Postal dispute: union Exec votes for a deal

[stephen500]

Postal dispute: union Exec votes for a deal
http://www.workersliberty.org.uk/node/9373

''It looks like the CWU's Postal Executive has endorsed a deal with Royal Mail.

But rank and file postal workers still have not been told what was in the deal, negotiated on Friday 12th by CWU deputy general secretary Dave Ward; and it is not even clear that the Executive endorsement of the deal is definite.

Late on Friday evening, 19th, Dave Ward and union general secretary got the majority support of the Postal Executive for a deal to be put to the members.

We understand that the deal is as previously leaked: a pay rise of 6.9% over two years but with strings on pensions, productivity bonus schemes and flexible practices in delivery.

But the Postal Executive also instructed Dave Ward to obtain a commitment from Royal Mail bosses to rescind the executive action they have taken whilst the dispute has been on and their threats of sanction against union officials.

Only once this commitment is obtained (it is to be the subject of a further meeting between Dave Ward and Royal Mail) will members will be balloted with an Executive recommendation to vote Yes.

What will happen if the bosses refuse to give a commitment? That is not clear.

Exactly how much the union has given away in agreeing to "flexible practices" and cuts in pensions, we do not know. But, with Royal Mail bosses visibly on a well-prepared major offensive, and the CWU leaders almost farcically dithering (eight days since the CWU announced an "agreed deal" and cancelled industrial action, and still the members have been told nothing), we have to fear the worst.

--

Continue and extend the unofficial strikes!
Call a national reps' meeting!
Defend conditions: no sell-out, wage-cutting deal!
Reverse liberalisation: the post should be a public service!

To put it bluntly: it looks increasingly likely that the CWU leadership will attempt to end this dispute on the basis of a rotten deal. What can postal workers do in response?

a) Continue and extend the unofficial action

As a result of management impositions on start times and other issues, unofficial action has broken out all over the country - including at offices in North, East, South East and South West London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Chester, Fife, Livingston, Peterborough, Dalkeith, Bristol, Leicester, Grangemouth, Kilwinning and Kent.

This unofficial action should be maintained and extended. It is the only way to protect postal workers from management attacks and retaliation - and a good way to exert the maximum pressure to prevent the dispute from being abandoned.

Workers who refuse to handle mail from other offices on strike are, of course, 100% right.

b) Demand a national reps' meeting

The PEC will be discussing the proposed deal on Monday 15th. But it should not just be left to the executive. A national reps meeting is needed for real rank-and-file control.

If the union leadership won't allow this, then offices still on strike should take the initiative and call a national meeting representing as many branches as possible.

c) Vote "no!"

Voting down a deal in a ballot is not the same as getting the action back on. But the campaign for a "no" vote is an essential part of what is now necessary to prevent defeat.

Postal workers have the power to win

Whatever the CWU leaders have agreed under pressure, postal workers have the power to win this dispute.

The strength of the union is in the rank and file and in the
workplaces, not in the leadership and in the negotiating rooms.
If a "critical mass" of big offices stay on strike, and other postal
workers respect the rule that you don't handle scab mail, we can
apply unbearable pressure to Royal Mail bosses and to other
businesses which depend on the mail.

Don't fall for the stories about mail being redirected to private operators. No private operator has the network which Royal Mail has for delivery to the doorstep, and none is likely to build one.

Even in Sweden, where the mail has been completely privatised and open to free-market competition for many years, the former public-service operator still does over 90% of deliveries. Royal Mail and the Government, and business generally, cannot manage without Royal Mail workers. They can try to bash workers down, and blackmail us into joining a competitive "race to the bottom" for wages and conditions, but they cannot manage without us if we stand firm.

Don't be blackmailed by the anti-union laws, either. All the unofficial strikes last week were technically illegal under the Tory anti-union laws continued by Brown and Blair. No-one was talking about taking anyone to court, were they?

The prison officers' recent walk-out was completely illegal under the anti-union laws. What was the Government going to do? Send them to jail?

Take note of what the Guardian's legal columnist wrote about the prison officers' action:

"The fact is that a high court judge ordered the cessation of a
clearly unlawful industrial action, and thousands of the strikers,
including their leaders, took no notice.

