CWU members have voted, in a 67 per cent turnout, a much bigger turnout than in a British general election, for strike action, with a 76 per cent majority vote for national action.
The decisiveness of the turnout and the yes vote, is a product of the postal workers determination that the attacks on their wages, jobs and pensions, as well as the drive to privatise the Royal Mail must be stopped and defeated.
Postal workers know that the right time to take indefinite strike action to defeat the Royal Mail and the government is now, in the period leading up to Christmas.
Postal workers know that, despite the words of CWU leader Billy Hayes, this vote is not a referendum on Royal Mail’s aggressive tactics, but a vote for immediate indefinite strike action to defeat these tactics.
In fact, the strike ballot of the postal workers is be just the first of many such decisions to take strike action by sections of the British working class which is under attack on all fronts by the bankers and the bosses and their Labour and Tory political servants who are all saying that the working class must pay the full bill for the capitalist crisis.
Workers all over the country are facing wage cuts, pension cuts , threats of mass sackings and closures and privatisation measures.
The postal workers must immediately approach all these other sections that are under attack and propose a united front of strike action, a general strike, to defend the interests of the working class and the working class youth.
There are many such allies.
There are the BA workers who are having 1,700 sackings imposed on them as well as a two-year wage freeze, as well as an attempt by BA to recruit new staff on very poor pensions and at half the wages of current staff.
Their union Unite has called on BA to ‘remove the imposed changes and resume talks or risk a serious, drawn-out confrontation with its workforce.’
Steve Turner, Unite national officer for aviation, said: ‘This imposition is completely unacceptable. It is a disgraceful attempt to intimidate workers into accepting poorer contracts. This imposition must be withdrawn. BA must step back from the brink and get back round the table to talk.’
But BA are not stepping back from the brink. The refusal of Unite to order an immediate strike ballot has given BA boss, Walsh, strength.
Unite must put this right and organise for indefinite strike action alongside the postal workers, as well as instructing its managers in the Royal Mail not to scab and strike-break.
At the Luton and Ellesmere Port GM, now Magna plants, up to 1400 workers face the sack and both plants face closures over a couple of years.
We urge GM UK workers to occupy the plants and demand that they be nationalised to save all of the jobs. Now is the time to join the massive movement to defend workers rights that the postal workers are leading.
The CWU leadership must give the required seven days notice of strike action now, and it must must approach its natural allies in the public sector, the firefighters, the civil servants, the NHS trade unions and the prison officers, who are all facing massive attacks, to form a public sector alliance and take strike action alongside side the postal workers.
The way forward is to build a fighting trade union alliance that is stronger than the government and which will bring down the government and go forward to a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies and bar the way to any return of the Tories, who are already boasting of the cuts that they are going to impose on the workers and the poor.
This is the way forward. Only the WRP and the Young Socialists fight for this policy. Join today.
