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!

Royal Mail workers have voted by a record-breaking majority to take national strike action against the concerted assault on their jobs, pay, workloads, the service they deliver to the public – and the attempts to smash the Communication Workers’ Union as a national union.

They voted by over 3:1 for national strikes – a 76.24 per cent Yes vote in an extremely high turnout of 67 per cent. 61,623 voted Yes, 19,207 No.

This is a mass rejection of the bully-boy rule of Royal Mail bosses – egged on in their reign of terror by the job-cutting, privatising New Labour government, headed up in their crusade against CWU members by Lord Mandelson.

It is a mass mandate for effective, united and immediate strike action, at a time of year when the volume of mail rockets, workloads rise, and the value of our posties is even more recognised by the public.

Royal Mail spin-doctors are trying to whip up public fury at these workers daring to ‘disrupt Christmas’ – the same bosses who have ‘disrupted’ the lives of 60,000 workers (and their families) who have lost their jobs with Royal Mail in the last 5 years.

Willie Marshall, secretary of the Scotland no2 branch of the CWU, told me what he thinks of the vote.

This is a bigger majority even than the 74 per cent YES vote in 2007, the last time we had a national strike. I wasn’t surprised at the massive turnout, when you look at the level of anger amongst members.

It proves members are ready for the fight. And this is not about pay; it’s about the survival of Royal Mail.

Members want the strike action within 7 days after the national meeting of regional secretaries and divisional reps on 12th October. We want the action as soon as possible, and for at least the first strikes to involve the entire workforce, all out together, to show our unity and solidarity.

Members of the Scottish Socialist Party inside the CWU played their full part in winning this landslide for unified national strike action. The SSP does not hesitate in giving full-blooded support to CWU members forced to strike against the decimation of jobs, public services, pay, pensions and union rights. We will do all we can to build public support for their strike action, until they win a decent deal that defends jobs, services, conditions and workplace rights.

And we will do what we can to press the leadership of UNITE to call on their members not to be used as organised scabs during strikes.

Royal Mail managers used to be in a union called CMA, which has now merged into UNITE. Top dogs in Royal Mail have prayed in vain for a No vote, or at least a poor turnout in the strike ballot, but lost no time in organising for managers to be deployed as scabs to sustain the pretence of a postal service just in case CWU members had the audacity to vote Yes!

They have regularly jetted managers into local offices on strike, usually taking care to deploy them from far-flung places, to reduce the likelihood of them taking sympathy action with CWU members they already know.

Willie Marshall commented to me, The excuse they used for doing striking CWU members’ work during local strikes is that nobody informed them! That is nonsense, but they can’t use that excuse this time.

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

The national CWU leadership have been handed a massive mandate to forge ahead with national strikes, to keep up the momentum, and they should immediately approach UNITE to organise solidarity with their battle for the survival of Royal Mail as a public service – rather than stand silent as UNITE members are organised by top management as a battalion of scabs.

Stand by your posties – victory to the CWU!

The Scottish Socialist Party is in full support of the thousands of postal workers who are staging strike action and other protests on Friday 17th July, in anger at arbitrary cuts to staffing levels and service levels to the public.

These cuts are being imposed by Royal Mail bosses in flagrant breach of the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement, signed after strike action that year.

Delivery Ofices and Mail Centres in Edinburgh and East/Central Scotland will walk out, as will Irvine posties the next day. This is part of a growing groundswell of strikes across the UK , with 400 other offices requesting ballots for strike action.

High-and-mighty Royal Mail bosses are imposing cuts to staff and services; managers are using bully-boy tactics to impose the cuts, and ever-increasing workloads are being heaped on the shoulders of a shrinking workforce. Pressure and stress is at breaking point for postal workers, who are hitting back with escalating strike action.

John Brown, Scottish Regional Secretary of the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) told me what lies behind the rolling anger and action by posties.

Royal Mail is trying to impose cuts way beyond levels acceptable to either staff or the public who rely on the service we deliver. They are totally intransigent, refusing to negotiate and abide by the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement, which stated that the union would be fully involved at all levels at all stages of modernization.

