THE POSTAL workers union, CWU, is now in a headlong collision with a Royal Mail management openly moving to destroy the union as an independent organisation which fights for its members, and turning it into a company union.
As a company union, its only function is to faithfully carry out the policies dictated by the management and ensure its members comply with every order handed down to them.
The boss of Royal Mail, Simon Thompson, has issued an ultimatum to the union to either accept a deal that would spell the end of the CWU as an independent trade union, or the company will walk out of any negotiations over pay and conditions.
The long list of management demands spelt out in this deal include:
- Turning Royal Mail into a gig-economy style parcel courier;
- A non-backdated 3.5% pay increase for postal workers with no pay increase at all for Parcelforce workers;
- Just a 3% pay rise and acceptance of ‘outsourcing’ for Fleet workers, leading to compulsory redundancies.
On top of this, Thompson and Royal Mail are demanding that the CWU agrees to no longer support members taking the company to employment tribunals over unlawful pay deduction during strikes.
Also, this take-it-or-leave it deal demands that the CWU be removed from the workplace, thus leaving it unable to organise workers locally.
It ends the right of branches to negotiate local changes, imposes start and finish times that mean the end of early deliveries, cuts sick pay, removes premium payments for working Sundays, and introduces technology to monitor postal workers every minute of the day. No commitment on job security is offered. Instead, they hold a future of mass sackings, a gig-economy of self-employed workers, with the CWU reduced to being a management-controlled body to enforce workers’ compliance.
The CWU has reacted with fury, rejecting out of hand every one of these demands and insisting that the planned two-day strike action starting tomorrow will go ahead. The union organised workplace meetings across the country yesterday where members voted ‘no confidence’ in Thompson’s handling of the company.
However, this take-it-or-leave-it deal is not going to be defeated by motions of no confidence or isolated days of strike action.
Thompson and the Royal Mail Group bosses have signalled that they are ready to face down the union and the two-day strikes in order to achieve what is necessary for them and their shareholders.
That means: destroy the CWU, break up the Royal Mail and ditch the letter delivery service to concentrate on the more profitable parcel delivery service where they will compete with Uber-style companies by using casual, self-employed workers with no employment rights, low wages and no union representation.
Royal Mail is encouraged to wage this outright war knowing it has the backing of the Tories and all the anti-union laws designed to make legal striking virtually impossible.
The entire working class must take warning from this declaration of war on the CWU.
Contained within this attack is an attack on the existence of every trade union by a capitalist system that can no longer live with unions being forced by their members to fight for wages and conditions to defend them from paying the price of capitalism’s economic crisis.
The working class fought to build trade unions and they will not tamely submit to seeing them destroyed, but instead will demand that their leaders end the policy of limited strikes and mobilise the full strength of the working class to put an end to the bosses who think they can smash the unions and drive the working class into poverty to protect their profits.
Postal workers must demand the CWU answer this attack with an all-out strike and that the entire trade union movement comes out in a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will re-nationalise Royal Mail along with the banks and major industries placing them under the management of the working class – building a socialist planned economy.
A general strike leading to a workers’ government and socialism is the only way forward for the working class today.
