DAY one of the London CWU’s three-day strike action was a massive success, after the move by the Royal Mail and the government to get a judge to declare the action illegal failed on Tuesday early evening.
The strike action is now to continue for two more days and will once again illustrate that postal workers are more than ready for decisive action to defend their jobs, wages, conditions of service and pensions, as well as the state-owned status of the industry.
The reaction of the Royal Mail and the government to the postal workers defence of the nationalised industry, which forced them to ‘shelve’ the part privatisation plan was to try to get the strike action declared illegal. This proves that the era of compromise and compromise deals is well and truly over.
We are now taking part in a fight to the finish, because the sheer depth of the world crisis of capitalism means that the only way that the bourgeois order will survive is by stripping the working class of every one of its hard won gains.
Therefore the three day action is just the continuation of the battle that saw the part privatisation plan ‘shelved’, and the war remains to be won.
This means that there must be no equivocation about the July 17th action which the executive itself has decided will be ‘a national day of action on Friday 17th July which will combine industrial action and demonstrations.’
This must be a national stoppage and there must be a national demonstration to which the whole of the public sector and the whole of the working class is invited to attend, it must be a demonstration of hundreds of thousands.
Friday 17 must not be allowed to become just a series of local demonstrations. The national nature of the action must be carried through.
And if the Royal Mail, with the government behind it, tries to use the anti-union laws again, then the membership are more than ready for that.
As one member told News Line yesterday: ‘We have had enough of doing it by the law and as was said at the meeting yesterday, there are good laws and bad laws and bad laws need to be broken.
‘We are not going to be told what we can and cannot do by judges.’
The time has come for the postal workers and all workers to put the anti-union laws where they belong – into the dustbin of history!
Next week’s action must be huge, it must be national and it must prepare the way for the formation of a public sector alliance that will bind the public sector unions together as one, so that an injury to one really is an injury to all.
The CWU must approach the leader of the Unison trade union, Prentis, who has publicly pledged that he will establish a public sector alliance, to fight the government’s policies, to do just that.
Such a public sector alliance must call a one-day general strike and invite every union to take part in it.
Such a strike must be a dress rehearsal for an indefinite general strike to bring down the Brown government and go forward to a workers’ government.
This will end the privatisation programme, nationalise all of the major industries and the banks under workers control, end tuition fees and loans and restore free state education.
The period of compromises is over, the world crisis of capitalism has seen to that.
To get reforms today you have to wring them out of the ruling class through mass strike actions that lead onto the socialist revolution to smash capitalism and bring in a socialist planned economy.
The working class faced with 20 per cent budget cuts and pay freezes, has no alternative but to march forward and carry out this socialist revolution and a socialist reconstruction of society.
