Communication Workers Union leaders hail completion of Kretinsky’s EP Group buyout of Royal Mail

[stage3]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/ ... -m05.html

Tony Robson
13 hours ago
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) on April 30 welcomed the news that Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group successfully completed their £3.6 billion takeover of Royal Mail—and parent company International Distribution Services (IDS)—with the buyout of 80.6 percent of shareholders.

The CWU statement from General Secretary Dave Ward and his deputy Martin Walsh is a cringing defence of their pact with multi-billionaire Kretinsky.


Communication Workers Union Deputy General Secretary (Postal) Martin Walsh, (left) and CWU General Secretary Dave Ward speaking at a previous CWU Live event [Photo: screenshot of video: CWU/Facebook]
They claim, “The CWU have reached a groundbreaking agreement with EP Group that provides the platform of a fresh start and the rebuilding of Royal Mail.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. EP Group has established sole ownership and delisted the company as the groundwork is laid to shelve the mail service. The price of a first-class stamp has been ratcheted up by 25 percent to £1.70 since the takeover bid began last May.

Kretinsky’s decried the Universal Service Obligation (USO)—the statutory obligation to deliver letters six days a week to all addresses in the UK at a uniform price—as a “death grip”, with its requirements the strictest in Europe.

This has been echoed by CWU leaders who repeat the mantra that the USO is “financially unsustainable”. The dismantling of the mail service is baked into the Framework Agreement cooked up with EP Group by Ward and Walsh last December. This has been unanimously endorsed by the union postal executive but not put to a vote of the membership.

The downgrading of the mail service is to initiate a new stage of corporate warfare with thousands of job losses and the introduction of new exploitative work practices, along with automation, to transform Royal Mail into a parcel delivery network.

Ward and Walsh have spent the best part of a year in private talks with Kretinsky and EP Group to draw this up. But despite their PR hailing the successful buyout they acknowledge that “This is a development that many will greet with scepticism and uncertainty”


The CWU views basic class hostility to the carve-up of Royal Mail by billionaire asset strippers as an obstacle to be overcome through the methods and gaslighting and censorship. The union’s formal commitment to renationalisation of Royal Mail is window dressing, to be shed in its alliance with the Starmer Labour government.

While the previous Conservative government gave its “in-principle” agreement to the Kretinsky takeover, it needed the rubber stamp of the Labour government last December in its Deed of Undertaking with EP Group, based on a bargain basement of short-term “protections”, to install the oligarch and his private equity firm to sole ownership. It demanded the demobilising of all opposition to dismantling the USO as an example of the tripartite alliance Starmer promised to union leaders with the government and big business, with the CWU promised a seat at the corporate table with EP Group in return.

Ward and Walsh even present Kretinsky as a saviour figure, stating that “the truth is that the biggest threat to the future of our postal services is the status quo”.

A concerted wrecking operation of the mail service has accelerated under Royal Mail to pave the way for Kretinsky. The current executives and wealthy investors will now gorge themselves on millions from the buyout.

The regulator Ofcom announced in January its support for Royal Mail’s plans to downgrade the mail service to an alternate weekday delivery service for second class letters based on the Optimised Delivery Model (ODM). This is a blueprint to remove fixed duties for postal workers, increase call rates and delivery routes and eliminate one in four walks in a £300 million cost cutting exercise across Royal Mail. In addition, Ofcom has offered the watering down of quality-of-service targets including for first class post and delay of speed of delivery for both.

Walsh signed the Terms of Reference with Royal Mail in December to foist the ODM on 37 delivery offices in the “USO reform” pilots from February to June, as a testing ground for rolling this out across all 1,200 units in a national agreement with Kretinsky. Faced with dissent among postal workers, Walsh has doubled down on the message that the existing USO is “financially unsustainable”. They declare, “The current Royal Mail Group Board have destroyed the service, turned on their own employees and grossly mismanaged the company from top to bottom.”

This is shameless. This is what their pro-company agreement, co-authored with the self-same Board at ACAS to break the 2022-3 national dispute and enabled the biggest attack on the jobs, terms and conditions of Royal Mail workers in history. They then worked together to enforce this through the joint union-management groups.

What they describe as “gross mismanagement” was a £600 million looting operation by private investors, including Kretinsky. Then, as now, the CWU insisted that challenging the subordination of the mail service to the interests of the corporate oligarchy is impossible.

In the Letter to Branches attached to the CWU statement, Ward and Walsh state, “The next steps for the CWU will be to send to members home addresses an extensive communication explaining the terms of the CWU/EP Agreement and updating members on the USO. This will be timed towards the end of May and will be part of a series of communications to launch the new agreement.”


