Royal mail slash and burn cuts continue

[goinpostal]

Royal mail slash and burn cuts continue
15 February 2011
from Privatisation and cuts...link the fights!

Royal Mail bosses barely waited for the ink to dry on the new Business Transformation 2010 agreement last May, before embarking on radical closure plans. Under the new ConDem government, with the prospect of privatisation in the near future, they have accelerated their plans, aiming to pile up profits to make the company ripe for a sell-off. If they aren’t stopped the postal network today will be massively downsized and barely recognisable, while the postal workers CWU union will lose thousands more of our members.

The original Hooper report into postal modernisation had raised the possibility of up to half of the company’s seventy mail centres to close, but Royal Mail proposals now go much further than even this in many regions:

• In the North East division nine mail centres are to be consolidated into three at Leeds, Sheffield and Tyneside.
• In Kent four mail centres could be closed and merged into a single depot in Strood
• Three Hertfordshire mail centres could be closed to create one big hub at Hemel Hempstead.
• Bolton, Crewe and Liverpool mail centres will be closed and work transferred to Warrington.

Now postal bosses have announced the closure of two out of three of the huge London sorting offices at Mount Pleasant, Nine Elms and Bow, with rumours they have already sold the land out from under the Nine Elms depot, after much talk about consultation with the union. Royal Mail has given no guarantee on compulsory redundancies, only that it hopes to avoid them. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, as delivery offices are closed and merged too, alongside the introduction of automatic walk sorting machinery and the use of vans for delivery, giving the company an excuse to lift the health and safety 3.5 hour limit on delivery span, hiking workload.

All told, Royal Mail’s modernisation programme means thousands upon thousands of jobs going, Those that don’t lose their jobs will be forced to travel up to a hundred miles to get to their new workplaces, causing huge stress and strain. Behind Royal Mail crocodile tears about “support” packages for staff, the human cost of this was brought home in April 2010. Robert Steele, an engineer at Crewe, killed himself after being told of the forcible transfer to Warrington of Crewe staff, after he had already been transferred from the closed Stoke office the year before.

Privatisation and Modernisation: two sides of the same coin

ConDem privatisation and Royal Mail modernisation (or downsizing, as it used to be called) are two sides of the same coin. The aim of the cuts is to turn the postal service into a private, profitable company, a new source of wealth for the City shareholders after the financial meltdown. Privatisation itself will see this cuts onslaught pushed forward even faster. The alternative is to link the two issues in a common fight.

However the CWU leaderships’ policy is based on the 2010 Business Transformation agreement, which make it nearly impossible to challenge such closures and has seen the union leadership agreeing to Royal Mail cuts. This has gone alongside an attack on democracy in the union, with reps deprived of the ability to use the industrial relations rules to disagree proposals without higher officials first okaying it – and often blocking such challenges.

Since late October, demonstrations against the closure of a mail centre in Stevenage and a mass meeting in the East London Mail centre have started to put pressure on the leadership to stand up to Royal Mail’s blitz. In a concession to pressure on cuts, the leadership is now promising meetings with local reps to discuss “modernisation issues”. Activists and reps can use these to demand the leadership fights every closure and allows strikes to go ahead.

Organising the fight against closures locally in the union and via anti-cuts committees can help push things forward. While we have to fight Royal Mail cuts wherever possible, defeating privatisation is absolutely key to ultimately beating them. A strategy to defeating privatisation necessarily involves fighting modernisation and vice versa. A national strike, fought all-out and coordinated with the many other groups of workers going into action against the ConDems, can defeat both attacks.

If privatisation goes through it will be a disaster for postal worker’ working conditions and pay. If we defeat privatisation, it would upset the management juggernaut that has rode roughshod over our jobs, conditions and union for the last five years, and start the fight to reverse it.

[stokes11eg]

However the CWU leaderships’ policy is based on the 2010 Business Transformation agreement, which make it nearly impossible to challenge such closures and has seen the union leadership agreeing to Royal Mail cuts. This has gone alongside an attack on democracy in the union, with reps deprived of the ability to use the industrial relations rules to disagree proposals without higher officials first okaying it – and often blocking such challenges.
MMM---Hope Big Billy reads this part, and finally takes some responsibility for this mess.