They want 10 per cent savings across the board and insist that this must mean 10 per cuts to duties. There are not compulsory job losses as such, but they are sneaking through job losses. For instance, Royal Mail are forcing people to leave the industry; alongside their ‘savings’, a redundancy package is on offer, so when people who are fed up and want to get out of the job leave, they are not being replaced.

The press is trying to play up the idea this strike action is about pay. Well, in reducing the numbers in Delivery Offices, Royal Mail is offering full-time workers part-time jobs – which obviously involve big pay cuts.

But this is primarily strike action against the attack on the public service provided through arbitrary reductions in staffing levels.

And these are not cuts due to the introduction of new machinery. The national Agreement means any new technology can only be introduced with the full agreement of the union and its members. So far only 4 or 5 pilot offices have had the new machinery tried out, and as we expected, they have not led to the savings Royal Mail predicted.

But the cuts members are striking against are before the job cuts that new machinery will involve. By striking, members are effectively saying we cannot provide the level of service to the public expected of us because of the arbitrary cuts being imposed through executive action by the employers.

There have been little or no local negotiations. Senior management of Royal Mail has failed to even turn up to the previous talks with the national union. Today (15th July), they are supposed to meet the union in London . Maybe the strike action in London will have concentrated the minds of the Neanderthal men in senior management and force them to make concessions!

With the Royal Mail making £900,000 a day in profits, there is even less excuse for these cuts to jobs and services.

The New Labour government has been dealt a bloody nose on their plans to part-privatise Royal Mail. Now is the time for this wounded beast to be pursued through united, national strike action against their cuts.

These attacks are partly motivated by a desire for revenge for the defeat of privatisation on the part of Royal Mail bosses and Lord Mandelson, the Prince of Darkness and Dirty Deeds, who has announced his desire to accustom workers to a full decade of austerity, so as to enrich his friends in industry and the banks.

The growing revolt, through spreading strikes, could now be escalated into national strikes – accompanied by withdrawal of funding of New Labour by the CWU – which is an increasingly abusive relationship, akin to voluntary payouts to an arsonist to buy the fuel to torch your home!

The SSP stands unashamedly on the side of workers striking to preserve a vital public service.

Now the Labour Party are planning to privatise 30% of Royal Mail. Twice disgraced Business Secretary Peter Mandelson claims that Royal Mail is in danger of running out of money and that the taxpayer could not be expected to fund potential liabilities in the region of £8bn in the companies pension fund. Part of the reason the pension fund is in deficit is that the return on the investment for them is based on Labours glorious Free Market which has just failed, spectacularly, again. The main part though, and this is good, is because Labour allowed the bosses to take a pension holiday for thirteen years!

They encouraged the bosses to not pay money into the pension fund, then use the fact it’s now, obviously, in deficit to attack the service.

Billy Hayes, leader of the Communication Workers’ Union hit the nail on the head:

The government is saying they want a foreign company to run the post office, which is ridiculous. We could be faced with a situation where the Royal Bank of Scotland is nationalised and the Royal Mail is privatised.

This is not an isolated incident, Labour and the Tories freed up the most profitable parts of the Royal Mail to competition, and more recently Labour have been attacking whole swathes of the service. This included disgracefully closing four post offices in Dundee, one of which was in the area they are now trying to convince voters to elect them in. Dundee SSP were out campaigning constantly getting people to sign petitions and write letters objecting to the closures and taking part in the Consultation.

The outcome of privatising the most profitable parts of the service is that Labours demands that the company turn a larger profit is harder than ever, because of Labour gutting the service in the first place.

New Labour for consultation is clearly English for proclamation and farce. The objections of hundreds were ignored. A handful of Post Offices have been saved from closure, only for others to take their place. Showing clearly they were not closing based on popularity or local need but purely because they wanted to close X number. The act of removing one from that list resulted in the adding of another.

There are two petitions on the issue, and the least you can do is sign them. After that write to your MP. There will no doubt be other protests and actions taking place over this issue so pledge to take part in any that do.

CWU petition

Petition on Number 10 site