Postal workers set for first national strike in 11 years

[TrueBlueTerrier]

By Keith Lee
28 June 200


Britain’s postal workers are set to hold their first national strike in 11 years on June 29. The strike was called by the CWU (Communication Workers Union) after pay talks between the union and management at Royal Mail collapsed.

Postal workers employed by Royal Mail have recently voted by more than a three-quarters majority to take industrial action.

The union is in dispute with Royal Mail over a 2.5 percent pay offer for delivery workers and threats to cut 40,000 jobs. Some 5,000 CWU members working in Post Offices were also balloted in protest at planned closures, pay and the moving of post offices inside stores of the high street retailer W H Smith. Cash handlers, who deliver money to post offices, also voted to strike.

Royal Mail employs nearly 193,000 people and delivers 84 million items of mail to 27 million homes and businesses every day, which amounted to sales of £9.1 billion (US$18.1 billion) last year.

Postal workers face a major struggle against an opponent that is determined to win at all costs, but under a union leadership that wants nothing more than a shabby compromise that will help Royal Mail achieve its objectives and that it can impose on its members.

Contingency plans for the present strike have been put in place by Royal Mail, but these are being kept secret. A spokesman stated, “The company will use every resource in our power to keep the service going.â€

[IWW Fellow Worker]

That's a great article. Certainly better researched than the garbage from the Daily Fail or the Daily Torygraph. I wouldn't agree with everything this organisation stands for, but they are correct in saying the leadership of the CWU, and just about every other large union these days, is far too cozy with the Government and bosses.

[goinpostal]

There is a problem with the figures in the WSWS article, don't they refer to the job losses before the efficiency agreement (the report is from 2005-6) - but anyone seen the job losses figures for since the efficiency agreement last year? I bet they are horrendous, no wonder Dave Ward and all the others that want us to go back to the efficiency agreement haven't collected any! We've lost quite a few in our office.

[F0zziebear]

As said previously the only true way of slowing things down is to co-ordinate across Europe. If the UK, Dutch and German state postal workers went on strike then people would listen. Why? Well it's only TNT and Deustchepost (under DHL) who are sewriously entering the UK market. Business Post is strnage in that it harbours no E2E desire. So whilst you complain about competition, that competition in fact other European state/privatised postal companies! Why are they competing? They are being attacked by each other!

The article fails to mention the jobs created by competition, though this number does not compensate the numbers lost! Also the article infers that all job losses are frontline. Many managerial jobs have gone in the UK and in other countries. posts in recent days seem to think that management haven't been attacked. We attacked managerial jobs in recent years and it's only now that significant postal jobs are being talked about!

F0zz with the Port and cheese on Sunday

[goinpostal]

Hiya fozzie, the quickest way to win is to unite our ballots with the other public sector workers in Britain facing Gordon Brown's pay freeze, that is a real possibility in the hear and now. Of course we should also campaign for European wide action, strikes in France and Italy have forced the EU to abandon the 2009 postal opening deadline, which makes Labour's opening here look even worse!

Unite the public sector strikes!
WP Postal Workers Bulletin 12 • June 2007 CWU Conference
http://www.workerspower.com/index.php?i ... 57,0,0,1,0

The CWU is a strong union and the government is in a weak position. What's more, we can have as our allies millions of other public sector workers - NHS staff, teachers, civil servants - who are fighting Gordon Brown’s 1.9% public sector pay limit. By joining our strike ballots together we can defeat not only our individual employers but the government itself and its free market policies.
Millions more, alarmed at the accelerating privatisation and funding crisis in public services, especially the NHS, can be rallied to our side against the media's anti-union propaganda by initiating an anti-privatisation movement on the scale of the 2003 anti-war movement or the anti-Poll Tax struggle. A public sector-wide strike over pay and mass movement of service users behind it seeking to break the tide of privatisation would be unstoppable.

Our CWU leaders have not initiated such a movement. They are tied to the Labour Party and manacle our union to its fortunes. They know such a movement might cripple the Labour government and lose it the next election. But who would be responsible? Not us but rather New Labour’s policies which were started by the Tories and that the Tories would just go on with if Labour lost.

We need a party that defends and extends public services and social ownership, that attacks the privatisers and the profiteers rather than the workers and the unions. Instead the tactics of Dave Ward, Billy Hayes and Co. are limited to those that solely go through the Labour Party structures, such as the newly launched toothless campaign to “Reign in the Regulatorâ€