years. Record profits (£900,000 a day last year!) have resulted from vastly increased productivity and heavier workloads from drastically fewer workers. The workers’ reward? Zero pay rise; abolition of the Final Salary Pension Scheme; ‘absorption’ of extra work into existing workloads with no extra pay; not a penny reward for increased productivity … and 60,000 job losses!

Crozier’s 35,000 scabs

Crozier and his cronies are hiring 30,000 temps as an army of scabs – recruited from people desperate for a few weeks’ work in the midst of recession – in addition to 5,000 Royal Mail managers being deployed to scab on the actual strike days. Royal Mail bosses are spending a fortune (of the public’s money) to break the strike, break the union, break the backs of the workforce, to usher in later privatisation.

They have no interest in reaching a resolution that protects workers’ conditions and jobs whilst improving the public service. They only belatedly offer to go to ACAS to get the pre-Xmas strikes cancelled, so as to come back with a vengeance in January. They must not succeed!

Bosses launch war

Instead, they have prepared for war. The secret document, exposed by BBC Newsnight, shows they plan to remove union facilities to help prosecute their war on postal workers. That is already the local experience in many areas. And they are in collusion with the Labour government on this! Lord Mandelson, whose scheme to privatise Royal Mail was shelved in the face of public uproar and the threat of strikes, is out for revenge. He has publicly denounced strikes – legally balloted for according to his Labour government’s vicious anti-union laws – as suicidal.

Interviewed on TV, he showed an incriminatingly detailed knowledge of the secret Royal Mail document, homing in on how much union facility time costs Royal Mail, which suggests he either wrote it – or at the very least has been in cahoots with Crozier and his crew.

Labour government collusion

Labour government ministers have been quoted saying this could be our miners’ strike. They egg on Royal Mail bosses to confront the union, to casualise the workforce with floods of part-timers, in their anti-working class mission to create armies of cheap labour in a de-regulated labour market that maximises profits.

As sole shareholder in Royal Mail, the Labour government have the power to settle this dispute in defence of workers and the public, but instead they encourage vicious hysteria in the press against the CWU – such as reports of riot cops preparing for battles between strikers and scabs. They let Royal Mail bosses enjoy a 13-year pension fund holiday, creating a record pension fund deficit, which workers are being punished for.

Don’t feed the hand that bites you!

New Labour has never been innocent by-standers in this long-running conflict, contrary to their protestations – and in stark contrast to the mind-boggling continuation of funding of New Labour by the CWU. Last year alone the CWU gave their arch enemies over £1million.

The national union should unreservedly declare an end to this crazy support for the party that is butchering CWU members, as one strand to the current war for survival. As we first wrote in SSP workplace bulletins in January 1999: make the break from New Labour’s New Tories – don’t feed the hand that bites you!

Members of the Scottish Socialist Party inside the CWU played their full part in winning the landslide majority for unified national strikes. The SSP does not hesitate in giving full-blooded support to CWU members on strike. We will build public support, until you win a deal that defends jobs, services, conditions and workplace rights.

UNITE – stop scabs!

SSP members in UNITE will press the UNITE leadership to call on their members not to be used as organised scabs. Royal Mail regularly jets managers into local offices on strike, taking care to deploy them from far-flung places, to reduce the likelihood of them taking sympathy action with CWU members they already know.

Leaders of UNITE should instruct their members to do their normal duties, not other people’s jobs, and not to manage Crozier’s scabs – and start a campaign for a strike ballot of their members in Royal Mail – whose jobs are on an extremely shaky nail.

Other unions, and the TUC/STUC, should call and build mass solidarity marches – and appeal to the unemployed not to scab.

If Royal Mail and the Labour government raise the stakes even higher, for example by taking court action against the CWU, other unions should call members out in defiant days of solidarity strike action to help win this critical battle.

• No suspension of strikes – pre-Xmas is the best time to hammer
• Royal Mail bosses – it makes up two-thirds of their annual profits.
• Stand firm and united – victory to the CWU!