This is not an engagement with members—who have been denied any say on either the Kretinsky takeover or USO “reform”—but a marketing exercise for EP Group to secure the CWU’s privileged status as junior partners and make postal workers fall in line.

Walsh has confirmed talks on pay recommenced from April 29, with EP Group over an “above inflation pay deal”. The evasive wording is deliberate, it will not make up for the 14 percent real-terms pay cut imposed by the sellout agreement two years ago, which has dragged postal workers closer to the minimum wage.

Walsh has proclaimed the “aim” of reaching an agreement on May 14, to be endorsed by the postal executive and then be presented at a Special Briefing on May 21/22.

The pay talks are tied to Section 5 of the Framework Agreement, full of hollow pledges about “resolving outstanding issues” including cuts to sick pay and the two-tier workforce the CWU postal executive rammed through two years ago. Even this is tied to delivering “USO reform.” The Framework Agreement says that any improvements are dependent on pushing through “transformation plans’, e.g., removing fixed duties, hiking up call rates, and eliminating jobs.

Postal workers cannot afford a surrender document Mark II. Ward and Walsh avoided facing members at the CWU Live online meeting on Thursday, where they were billed to provide updates on the EP Group takeover. Instead, they sent pre-recorded videos full of dissembling from their joint statement and letter to branches.

The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) was established in opposition to the sellout deal in 2023 to wrest control from the pro-company union apparatus and restore power to the shop floor.

What is needed is not compliance with Kretinsky’s restructuring but building rank-and file-resistance. This needs to be based on two fundamental principles: The prioritisation of postal workers and the mail service, not the profits of the oligarchy—to defend jobs, demand an inflation busting pay increase, end the two-tier workforce and enforce safety against crippling workloads. Secondly, Royal Mail workers must link up their fight with postal and logistics workers internationally against similar efforts to privatise mail services and enforce brutal corporate cuts to jobs.

We encourage postal workers to contact the PWRFC and assist in building this collective resistance.

[Valentina@1]

Say what you want about this mob,but this all facts I’m afraid,nobody can actually say it’s not

[Alfietherat]

Disgraceful how quick and easy the CWU and the Labour Government agreed to the sale. This will end in tears for the workers.

[hans solo]

Wait until the pay offer
Lets see what their view of the takeover then

[Valentina@1]

Once CWU scare monger members into excepting deal,it goes through.

There’s zero pushback on anything anymore I’m afraid.

Sad times

[tramssirhc]

Excellent reporting by the only movement supporting rank and file postal workers. We all know how this ends and its not going to be anything like the fantasy that Martin Walsh believes in.

[GRS]

So a lot of talk in the news today about the government urgently updating its strategies in preparing Britain for war. Amongst the key strategies being looked at is the postal system, which especially in the event of a cyber attack that takes out other methods of communication would be invaluable in government maintaining communication with the public. Obviously the main concerns centre around Russia and to a slightly lesser extent China & Iran. So what have the government done……waved through the sale of the one company able to step up in the event of a crisis and not only waved it through but to a spiv who’s a close business partner with Russia & ally of Putin. Is this purchase by him actually a genuine business interest or something more shady where he has the ability to shatter one of this country’s key infrastructures. Much like the Chinese purchase of British Steel this is looking like a deliberate act of sabotage!!!

[enskied]

So little information from the CWU in reality. so little so often. Again and again.

[postslippete]

I honestly don't believe we should be selling off critical parts of our infrastructure to any foreign investor. It's not just about security but about long term public accountability and service. Kretinsky keeps his cards very close to his chest so there will be conspiracy theories but he has generally presented himself as an opportunistic investor focussed on turning around undervalued European assets. And imho the only reason why he wants to take over our business now is because of the USO reforms (he initially wanted to honour the USO for just 5 years) and as most of our infrastructure is primarily built around letters; these assets could be sold off for ££££ along with thousands of postal workers jobs. There are guarantees of no compulsory redundancies until Ofcom's review of the USO next year.

Unfortunately, everyone (Ofcom, the CWU, postal workers) have been taken in by Seidenberg's comments about it not being sustainable to maintain a delivery network built for 20 billion letters when we are now only delivering 7 billion. But that has been exacerbated by RM's long term strategy of managing the decline by jacking up postage prices than anything else. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy by making sending letters expensive so that fewer people use it and then argue that it is no longer viable. RM are likely to save millions as a result of watering down the letters business but once that revenue stream has almost dried up, what do we have left? The parcels market is super competitive with the likes of Amazon, DPD and Evri squeezing the margins hard and there is a big risk that RM becomes yet another low margin courier with no real unique selling point.

