Class Struggle in the Post Office

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The Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher rejected privatising the Post Office, and did not try to smash its main union, the UCW. They may have made the mistake of wrongly associating a right-wing leadership with rank and file passivity. Since the Shorter Working Week dispute of 1987 till now, workers in the Royal Mail have struck and struck again and again to defend their working rights, wages and conditions. As they saw their fellow Post Office workers in Parcelforce and Post Office Counters knuckle under to mass job losses and depot/office closures, Royal Mail workers during the 1990’s and 2000’s gave a clear lead to the whole movement with one illegal strike after another.

During that time I myself have been threatened with two High Court writs, for an illegal walk-out in 1993 and an anti-BNP leaflet boycott in 2004; placed on a two-year suspended dismissal twice for leading walk-outs; sacked once and re-instated in 1999; and, finally threatened with dismissal after another Bridgwater walk-out, lasting a whole week in 2002.

The reason I am still employed is simply that in all these cases, Royal Mail were never sure that if they actually sacked me, that Bridgwater, Bristol and West Country walk-outs would not trigger national unofficial action.

In the early 2000’s, the member’s rejection of a pay strike in a national ballot led to Royal Mail to try their hand at union-bashing. Result: an illegal strike wave that started in London, engulfed the whole of the south and west of England, and in making Royal Mail back off, saved the CWU as an effective fighting force. At times these illegal walk-outs were started by national CWU officials like current Deputy General Secretary Dave Ward

The militancy of Royal Mail workers , however, remains extremely patchy: some offices have surrendered jobs and conditions wholesale for years, others, like my own and Bridgwater and others in the West Country such as Plymouth and Bristol, remain absolutely undefeated and still ‘up for it.’

The key to this historic and unique twenty-five year militancy, unprecedented I think in the whole of British Trade Union history, is to be found in the survival of the shop steward system, strong regional traditions of rank and file solidarity between neighbouring sorting offices, and, in CWU Branches such as Bristol, almost continuous ‘Gate Meetings.’

At my current tiny Delivery Office in the Somerset Polden Hills village of Woolavington, the three of us successfully struck for a week in January 2009 to stop an attempt to close our office: we think it was ‘The Smallest Strike in British History!’ Even local Tory Wing-Commanders supported us!

For hundreds of us Royal Mail militants, the long-expected National Agreement may contain many clauses, some good, many bad, but if in the agreement there is a serious joint attack on effective local shop stewards and branches, and these paragraphs are not contested and deleted, then the end of the Royal Mail, the Post Office and CWU will not be long delayed.

However, and meanwhile, the struggle goes on: my parent delivery office at Bridgwater has had – I kid you not – two walk-outs and a sit-in in the last month!