THE Royal Mail faces privatisation this summer after the passage of the Postal Services Bill through parliament yesterday after its third reading.
The legislation will enable the full or part privatisation of Royal Mail and will sever the link between the mail business and the post office network – if it is allowed to stand.
Billy Hayes, CWU general secretary, commented on Thursday: ‘The UK’s postal services face an uncertain future because of the government’s Bill. Without strong guarantees the post office network could be stripped of a third of its income when Royal Mail is privatised, leading to thousands of closures.
‘The new law means the Universal Service, six days a week, one-price-goes-anywhere, could be downgraded in just four years and we fear that consumers will see massive price hikes. Privatisation has led to a three-day a week rural service in the Netherlands and postage costs twice as high as ours in Germany. Royal Mail is already under huge pressure from the government to slim down and appear attractive to a private buyer. There’s no evidence that a buyer exists and this uncertainty is very stressful for postal workers.
‘Regardless of who buys this business, the CWU will still be representing the interests of postal workers. We will be fighting for jobs and services for the long-term as we are not governed by the short-term profit motives of “spivs and gamblers”, in the Cabinet or elsewhere.’
In this quotation Hayes reveals that the CWU leadership has already accepted that privatisation is inevitable, and that it will not be fought and defeated by the present CWU leadership.
This position is only an extension of the conduct of the CWU leaders over the past decade. They have repeatedly tried to ride out the huge anger of their members over the attacks of Royal Mail and the government, by calling partial strike actions.
These they have then called off, just when the membership of the union was getting into its stride and on the brink of victory, in order to make sell-out deals with the Royal Mail and the government that have involved mass redundancies being accepted, and wages and pensions slashed, and members in Mail Centres, Sorting Offices and Delivery Offices being put under severe strain to sort and deliver intolerable loads, while facing constant management bullying to do more and more.
As a result of these leadership sell-outs, including agreeing to the Royal Mail’s Business Plan, the capitalist media is now boasting that Royal Mail is planning 40,000 redundancies, and claiming that the CWU leaders have agreed to 24,000 redundancies over three years – without any clear denial being made by the union leadership.
The position of the union leaders is that they are prepared to accept Mail Centre and other closures, provided the redundancies are voluntary. This attitude is encouraging the management to be ever more extreme in their behaviour in order to drive workers out of their jobs. In fact, the Royal Mail is not the only nationalised service that faces privatisation.
The Tories and bosses are straining at the leash to privatise the entire National Health Service as well as the civil service and the entire council workforce, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs, smashing wages and destroying pensions.
Now is the time for the organisation of a general strike. The public sector trade unions must take the lead and decide that the TUC must call an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition, smash the privatisation programme and expropriate the bosses and the bankers to go forward to socialism.
The only way that the working class can defend its interests is to carry out a socialist revolution. There is no other way. All workers who understand that a fight to a finish with the ruling class is under way must attend the News Line-ATUA conference on June 19th (see ad, page 3), where these issues will be discussed and a perspective for action outlined.