The numbers stack up

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DESPITE his very best efforts at spin, Steve Oldroyd shows that he is living in cloud cuckoo land when he says that a three to one majority vote of posties in favour of strike action is “not a success for the union”, Mailbag, October 12.

Let me spell it out in the simplest terms possible, 80,866 posties voted in our ballot and of these, 61,623 posties voted ‘Yes’ to strike, and only 19,207 voted ‘No’. That’s what I call a result.

Mr Oldroyd’s claim that ‘those who don’t bother to vote are usually the ones who don’t want to strike’ is laughable. If they were all that bothered, either way, then surely they would have voted? If they were really opposed to the prospect of a strike, surely they would have voted ‘No’.

It seems abundantly clear to me that those CWU members who didn’t vote, either (a) knew which way the wind was blowing and didn’t feel adding their ballot paper to the mountain of ‘Yes’ votes would add much to the result, or (b) were willing to go along with what everyone else decided for them.

The fact remains that 76% of posties voted for a strike on a 67% turnout.

In Huddersfield’s Royal Mail Delivery Office, 85% of posties are CWU members. Of these 188 members, that would mean 125 actually voted. Of these 125, let us say that 76% voted ‘Yes’, and 24% voted ‘No’, just as happened nationally. That means 95 ‘Yes’ votes, against 30 ‘No’s in Huddersfield Delivery Office.

The ballot result in the dispute in 2007 was very similar: 77.5% voted ‘Yes’, and only 22.5% voted ‘No’. Back then, when we took strike action, not one postie crossed our picket line.

I expect we shall see the same again this time round.

Condescendingly, Mr Oldroyd urges us to think of our families and the hardship that a strike could cause before we ‘throw away’ our pay packet ‘for nothing’. We thought long and hard about it. Then we voted. The result was yes to strike action. That’s what we call democracy.

As for throwing away our pay packet for nothing – nothing is exactly what Royal Mail has given us for a pay rise this year, despite making £321 million in profit.

Nothing is exactly what Royal Mail is wanting to give us while they cut out thousands more jobs, make full-time jobs into part-time ones, impose unacceptable workloads onto our backs, and worsen the service we are still proud to provide.

As far as I’m concerned, the CWU’s successful ballot for strike action shows most forcefully that postmen and postwomen up and down the country will not put up with being treated like nothing by their employers any longer.

Simon Midgley

CWU Unit Representative, Huddersfield Delivery Office