Posties Don’t Want to Strike This Christmas – but We Are Facing the Fight of Our Lives

Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson and those like him have driven workers to this action — and if we don't all fight back, the 500-year-old postal service we rely on will not be the only institution broken up for a quick buck, writes DAVE WARD

POSTAL workers are taking their 18th day of strike action today — and they do so with a heavy heart.

The CWU did what it could to avert a Christmas Eve strike. We offered to suspend these strikes and establish a period of calm until January 16, if Royal Mail would adopt a joint agreement incorporating its promise of no compulsory redundancies.

Royal Mail had dismissed our offer within hours — showing it was never serious about saving Christmas. It made these strikes inevitable and its attitude means more strikes will take place in the new year.

We know the company’s intransigence has caused mountainous backlogs of parcels and post. Our members would rather be delivering that post than out on the picket lines again today — but in Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson they are up against an aggressive, reckless, out-of-control executive who is committed to destroying this 500-year-old public service and wrecking their livelihoods.

No responsible management could have turned a £758 million profit announced in May this year into supposed losses of a million a day. The same Royal Mail that says it can’t afford to offer staff a proper pay increase at a time of soaring inflation paid out £400m to shareholders last year.

Only gross mismanagement could have turned such a profit — a profit built on the hard work of staff — into such losses. But it is worse than that.

Recently Royal Mail boasted of a £1.7 billion “war chest” — money it is using to crush its own workers, not to try to resolve this dispute.

There are dark forces at work when a company has plenty of money to negotiate a proper pay rise for its workforce but instead tries to impose below-inflation offers tied to attacks on their terms and conditions.

The war Royal Mail is waging against its workforce is inevitably a war on the service itself. Bosses want to end daily deliveries. They want to replace our members, force them out the door, bring in self-employed workers and new starters on 20 per cent less, working an extra three hours each week.

What a way to treat workers who were going out to work throughout the pandemic, keeping the country posted — often doubling up as the only human company people forced to isolate would get on a daily basis.

Workers who were saluted as key workers at a time when we thought maybe the respect suddenly being shown to the people who keep this country running would translate into a new deal after Covid — a deal that would see working people treated with respect and paid properly for the jobs they do.

It’s disgusting, but from their point of view, it makes sense. The bosses aren’t interested in the future of Royal Mail. They want to turn a loved and trusted national institution, one millions rely on, into a gig economy parcel delivery service: hiving off the profitable parcels business and seeing letters delivery run into the ground, putting the universal service obligation at risk, ending Britain’s postal service as we know it.

If this sounds familiar, it is. I’ve been warning for years in the pages of the Morning Star that chief executives in Britain no longer know how to build things — they only how to take the money and run. Greed rather than strategy.

If there is a strategy, it’s fixed on turning assets that could deliver a future for essential services into a quick buck for shareholders today, whether or not that means there’s no service to speak of tomorrow.

In the private sector, the same mentality did for once-great companies like Thomas Cook and BHS; in the public sector, we can see it in the grotesque sums leeched from our railways and the rundown of our NHS.

So the postal workers’ struggle today is not unique. We have a lot in common with the railway workers, nurses, ambulance workers, firefighters, civil servants, teachers and others who are striking or balloting for strikes: a fight for proper pay rises during a cost-of-living crisis that is also a boom time for the super-rich, but one that is also a fight for the very concept of public services in Britain, even though Royal Mail was — disastrously — privatised by the Tories and Lib Dems nearly 10 years ago.

And workers realise it. The strength of postal workers on our picket lines has been an inspiration: and so has the solidarity shown them by other workers and members of other unions, who have shown out in their tens of thousands across Britain to tell the CWU they are with us.

Postal workers have been proud to reciprocate that solidarity on other workers’ picket lines and that will continue.

The determination of workers to win this showdown is clear — but we can’t underestimate the will of our enemy either. The employers digging in and refusing to negotiate have the support of a rotten government which is planning even harsher anti-strike legislation now that unions — to the Tories’ surprise — have smashed the deliberately difficult ballot thresholds they arbitrarily set for strike action back in 2016.

If the Tories proceed with their “minimum service levels” legislation they will outlaw effective strike action by the very essential workers they clapped during the pandemic — the railways may be first in the firing line, but we are all the target.

So we’re going to need your support and solidarity when we walk out again in the new year, and we need to fight for a new deal for workers that becomes a serious political challenge to the entire direction of this country.

The huge enthusiasm we saw for fundamental change when hundreds of thousands flocked to join the Labour Party in 2015 has been echoed in the giant turnouts for Enough is Enough rallies this autumn. The mood for change hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s time politicians started to listen.

I’m pleased that’s started to happen, with many MPs standing with postal workers on picket lines — but there is no excuse for politicians of any party who refuse to do so or to back workers’ justified pay demands. There is so much at stake.

I know the Morning Star is with us and on behalf of my union wish all your readers a merry Christmas today. If your post didn’t get through, you know that’s because we are fighting the biggest attack on a group of workers since the miners’ strike.

Disruption today is about securing a future for this service and let’s steel ourselves over the festive period for a battle which will only intensify in the cold months ahead.

Dave Ward is general secretary of the Communication Workers Union — follow him on Twitter @DaveWardGS.