THE Brown government is organising a £3bn sell-off of up to one third of the Royal Mail, a privatisation that will cost up to 50,000 Royal Mail workers’ jobs.
The return of Mandelson to the Labour government has seen Brown’s pledge to keep Royal Mail as a publicly owned service ripped up.
The proposal is contained in the Hooper Report that has been handed to Mandelson, the government’s Business Secretary.
The central proposal is that the postal network will be sold to TNT.
The report also outlines that the £22 billion Royal Mail pension scheme has a ‘black hole’ exceeding £7 billion, caused by the Labour government’s policy of ‘pension holidays’ as far as its contributions are concerned over a number of years.
The government will now take control of the pension fund. This is viewed as central to the successful sell-off of the industry.
Privatisation will mean, in its first stages, at least 50,000 Royal Mail workers losing their jobs.
It will mean an end to the delivery of mail from any post box in the UK to any letter-box anywhere in the UK for a single price.
This will rip up another Labour government promise.
Next Friday the government is facing a 24-hour strike action over its plan to shut down a dozen massive Mail Centres.
The continuing state ownership of the Royal Mail has been a key part of the agreement between the CWU and the Blair-Brown governments.
It was a major part of the Warwick Agreement prior to the 2005 general election and in Warwick Two held this year.
The government is now declaring war on CWU members – at the same time as it is showering the banks and the bankers with cash.
In fact the Brown government has been at war with the CWU for a number of years.
It played a central part in ripping up all of the agreements governing the Royal Mail’s conditions of service bringing in extreme flexibility, which has imposed a massive strain on the membership of the CWU.
It also, through the Royal Mail management, unilaterally terminated the CWU’s final salary pensions agreement with many members losing thousands of pounds as a result.
Now it is to go for the jugular, privatising the industry, casualising the workforce and breaking the CWU trade union.
Billy Hayes, the CWU general secretary, commented yesterday: ‘Whether it’s staff shares or minority stakes, any sell-off or joint venture will lead to full-blown disastrous privatisation. . . . We will oppose any form of privatisation and hold the government to their manifesto commitment to keep Royal Mail fully integrated and wholly publicly owned.’
Hayes would not say that the union will take strike action to stop privatisation.
The fact is that the membership of the CWU is prepared to fight but the leadership has repeatedly buckled in front of the Labour government.
It cancelled a whole series of strike actions defending the union’s conditions of service, in favour of secret talks with the government, which saw it accept the same drastic changes in the conditions of service.
It refused to call strike action in defence of the union’s final salary pension scheme and in fact said that it agreed that it had to go, and the issue was what would replace it.
Now it is astonished that these collapses of leadership have encouraged the government to think that it can break all of its pledges and privatise the industry.
CWU members are heading into a big fight. They must immediately
• Force the Hayes-Ward leadership to resign and replace it with leaders who are prepared to fight the Brown government.
• Halt all financial support for the Labour Party and government.
• Organise a ballot for national strike action to defeat Mandelson’s privatisation plan.
• Form a public sector alliance to fight and defeat the Brown government’s privatising and union busting policies.