There won't be any massive profits in the company in the next few years either because DK has borrowed billions to buy the company and is already investing millions in a network of parcel lockers. Even if the business is streamlined and profits emerge - they will go towards servicing the debts and returning value to its investor first and foremost - its classic private equity playbook stuff.

[tramssirhc]

So a lot of talk in the news today about the government urgently updating its strategies in preparing Britain for war. Amongst the key strategies being looked at is the postal system, which especially in the event of a cyber attack that takes out other methods of communication would be invaluable in government maintaining communication with the public. Obviously the main concerns centre around Russia and to a slightly lesser extent China & Iran. So what have the government done……waved through the sale of the one company able to step up in the event of a crisis and not only waved it through but to a spiv who’s a close business partner with Russia & ally of Putin. Is this purchase by him actually a genuine business interest or something more shady where he has the ability to shatter one of this country’s key infrastructures. Much like the Chinese purchase of British Steel this is looking like a deliberate act of sabotage!!!

Any war is a a war cooked up by the capitalists to cover for the failure of them to offer anything to the working class. The current economic system has reached its end.

The finger pointing by the capitalist at other countries such as China, Russia and Iran is deliberate. They are telling you they are the enemy and always have been. The working class in these countries are not your enemy and never have been.

The postal industry is in the hands of a few capitalists from all over the world. Don't allow the bigotry of the capitalists to fool you into thinking that one person and that person's nationality is the problem. Capitalism is the problem.

The buyout is simply about the conversion of debt, starting at roughly £5 billion, into actual cash that can be extracted from the industry. For the capitalists debt is simply numbers on a spreadsheet. For you and me debt is a matter of life or death. Our loanees would never allow us to bankrupt ourselves and then walk away with the actual cash. The bosses do this everyday without any question.

It's worth remembering that the sale of the steel industry was supported by our government and the steel unions. The buyers have ploughed millions into maintaining production and had reached the point where it was unable to keep doing it. Thats not sabotage. The sabotage was selling steel making to the capitalists in the first place.

[tramssirhc]

I honestly don't believe we should be selling off critical parts of our infrastructure to any foreign investor. It's not just about security but about long term public accountability and service. Kretinsky keeps his cards very close to his chest so there will be conspiracy theories but he has generally presented himself as an opportunistic investor focussed on turning around undervalued European assets. And imho the only reason why he wants to take over our business now is because of the USO reforms (he initially wanted to honour the USO for just 5 years) and as most of our infrastructure is primarily built around letters; these assets could be sold off for ££££ along with thousands of postal workers jobs. There are guarantees of no compulsory redundancies until Ofcom's review of the USO next year.

Unfortunately, everyone (Ofcom, the CWU, postal workers) have been taken in by Seidenberg's comments about it not being sustainable to maintain a delivery network built for 20 billion letters when we are now only delivering 7 billion. But that has been exacerbated by RM's long term strategy of managing the decline by jacking up postage prices than anything else. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy by making sending letters expensive so that fewer people use it and then argue that it is no longer viable. RM are likely to save millions as a result of watering down the letters business but once that revenue stream has almost dried up, what do we have left? The parcels market is super competitive with the likes of Amazon, DPD and Evri squeezing the margins hard and there is a big risk that RM becomes yet another low margin courier with no real unique selling point.

There won't be any massive profits in the company in the next few years either because DK has borrowed billions to buy the company and is already investing millions in a network of parcel lockers. Even if the business is streamlined and profits emerge - they will go towards servicing the debts and returning value to its investor first and foremost - its classic private equity playbook stuff.

Almost every function of our lives is in the hands of capitalists from all over the world. Lets talk about the French capitalists ripping us off for nuclear power. Or we could discuss the Australians bankrupting the water suppliers. Capitalism has no race, colour or creed. The buyout is nothing to do with nstionalities and is everything to do with converting £5 billion of debt into hard cash that can be taken out of the industry. They may not get the whole lot but they will get money for nothing. Debt is just numbers on their spreadsheets. The gamble is just how much of that £5 billion can be made into real money before it goes tits up.

Postal workers have not been taken in. Those who claim to speak for postal workers have, like the CWU. There will be no changes to the very basic operation of the postal industry - the infrastructure is already here and the likes of Amazon exploit it every day because they cannot and will not create a matching infrastructure. 7 billion letters will not be delivering themselves. That fact is proven by the failure to deliver the legal requirements of the universal service now.

The postal industry is a cartel dominated by only a few players. The capitalists have a golden rule - don't attack each other. They will do nothing to risk their profits. Driving each other into the ground is not their plan. Driving us into the ground is.

