ROYAL Mail chairman Allan Leighton reiterated yesterday that the organisation cannot afford to improve its 2.5 per cent pay offer, despite staff voting 77 per cent for strike action.
He said that ‘The money on the table is the money on the table because that is what the business can afford.’
Leighton continued: ‘Businesses like ours that are competing in a commercial environment can’t afford to pay money out that we don’t have.’
As is well known, the Royal Mail management have been spelling it out publicly, that if the CWU takes strike action, and does not roll over to all of its wage cutting, rationalisation and mass redundancy demands, then a major struggle comparable to the miners’ strike is on hand.
The Royal Mail management has been encouraged by the weakness of the CWU leaders to maintain this position. The union leaders have been telling their members that they are opposed to a strike and wanted a big strike vote so as to persuade the Royal Mail management to come to the negotiating table.
The Royal Mail is very aware that it faces a union leadership that does not want to fight, and intends to make full use of this weakness by being completely intransigent. This is why it is forever boasting of how many managers it can mobilise to act as scabs and of the ‘top secret’ other strikebreaking measures that it has organised along with the Labour government and the would be privateers.
One of the CWU leaders Dave Ward said last week: ‘It is outrageous that the business is ignoring the clear message from their workforce and appear to be provoking a postal strike rather than resolving one.’
These union leaders will never learn. They are frightened to face up to the truth, which is that the Royal Mail and the Labour government behind it are determined not just to have a fight but to win a decisive battle that will clear the way for privatising the Royal Mail and the Post Office, forcing through mass redundancies and smashing the CWU, reducing it to the size of the NUM.
The privateers will be ecstatic and Brown will be established with the bosses as their saviour.
The Royal Mail is confident that this leadership will give in either before the fight is joined, or will sell out after a token action, leaving the mass membership of the CWU to their fate.
The only solution to this crisis of leadership is for the membership to step forwards and demand and initiate indefinite national strike action.
The recent annual conference of the GMB decided to call for an alliance of public sector trade unions to fight Brown’s policies of wage cutting and privatisation. The PCS has already called for this.
The GMB and all other public sector trade union must be approached now to take joint action alongside the postal workers to defeat Royal Mail and to defeat the government.
To initiate this action, Councils of Action must be formed to bring the local trade unions and the local communities together to establish unity in action from below and to initiate the action, throughout the entire trade union movement.
Leaders that are not willing to call and lead indefinite strike action, and to fight to bring the whole public sector out, must be forced to resign, and be replaced by leaders who are willing to lead the fight, and are determined to secure the future of the whole working class.
Defeating the government means bringing it down and going forward to a workers government that will carry out socialist policies including the nationalisation of the banks and the major industries to bring in a planned and nationalised socialist economy based on satisfying peoples needs.
Only the WRP is building the kind of revolutionary leadership that is necessary.
All workers and youth in struggle must join the WRP and build it rapidly to lead the struggle for workers power.
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