"But what if the situation had been more serious? What would have happened had thousands of strikers defied the court indefinitely? In such circumstances, is an injunction toothless? The strike leaders could be fined or even imprisoned for contempt of court.

"But such measures would only increase bitterness, make a settlement less likely and cause chaos in the prisons, possibly endangering public safety. The law would, in practice, be powerless" (3 September).

The same principle holds in the post. The union is not Billy Hayes and Dave Ward. The union is the rank and file. The union has not given its verdict yet. The union has not agreed to give away working conditions and pensions, let alone to "sell" them for... a wage cut!

Nor should it.

CWU leadership: looking for a way out

The joint statement signed by Billy Hayes, Dave Ward and Adam Crozier (TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has also slipped himself in there too) says: "The agreed terms covering all the issues in the dispute will be considered by the union’s Executive on Monday [15th]. Both parties will make a further statement thereafter."

There is no reason to suppose that the deal presented to the PEC will be anything other than a massive defeat.

The last two weeks have seen intensified pressure on the union leadership from Royal Mail, from the Government, from the courts, and doubtless, behind the scenes, from the TUC.

If you want to believe in miracles, you can suppose that Royal Mail management - who were visibly becoming more aggressive as the days went by - have suddenly folded and accepted postal workers' demands.

In fact the ones who folded were the CWU leaders - who visibly become weaker and more overwhelmed as the week went on - and the deal is most likely a rotten one.

The first step was the union cancelling the Mail Centre and Delivery Office strikes on 15/16 October and 16/17 October - in response to the court injunction.

The CWU also declared that "the injunction does not cover Airports and Separate Collection Hubs but because of the small numbers involved it was thought prudent to also withdraw this planned action".

That left a few fragments of the action still planned. The injunction itself was an example of the deadliness of the Tory anti-union laws continued in force by Blair and Brown, and how, if push comes to shove, they can be used by the bosses to illegalise almost any industrial action. According to BBC News, "the union had not given accurate figures for the number of staff affected by the strike - a legal requirement".

Of course, in any large strike, in a workforce with any amount of turnover, and varying numbers of workers off sick or on holiday, and complex shift patterns, it will pretty much always be possible for the employer to claim that the union's figures are inaccurate.

Rather than challenging the obviously contrived ruling, the leadership immediately buckled.

Royal Mail, in contrast, responded aggressively and quickly to the previous round of strike action by announcing the closure (for all workers, not just new starters) of the final-salary pension scheme on 5 October (as well as Oxford and Reading Mail Centres, both bastions of the union).

When postal workers returned after the four days, Royal Mail bosses unilaterally and without notice imposed new working hours - sometimes also involving loss of pay - and docked workers four day's money in one week.

They then cried "disruption" at the unofficial strikes which have as a result spread across the country. There are many reports of aggressive, hardline action by local bosses - and will no doubt continue to be, numerous examples of local, unofficial action in response.

Gordon Brown joins the attack: CWU leaders cave

Then the New Labour government piled in. On 10 October, Gordon Brown told Parliament: "This [dispute] has got to be settled by negotiations between the Post Office and the workforce...but there is no justification for the continuation of this dispute. It should be brought to an end on the terms that have been offered as soon as possible and I urge the workforce to go back to work."

Business minister John Hutton - the man who declared this summer that he wanted Labour to supplant the Tories as "the natural party of business" - echoed Brown. "This dispute has got to end. There is a perfectly decent offer on the table. It does not justify this type of industrial action. The fine details of whatever it is which separates the two sides should and can be sorted out around the negotiating table."

At this point, the CWU leadership then stopped talking about the new round of strikes, starting 15 October - not cancelled it, just stopped talking about it - and instead put out a statement (10 October) saying mildly that: "CWU remains resolute in seeking an acceptable negotiated settlement. Elements of Royal Mail’s proposal remain unacceptable and we hope to resolve these outstanding areas through negotiation".