All of this is easily stopped. Our politicians enforce the law and maintain the USO as it is. If the industry can't live with that then it gets renationalised.

[stage3]

So a lot of talk in the news today about the government urgently updating its strategies in preparing Britain for war. Amongst the key strategies being looked at is the postal system, which especially in the event of a cyber attack that takes out other methods of communication would be invaluable in government maintaining communication with the public. Obviously the main concerns centre around Russia and to a slightly lesser extent China & Iran. So what have the government done……waved through the sale of the one company able to step up in the event of a crisis and not only waved it through but to a spiv who’s a close business partner with Russia & ally of Putin. Is this purchase by him actually a genuine business interest or something more shady where he has the ability to shatter one of this country’s key infrastructures. Much like the Chinese purchase of British Steel this is looking like a deliberate act of sabotage!!!

Any war is a a war cooked up by the capitalists to cover for the failure of them to offer anything to the working class. The current economic system has reached its end.

The finger pointing by the capitalist at other countries such as China, Russia and Iran is deliberate. They are telling you they are the enemy and always have been. The working class in these countries are not your enemy and never have been.

The postal industry is in the hands of a few capitalists from all over the world. Don't allow the bigotry of the capitalists to fool you into thinking that one person and that person's nationality is the problem. Capitalism is the problem.

The buyout is simply about the conversion of debt, starting at roughly £5 billion, into actual cash that can be extracted from the industry. For the capitalists debt is simply numbers on a spreadsheet. For you and me debt is a matter of life or death. Our loanees would never allow us to bankrupt ourselves and then walk away with the actual cash. The bosses do this everyday without any question.

It's worth remembering that the sale of the steel industry was supported by our government and the steel unions. The buyers have ploughed millions into maintaining production and had reached the point where it was unable to keep doing it. Thats not sabotage. The sabotage was selling steel making to the capitalists in the first place.

[pinstripe]

So what is the WSWS’s solution to this? They are vocal about the problems, but not quite so about a solution. So what do they suggest? Renationalise RM? An all out strike? What?

What they fail to recognise is that the general public don’t care, and most posties no longer care, it doesn’t matter as whoever is in charge will do what they want.

[tramssirhc]

So what is the WSWS’s solution to this? They are vocal about the problems, but not quite so about a solution. So what do they suggest? Renationalise RM? An all out strike? What?

What they fail to recognise is that the general public don’t care, and most posties no longer care, it doesn’t matter as whoever is in charge will do what they want.

Absolutely renationalisation. The service is not going to improve unless it is renationalised. As for an all our strike, that will not happen under the current leadership of the CWU. The leadership is wedded to partnership and the membership detest the leadership at all levels. That's not a recipe for industrial action.

The working class do care about the services they receive. People are disgusted that the USO has been destroyed so that profit can be made. MP's are overwhelmed with complaints about the service constituents are receiving. Ultimately parliament decides what happens next. This can all be stopped by the lawmakers enforcing the laws. Don't let parliament get away with pretending this is not their problem. It is. Demand your MP acts.

As for the unaccountability of the industry, that's a reckoning about to happen. The government can act now or act once it goes tits up and the taxpayer is left with its 'golden liability'. History won't be kind when the capitalists convert that £5 billion of debt into hard cash and walk away. That's what coming.

[stage3]

Spot on tramssirhc,not sure how the case can be made that the public don't care. As you pointed out they've been highlighting the run down of the service - missed medical appointments, bills and cards. This has been directed at RM not posties. Instead of blaming the public, responsibility should be placed where it belongs, with the CWU top brass. They use their comms to quote Ofcom that the current USO over delivers for the public need!

I think many have come to the conclusion that this is supported by the entire political establishment with the Labour government at the top and appeals to MP's won't change anything, remember the post cards over privatisation. But this consensus on behalf of the oligarchy is not grounds for standing on the sidelines. An independent struggle is required and faces every section of workers, the Birmingham bin workers fighting the downgrading of their job and pay to make austerity cuts and NHS workers opposing privatisation. The list could go on.

The PWRFC stands for the prioritisation of postal workers who have built this service - defending their jobs and conditions - plus the public interest, not the profits of oligarchy sucking the life out of society and spoiling everything they get their hands on. The first principle of what industrial action is taken is it is determined by the members, its not about just calling everyone out. No resistance will happen on the watch of those responsible for the sell out in 2023 and are buried in Kretinsky's back pocket eg Dave Ward and Martin Walsh. This is about self-organisation of postal workers to remove the dead hand of this bureaucracy.