THE postal workers dispute intensified yesterday when, with Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool already out on unofficial strike, the action was spreading all over the country, at the start of the second week of official rolling strikes.
Earlier on Tuesday, Royal Mail took the gloves off and organised mainly Polish strikebreakers in Hemel and Watford to drive through picket lines at the Mail Centres at high speed risking causing serious injury or death to pickets.
Perhaps this is what Royal Mail bosses meant when they said that a postal workers strike would be a rerun of the miners strike of 1984-85 when a number of miners were killed or seriously injured on the picket line.
Yesterday postal workers walked out on unofficial strike in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool after bosses docked the pay of workers who refused to cross picket lines, and workers refused to handle work that had been stopped by the strike action.
The postal workers are now fighting the battle for the whole of the working class in this country, which is facing just what postal workers are facing, wage cuts, sackings, privatisation, and casualisation and attempts to smash their unions.
The CWU leadership must now call national strike action and the TUC must take a stand alongside the postal workers by calling a national demonstration, so that millions of workers can turn out to show their support for the postal workers.
Emergency resolutions must be put down by the trade unions for the TUC Congress, calling for an indefinite general strike in support of the postal workers to defeat the Royal Mail, and the Brown government, which is giving Royal Mail 100 per cent support.
The local branches of the CWU must take the initiative in organising the working class to stop the strikebreakers in their tracks.
They must set up Councils of Action in their localities to organise all of the local trade unions and every section of the local community for solidarity strike actions, demonstrations and mass picket lines.
The way to stop the strikebreakers is to block the approaches to the Mail and Delivery centres with hundreds of pickets.
Councils of Action will not only do this job, they will prepare the way for a general strike.
What is driving the attacks of the Royal Mail on the postal workers is the crisis-ridden capitalist system. Capitalism can no longer afford to allow the workers to have proper jobs, wages, pensions, state education or a Welfare State.
Every industry has to be privatised and casualised with the power of the trade unions broken, to allow the British bosses to undercut the other slave labour economies of the world.
It is, in fact, the Brown government that is leading this onslaught on the workers.
The whole of the workers movement must now reply to this onslaught.
Unions must stop all financial support for the Labour party.
The TUC must be forced to call a general strike in support of the postal workers. The object of the strike must be to win the struggle by bringing down the Brown government.
The Brown government must be replaced by a workers government that will carry out socialist policies after expropriating the bankers and the bosses.
Victory to the postal workers.
Build Councils of Action to organise mass pickets to stop the strikebreakers.
Forward to a general strike and a workers government.