As if living in a dreamworld, the CWU leaders declared: "CWU believes the time is right for the Government to intervene in a positive way to resolve the dispute". Wake up, Billy! Wake up, Dave! The government had intervened - solidly on the side of the bosses. "CWU remains committed to achieving an agreement", bleated Hayes. As if Royal Mail bosses weren't throwing in new punches, day by day! As if the postal workers were facing some minor, marginal difficulties, rather than a major offensive by the bosses to smash the strongest remaining area of trade union organisation in Britain!

What will the deal be?

The secrecy with which the union has conducted negotiations means we don't yet know the details of the proposed deal. Beyond a general likelihood that it will be a sell-out, there have been rumours circulating in the press.

According to Radio 4, on Saturday 13 October, the deal involves acceptance of a 2.5% pay offer (ie a real terms pay cut) for the next two years, closure of the final salary pension scheme for all workers, and local negotiations over working practices (the last of which was presented, bizarrely, as a union victory!) According to the 14 October Observer, the final salary scheme will stay open for current workers, but the union has abandoned its demand for it to be extended to new entrants.

The Observer also says that the deal includes "the phasing out of 'Spanish practices'", code for much harsher management control on the job, and de factor wage cuts.

It is clear that by and large management have got their way.

What defeat could mean

It is a certainty that the deal will involve heavy attacks on postal workers' conditions to bring them closer to the fully-marketised "race-to-the-bottom" ideal, and that - if the deal is not rejected - this big setback for the workers will be followed by a further and wide-ranging Royal Mail bosses' offensive.

But this will not just be a defeat for the CWU and postal workers. Since the late 1980s, postal workers have been the strongest battalion of the British trade union movement. They conducted the biggest dispute over that period, the 1996 strike. Until only a few years ago, postal workers accounted for one-third of all striker-days in Britain.

The Post Office, alone of all commercial enterprises, remained publicly-owned, and, until recent years, largely run as a public service rather than as an operation whose criteria are all set by profit-maximisation and market competition.

That is why Royal Mail management were right to predict that, if the CWU persisted, this dispute could be "as bloody as the miners' strike". It is, despite a very different situation with a much lower level of struggle than the mid-1980s, as important as the miners' strike.

If the CWU is defeated, the trade union movement will suffer a major setback. The conditions for other public sector workers fighting Gordon Brown's pay limit, and for a revival of trade union activity more generally, will be much worse. If the CWU wins, of course, they will be much better.

The need for a rank-and-file movement

Leaders like Billy Hayes and Dave Ward are part of the so-called "awkward squad" that now dominates the trade union movement - yet like almost all the other "awkward squad" leaders, they have been found sorely wanting. This is true over political issues as well as industrial ones - witness the CWU's vote at Labour Party conference in support of Gordon Brown's plan to ban unions and local Labour Parties from putting motions!

New leaders are needed sure, but also structures to prevent the whole sorry story from being repeated all over again with a new set of personnel.

There is an urgent need for an independent movement among rank-and-file postal workers that can hold self-styled left-wing officers to account and force them to deliver. That is surely the main lesson of this dispute.

Creating a proper postal organisation for the CWU Broad Left, which currently really only exists on the telecoms side, would be a start. But the Broad Left is too exclusively an electoral machine, not an industrial force. A genuine rank-and-file movement is needed, one based on delegate representation from militant branches and groups of workers, and capable of genuinely mobilising postal workers in struggle and subordinating the leadership to itself.

Build cross-union solidarity committees!

A material factor in allowing the CWU leadership to do what they have done is the failure of other unions to take action in solidarity - or, rather, the success of those union's bureaucracies in preventing united action. Nonetheless, action is in the pipeline: civil servants and, probably, local government workers will hold national strikes in November, and the NUT will ballot for action in January. We need to keep pushing for coordinated action so workers can strike together - as a clenched fist rather than just a collection of fingers.

One way to organise such pressure is by establishing cross-union solidarity committees to link up the various public sector struggles. Such committees now exist in Bristol, Leeds, Luton, Nottingham and SW London; they will soon be launched in Haringey and Hackney. These initiatives are still weak but strengthening them and extending them to new areas is essential.''

