The Guardian has published an article on the Post Office closures and consultations. It details a parliamentary committee criticising the sham consultations and closure program.

When the press are telling us daily about the damage posties are doing to the service they are attempting to defend it’s worth remembering who the privatising parasites really are who are gutting the service by both tiny attacks and huge.

We wrote about the sham consultation at the time.

By Richie Venton SSP national workplace organiser

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!

By Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser

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.

Recently, if you have been watching the news or reading any newspaper you will have noticed the complete failure of whole sections of the private sector. Basing their business plans on profits they were expecting to make, the profits never arrived, but massive debts and write offs came instead. You will also have noticed that Labour threw hundreds of billions of pounds at the failed companies, some of which is being syphoned off by their greedy directors as bonuses, clearly not related to performance.

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

The Dundee branches of the SSP submitted the following objection to the proposed Post Office closures

Submission to Post Office Limited regarding proposed Post Office closures in Dundee from Scottish Socialist Party – Dundee branches

We believe that the Post Office network across the UK should not just be viewed as a chain of branches of a standard business, assessed solely on its ability to make a profit.

The nationwide network of Post Office branches is a valuable public asset that provides a vital social service in both rural and urban communities across Scotland. As a public service, Post Offices should be viewed and assessed on the wider role and benefits they provide to communities, not on the profit (or loss) they provide to Post Office Limited.

In light of the government’s recent £50 billion bail out of Northern Rock, Post Office Limited have strong grounds for going back to the government and asking for an increase in subsidy to protect the Post Office branch network, thus maintaining its positive role in communities.

It is also deeply insensitive to these communities, who are having to fight for their local Post Office service, that Royal Mail’s Chief Executive, Adam Crozier, earned £633,000 basic salary, topped up with a £3 million bonus in 2007/08!! How many Post Offices could have been saved with that £3 million?

In March 2007, Adam Crozier was appointed Chairman of the EFD.

At the time he stated

“I am extremely pleased to have been invited to take on this role. Ensuring equal opportunity for all is hugely important to us at Royal Mail and I look forward to helping to promote and develop the terrific work which Employers’ Forum for Disability does with employers throughout the UK.”
Source

On its website EFD states EFD has worked closely with government and other stakeholders, sharing best practice to make it easier to employ disabled people and serve disabled customers.

One has to question Mr Crozier’s commitment to EFD’s stated aims as the closure of Post Offices around the country is hardly going to improve Post Office Limited’s service to its disabled customers. It is going to make accessing post office services more inconvenient, more time consuming and more costly (public transport, taxis).

The recurring objections that have been raised by the hundreds of customers of the four Post Offices threatened with closure in Dundee to whom we have spoken over the last few weeks while campaigning, are:

Accessibility to the next nearest Post Office and the ‘fitness of purpose’ of those alternative Post Offices.

Lochee Road Post Office:

If this branch closes then the nearest Post Offices will be Ward Road, Tescos in the Stack, Brantwood or Blackness Road.

If walking, all of these alternatives involve either an uphill journey there and a downhill journey back, or vice versa. The bus services to both Blackness and Brantwood branches are infrequent. Any bus journey would involve added expense (For example, 2 visits per week to the Ward Road branch would incur a cost of £4.40).

This added expense would have a profound effect on those many Post Office customers who are on very low incomes and benefits. Many of those who use Lochee Road Post Office are elderly or disabled and/or on low income.

Although the public transport into the City Centre (Ward Road) is more frequent the extra expense is still incurred. The service at the Ward Road Post Office is already poor because of the lack of staff, resulting in long queues and standing time. At busy times, it is not uncommon for customers to have to queue for 10 – 15 minutes before being served. This adds to pressure and stress on staff and customers alike and can lead to a hostile atmosphere. Also some of the transactions carried out at Ward Road are the more complicated ones such as passports and car tax, which obviously increase waiting time.

Broughty Ferry Road Post Office:

Like Lochee Road, this branch serves a high proportion of elderly and disabled customers, who will find it extremely difficult to access other branches if Broughty Ferry Road closes.

Their alternative options are Ward Road branch (see above for comments); Maryfield branch or Arbroath Road. Both these branches involve a lengthy uphill walk and bus services in the area have recently been cut. Of course, the use of public transport will mean additional costs to those who can least afford it.

Nethergate Post Office:

The two alternatives for Nethgergate customers are:

• Ward Road branch (see above) and it involves crossing 2 busy main roads to access it;
• Perth Road branch, which is already extremely busy, often experiences lengthy queues in quite a small premise. So again there will be increased waiting times and queues, literally, out the door.

The Nethergate Post Office is also the nearest branch to the University of Dundee which is attended by thousands of students and hundreds of staff. The University has also recently built new premises in the Hawkhill area which might put even more pressure on Ward Road branch.

There are also many businesses in this area, such as Bank of Scotland, DVLA, HMRC and the new Alliance Trust offices being built just around the corner.

Fairmuir Post Office:

Again, there is an elderly population in the area of Fairmuir Post Office. An adjacent branch is the one in Arkley Street, which provides an excellent service, but the premises are very small. Under present circumstances, it can become overcrowded with four people waiting to be served. If it has to absorb Fairmuir’s customers then the service provided will decline. Elderly customers could be queued out into the street. This is surely not an image that Post Office Limited would want to be associated with, particularly during cold or wet weather.

All four branches are surrounded by independent, local shops or small businesses. Those shops we have canvassed have expressed their concern that the closure of the neighbouring Post Office will have a significant impact on their ability to survive. This is at time when they are already under pressure from the supermarket chains such as Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s.

Another factor that should be considered is that a significant proportion of Dundee’s population is on lower than average income and in receipt of social security benefits. Dundee also has one of the highest child poverty rates in Scotland.

Our extensive research and discussion with residents in all four areas leads us to conclude that none of the Post Offices in Dundee targeted for closure should be closed. We have found support for the retention of these four branches to be overwhelming among their local communities.

July 2008