THE reply of the leaders of the CWU postal workers union, Billy Hayes and Dave Ward, to the injunction obtained by the ruthless Royal Mail management team, declaring today’s and tomorrow’s Mail Centre and Mail Delivery offices strikes illegal, was to immediately capitulate and make the deal that Royal Mail has been again ruthlessly pursuing, with the 100 per cent backing of the Brown government.
The granting of the injunction was an exhibition of ruling class justice at its most blatant. It was granted on the spurious grounds that the CWU did not declare the numbers of workers that would be taking part in the dispute, as if this was some kind of state secret, and not routinely available information.
The CWU leaders were placed on the crossroads. They could either call off talks and instruct their members to follow the recent example of the Prison Officers Association and to take the strike actions and appeal to the entire trade union movement to give the union its all-out support, or give way and concede.
As they have done all along the line in this management- and government-imposed dispute, they conceded.
They are recommending that the union’s executive agree to the ending of the current final salary pensions scheme, and the introduction of a two-tier system, which will mean a bad deal for the established work force and a worse deal for new starters.
They are also recommending that wage rises should be ‘around’ the government’s inflation rate, meaning years of actual wage cutting.
They have also agreed to the flexibility proposals that the management want with the proviso that they should be imposed by local agreements, weakening the national unity of the union.
The National Executive of the union has a clear duty to reject this agreement out of hand on Monday and to instruct the membership to proceed with Tuesday’s strike action and with the prosecution of the dispute.
It must also appeal to the whole of the trade union movement, in the event of the state taking action against the CWU, to take general strike action to defend the right to strike, and to defeat the Royal Mail and the Brown government.
The alternative to this is to give up all of the gains that the postal workers have made since the end of the Second World War.
The executive should not be influenced by the fact that the general secretary of the TUC negotiated the deal.
He also put his signature to the notorious Compromise Agreement that agreed the mass sackings at Gate Gourmet and the adoption of the company’s ‘survival plan’.
He also negotiated the deal that saw the FBU stripped of all of its hard-won conditions of service in 2003-2004. He is a serial capitulator to the demands of the employers and the government.
The CWU executive must also demand the resignation of the Hayes/Ward leadership.
While the Royal Mail and the government have carried out their plan of action with extreme ruthlessness, the CWU leaders have dithered and dithered hoping that something would turn up.
From the start they insisted that they were not trying to win anything, all that they wanted was negotiations, and as soon as these were pledged they would halt all industrial actions.
This they did, when they had over four weeks of secret talks with Royal Mail which produced proposals that were completely unacceptable and were rejected by the CWU executive.
They then called the 48-hour strikes before capitulating to the injunction.
In these times of capitalist crisis, bosses and governments are determined, under the banner of ‘globalisation’, to smash trade unionism while guaranteeing the security of the banks. In this period the Hayes-Ward kind of union leadership is worse than useless.
There has to be a union leadership that is at least as aggressive and determined as that of the bourgeoisie, and moreover one that is not afraid to spell out that the working class demands and will fight for the end of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society.