[chayoliver]

Wow now that must have took ages

[tenpole tudorsack]

I'LL VOTE "NO" SIMPLY ON TWO ISSUES... A SELLOUT ON FLEXIBILITY AND INCREASED DOOR TO DOORS FOR BUGGER ALL

[pop it in pete]

Tempted to quote whole of the above. But would take too much space. .....Well writen i salute you Stephen500 sir. Its a shame our union and many rank and file members have got so stuck up with the capitalist materialistic world we live in today. That they have forgoten the principals and values that the trade union movement was founded on. I fear for my future in this union and company now if this agreement is anything like the leaks that have come out so far. The men and women that braved the hostile response during the wild cats were i feel right to continue. I am ashamed to say my delivery office, area, region, didnt show an ounce of the sheer guts and determination they did. How the hell the P.E.C think this is going to work i dont know why didnt they have the balls to hold out and reject the offer. I fear they thought of the union as an organisation first and not its membership. This is in deed a very sad day..........

[RobRoyThePostie]

If the deal is as suggested above true, i'll be voting NO as well. The minute I heard RM had won the injunction against the strikes I feared that the CWU negotiators would crumble...and the fact a "deal" was announced that evening suggests they did.

Stephen500, that is indeed a well written post sir.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Full text of deal http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/forum/vi ... php?t=6975

[steve07]

I'LL VOTE "NO" SIMPLY ON TWO ISSUES... A SELLOUT ON FLEXIBILITY AND INCREASED DOOR TO DOORS FOR BUGGER ALL

Seems to me like too many militants on this website,ive read the deal and it seems like we have a good deal.A definite yes vote from me and well done to our leaders for holding out for what is rightfully ours

[steve07]

Full text of deal http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/forum/vi ... php?t=6975

Don`t understand where everyone is coming from(no deal)i think having read the document that this is a good deal,big increase in pay,longs and shorts will only be implemented if it works locally in each office with union rep,flexibility cut to half hour instead of 2 hours,7 hours on tuesday 9 hours on fridays is not that much of a change is it?Only a fool would vote no

[postie dave]

Full text of deal http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/forum/vi ... php?t=6975

Don`t understand where everyone is coming from(no deal)i think having read the document that this is a good deal,big increase in pay,longs and shorts will only be implemented if it works locally in each office with union rep,flexibility cut to half hour instead of 2 hours,7 hours on tuesday 9 hours on fridays is not that much of a change is it?Only a fool would vote no

I think your missing the point if we introduce 'flexibilty' in the form of longs and shorts, with or without the reps. involvement, we have started the crack and royal mail managers will be come along with crowbars, wedges and hammers. Name one other industry that uses this form of 'flexibilty', I'm sorry but I think this is the start of something wrong.

[L Tommo]

Ive got as much to vote no to because of the HQ and billy n dave actions or NO ACTIONS... As well as RM and there bullying bullshite as well....


NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!

[DirtyHarry]

Seems to me like too many militants on this website,ive read the deal and it seems like we have a good deal.A definite yes vote from me and well done to our leaders for holding out for what is rightfully ours

Too many militants on this website, eh ? Well, there is another one especially for doormats like yourself, but I think you already know
that, don't you ?

[IWW Fellow Worker]

Seems to me like too many militants on this website,ive read the deal and it seems like we have a good deal.A definite yes vote from me and well done to our leaders for holding out for what is rightfully ours

Too many militants on this website, eh ? Well, there is another one especially for doormats like yourself, but I think you already know
that, don't you ?

He reckons he's a rep Harry! Bloody hell! I'll bet his DUM loves him.

[L Tommo]

run along steve off you go.... No place for a whimp... I think you can take your deal and enjoy it....


:lfo :cfo



OUT

[stephen500]

Stephen500, that is indeed a well written post sir.

Much as i would love to take credit for a well written piece, i didn't write it!
It is an article by workersliberty.org.uk.
I did use quotation marks to indicate it was written by some one else and the source:
http://www.workersliberty.org.uk/node/9373
So i just copied and pasted it! Hey i guess that does take some intelligence!

[stephen500]

I have read Rm version and it does not make good reading!