Strike while the post is hot

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Today’s Daily Mail, my favourite newspaper, splashes with news that postal workers could well be on strike again before Christmas. I could have told them that. Anyone who talks to anyone in Royal Mail knows how hard the managers are trying to bring about an industrial showdown.

The Mail has got hold of a union letter that says that CWU will resume the stoppages suspended after a TUC-brokered agreement in October “if management shows no sign of moving to meet their demands.”

This “secret” explosive document is actually a union circular, couched in extraordinarily moderate terms for a union locked in a bitter dispute. It is so mild that the Mail could find only one phrase worth quoting, which was that the union “will have no alternative other than to return to strike action before Christmas”.

I sympathise with the reporter, Becky Barrow, instructed to produce an inflammatory story from material that frankly isn’t up to it. The Mail newsdesk doesn’t look kindly on reporters who can’t whip up a right-wing storm out of nothing.

Fortunately there was an anonymous postie to hand who “said last night he had been ‘disgusted’ by the CWU letter and had cancelled his membership”. There’s always one, isn’t there?

The quote Becky Barrow uses is actually true, and fair. I was talking to our postie yesterday. He’s on the CWU negotiating committee at a south London sorting office and always has stories of speed-ups at work — two hours less a day to do his walk – of management harassment of unionised staff and favouritism towards the non-union strikebreaking temporary staff brought in in October.

Royal Mail is refusing to meet the negotiating timetable set by the TUC agreement. It’s a familiar picture to trade unionists: a company doing all it can to precipitate a strike to break the staff union and impose individualised terms and conditions of work.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the catastrophic national miners’ strike of 1984-85. The miners were set up by the government, with the entire state machine, and the media, mobilised against them, and were smashed; don’t believe the old lefties who tell you what a glorious fight it was. (Why does the labour movement so fetishise its defeats?)

Royal Mail has likewise got the government, marshalled by Peter Mandelson, and now the Tory government-in-waiting, behind it. Both parties want to sell the post office, and the price will be much higher if they can deliver a softened up, low-wage, non-union workforce.

The scene is set for a 25th anniversary revival, the miners’ strike of the public sector. But they’ve miscalculated. CWU General Secretary said in October that his union was in a stronger position now than the mineworkers were in 1984 and he had a point.

Back then the coal board had built up huge reserves and negotiated huge imports of coal. You can’t do that with letters; especially at Christmastime, when 120 million items go through every day.

The post office has the worst industrial record in Britain. There are constant little niggling local disputes, mostly unofficial, caused by the victimisation of staff by what the union sees as petty bullying management.

This could go on forever. There’s no time like Christmas for a treat. The posties should go for it now. The Daily Mail knows when something is a story. That why it’s my favourite paper.