restart the strike - press on for a full victory

[goinpostal]

Postal workers: press on for full victory!
Workers Power 318 – September 2007
http://www.workerspower.com/index.php?i ... 04,0,0,1,0

As we go online, union leaders have just come out of secret talks with Royal Mail empty-handed. They have been agreed "in principle" to recommence strike action later this month. A CWU rep calls on the rank and file to take control of a dispute that has needlessly lost momentum during these fruitless talks.

Postal workers surprised and scared Royal Mail bosses this summer. The climax of their action came when 6,000 workers joined an unofficial "wildcat" strike. Suddenly the bosses were ready to talk after months of arrogant refusal. Who says strikes don't work?

Unfortunately, Communication Workers Union leaders immediately suspended all action and agreed to total secrecy during the talks. Then they extended them under the same conditions. This is as worrying as it was unnecessary.

If it was the indefinite strike, launched in Glasgow, that brought Royal Mail tops Allan Leighton and Adam Crozier to the table, then a nationwide indefinite strike would have kept them there until a satisfactory offer had been made.

Also, the bosses love secret deals, stitching the workers up behind our backs. That's why the CWU should have insisted on open talks with representatives of the wildcat strikers in the room. Let's hear what these chiselers are saying.

Now that September's, here postal traffic is starting to climb. An all-out indefinite strike would not only hurt Royal Mail, but also business customers. Private mail companies, like TNT and UK Mail, haven't got the network to scab on a mass scale. If we have not won by the new deadline, 9 September, the CWU should launch such a strike, immediately.

What kind of deal?

But what would an acceptable deal look like?

First, we need a moratorium on job losses. This means breaking with the strategy of the CWU leadership that has centred so far on the agreement that accepted "genuine" efficiency cuts and banned strikes against them. Second, we should reject deals that would discriminate against new starters, and create a two-tier workforce of part-time staff on worse pensions, terms and conditions. Both concessions would seriously weaken the union.

Therefore we should not settle for the status quo plus a few quid. Instead, we need to reverse the whole direction of change since 2006, when Labour opened the market in postal services. Labour is using competition as a battering ram to force through 40,000 job losses, wage cuts and turning full-time posts into part-time ones.

Labour aims to prepare Royal Mail for privatisation. We are already some way down that road; we need to turn round; we need to close the market. The huge support for the strikes, especially in the big offices that are the fighting muscle of the union, and the unofficial strikes show we have the power to do so.

Showdown with Labour

Gordon Brown is committed to privatisation: from the London Underground to the civil service to the NHS. He wants Royal Mail to go the same way. So why do CWU general secretary Billy Hayes and his postal deputy Dave Ward continue to support the party of privatisation?

Already Postcomm - the pro-privatisation "regulator" Labour set up to introduce and develop postal market - has stated that, if it fails to "modernise" its business and cut costs, Royal Mail should split its sorting and delivery operations in two.

According to the Financial Times, Postcomm may force Royal Mail to contract out parts of its collection and sorting operations to private companies "to safeguard universal delivery" - while loosening the requirement to deliver to every address every day. This casual casting away of daily deliveries is a foretaste of things to come; if it ain't profitable, it won't get done.

The union should immediately suspend funding to Labour. We have given them hundreds of thousands of pounds, they are cutting tens of thousands of jobs. We say, not a penny more for Labour! Instead, we should look to the millions of public sector workers, who are also facing job cuts and below-inflation pay offers, and whose unions are considering strike action.

Brown is worried about an autumn of discontent - let's realise his fears. Our leaders should name the date for a united strike with Unison, the Public and Commercial Services union and the National Union of Teachers, and publicly call on their leaders to join in.

Rank and file - take the lead

But we shouldn't rely on Hayes, Ward and co. taking these steps. On past experience, they are more likely to recommend a terrible compromise, like last year's efficiency agreement.

It was the initiative and militancy of the rank and file that brought Royal Mail to the negotiating table and "find" £23 million for a new offer. The "do your job properly" campaign, the wildcat walkouts in Oxford, Preston, Scotland and beyond, the 2.5 million backlog of undelivered items of mail: these were our doing. But we're not the ones negotiating in secret.

Rank and file leaders need to get ready to relaunch the strikes, if, as seems likely, it is necessary. A conference called by the militant branches would be a first step. It could initiate an immediate plan of action and found a rank and file movement in the CWU to keep the pressure on the leadership. It could call emergency responses to Royal Mail provocations and victimisations, or spread such action when it kicks off.

Crucially, such a movement could warn against any further suspension of strikes, any more secret talks, any rotten deal. And it should take the initiative by leading strike action itself, if the official leadership fails to do so.

We could organise tens of thousands in our union behind a rank and file movement that fights for the aims and action we need. We could link up with militants in other public sector unions, and throw back the government's plans to downsize our jobs and break up Royal Mail. Now is the time, let's seize it with both hands.

How to win the strike
• Defend jobs and conditions: no efficiency deals that trade jobs for pay
• Raise our pay to £400 a week, the UK average pay rate
• Escalate the action: up to and including an all-out strike
• For rank and file control: strike committees of recallable delegates, elected in mass meetings, to control the dispute and all negotiations - for a rank and file movement in the CWU
• Solidarity committees in every borough, town and city: Unite the public sector strikes!

What we fight for
• For a rank and movement in the unions to end bureaucracy: for all officials to be regularly elected and recallable, and paid the average workers' wage
• For nationalised public services run under workers control, without any compensation to the profiteers
• Unions, workers: break from Labour and form a new workers party - one that doesn't lie to us in order to get into power every four years, but one that mobilises millions of workers to overthrow the capitalist system that lies behind the attacks on the working class and the poor
• For international solidarity with all those resisting America and Britain's wars - troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now
• For a socialist society, based on democratic planning not private profit, that abolishes poverty, exploitation and discrimination, and provides for a sustainable future - and freedom for all!

[Bromhamhatter]

Maybe if our union stopped supporting a so called Labour party that has nothing to do with socialism,then we might get somewhere.

[IWW Fellow Worker]

Maybe if our union stopped supporting a so called Labour party that has nothing to do with socialism,then we might get somewhere.

For someone who is going to vote against a strike, that's quite a statement.

[dongash]

this time we must strike, and when we have royal mail by the balls not suspend the strikes!!! we must get all we require and NO MORE "behind closed doors negotiations". it is time to stop messing about with leighton/crozier. hayes and co must stop grovelling round labour or risk alienating themselves from the membership.

[fatherchristmas]

i agree its about time the action was stepped up. their not complete fools at the top they sucked us in to talks and are now ready to try and give us the killer blow.

[DirtyHarry]

Maybe if our union stopped supporting a so called Labour party that has nothing to do with socialism,then we might get somewhere.

Why's a scab, or soon to be one, concerned about socialism? You've already stated your intention to aid bosses in their bid to drive
down workers conditions and pay.

Become a lackey if you wish, but if you're lackeying helps to to defeat us, your mortgage will be history within a few years.

[isaac]

single day strikes have no effect what so ever in our office all mail gets cleared the day after everybody needs to work to rule stop running round no overtime and if this is still going on at xmas STRIKE FOR ALL OF THE HOLIDAY PERIOD

[oxon]

Work to rule .... go for this !!!

[dvbuk55]

Work to rule .... go for this !!!

That is part of the strike strategy - it was largely ignored nationwide. Only a very few offices actually took it onboard and it would be the same again.