Communication Workers Union (CWU) members working at Royal Mail (RM) will strike on 26 and 31 August and 8 and 9 September, in a dispute over pay. An industrial action ballot for a parallel dispute, over changes to terms and conditions, concludes on 17 August. A postal worker and CWU rep from south west England spoke to Solidarity.
The shop floor was buzzing this morning after the announcement of the strike dates. It's the same as the excitement at Christmas, when you finally get through the pressure period and all the heavy deliveries and you know you've got a few days off. That's how people feel about these strikes, excitement! They can't wait for them; people have had enough.
The way the company behaves is just fuelling the fire. Just as the CWU announced the strike dates, RM announced that the Chief Financial Officer of RM is being given 72,000 extra shares, worth nearly £200,000. When they do things like that whilst telling us there's no money for a pay rise, it makes clear they're taking the piss out of us. It just makes people more enthusiastic about going on strike.
We know it will be a hard fight, but we are determined. There's a sense that the employer is digging in, and we say: bring it on! During the pandemic, the Government pressured [former Royal Mail CEO] Rico Back over his decision to implement executive action. The company backed down, and Rico left his job with a golden hand shake worth millions. That won't happen this time, so anything we win will have to be forced out of the employer via our industrial action.
We're fighting two parallel disputes, one over pay and one over terms and conditions. People feel strongly about both, but there is a particular strength of feeling over the terms and conditions. What they're proposing is simply unworkable; as an experienced postie, I know that. They want to impose later starts and finishes, a two-tier workforce, compulsory Sunday working, short notice duty changes, attacks on payments of sick leave and ill-health retirement... they want to control your life. One of the worst aspects of their proposals is the plan for annualised hours. That means that we'll work fewer hours during the summer when the mail volumes are lower, allowing the company to compel us to work longer hours – maybe 40, 45, 50 hours a week – during the winter when there's higher volume.
Staffing is already stretched in many areas. In my area, we've recently had a structural revision using all nationally agreed tools to establish the correct staffing levels, the amount of people needed to run the office. Senior management are only staffing to 95% of that, because they think it's “more efficient”. But we still have to deliver to 100% of our area. Where I work is one of the biggest rural delivery units in the country, so the staffing shortfall hits residential deliveries in the main town, with some deliveries not going out for two, three, four, or even five days.
The strikes we've called are part of the dispute over pay. Our second ballot, over the terms and conditions issues, closes on 17 August. The timing seems a little bizarre to me; if we get a settlement on pay, are we then going to go back on strike straight away over terms and conditions? Could it be possible that National Executives of different unions are coordinating their strikes?
CWU's National Executive Council is the decision-making body in terms of strategy and tactics in the dispute – when to strike, for how long, etc. But obviously there is informal discussion of that on the shop floor, which gets fed up to them. In the past, we've sometimes had selective strikes where workers in the three sections – processing, distribution, and delivery – strike for one day each. This has been effective in the past, basically meaning no mail gets delivered for three days but each group of workers only loses one day's pay. This is something we should consider again, in my view.
We're focused on winning concessions from Royal Mail, but we're obviously aware that we're striking at a time when lots of other workers are rising up. Social media posts about other strikes and campaigns, and posts from others supporting our dispute, are shared around at work, and people take encouragement from that.
Despite privatisation, the average postie is still committed to treating the job as an essential public service, whereas the RM CEO and board see it as a cash cow of a business, only fit for syphoning off profit for shareholders and themselves.
Enough is enough, bring on the battle!