TRUE to form the CWU leadership is declining to give any kind of leadership to its massive membership on the vital issue of the Royal Mail pension.
Yesterday they informed their members that they are going to hold a consultative ballot of the membership and that they are recommending that they turn down the Royal Mail plan for the type of pension that is to replace the final salary pension that postal workers have won and enjoyed for decades.
This consultation is a fraud since everybody knows that the entire membership is opposed to the new Royal Mail pension plans.
Everybody also knows that the result of this consultation will be out just four days before the Royal Mail is due to terminate the current pension on April 1st.
If the CWU leaders were serious they would have organised a strike ballot over pensions at least a month ago so that the entire membership was ready to face the situation with action.
They have left the issue to the last minute and have provided no clear lead because they do not have the slightest intention of fighting.
The fact is that while the membership are determined to defend their final salary pension, the CWU leadership has publicly stated that it agrees with the Royal Mail that the current final salary pension is unsustainable and has to go.
The ‘opposition’ of the leaders to Royal Mail’s plan has been so weak that over the period of the Royal Mail consultation the bosses actually made the conditions of the new pension plan more savage, not less.
At the start of the consultation they said that they wanted the retirement age raised to 65 by 2012.
By the end of the consultation the Royal Mail felt strong enough to say that they wanted to see the retirement age raised to 65 by 2010.
The position of the union leaders was that they wanted to see a new pensions scheme with less savage conditions, their weakness achieved the opposite.
Instead of defending the present final salary scheme they are prepared to accept that the retirement age be raised to 62 or 63 not 65.
They are prepared to see a cap on pensionable pay.
Their best option is a lesser pension that will see members working years longer, paying bigger contributions for that lesser pension!
Their weakness has enabled Royal Mail to stand fast and get tougher.
In refusing to defend the present final salary pension, the Hayes Ward leadership has gone too far, as far as tens of thousands of the members are concerned.
And this is after they sold out the struggle over wages and accepted ultra-flexibility of the workforce as the main condition of service, agreeing to everything that the Royal Mail wanted to bring in.
They brought the membership out on a series of one-day strikes, and then opted for secret talks to bring in the management’s plans, a move which almost 30,000 members rejected in the ballot.
Members of the CWU must demand a strike ballot and not the fraud of a consultative ballot on pensions.
Members must put forward motions for the CWU national conference demanding the resignation of the current leadership that has sold them out, and that these leaders be replaced by a new leadership prepared to defend the interests of the membership, and to fight both the Royal Mail and the government to protect these interests.
This is the kind of leadership that is required at a time when the government and the bosses are organising wage cutting, ultra-flexibility and pension busting, to turn millions of workers into paupers.
The leadership of the CWU must therefore be forced to resign and be replaced by leaders who are willing to take on the Royal Mail and the government and form a public sector alliance capable of bringing the Brown government down and going forward to a workers government and socialism.
