SSP candidate for Glasgow North East Kevin McVey delivers copies of the SSP's postal workers Voice to the picket line
The unfinished war over postal service future
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
8th November 2009
The CWU national leadership’s cancellation of the planned 2-day strike by all
210,000 Royal Mail workers, in return for the Interim Agreement with Royal Mail,
was met with anger, even fury, from many who have defied bully-boy bosses and
made the strikes absolutely rock solid.
Many postal workers wondered what exactly had been conceded by Royal Mail to justify suspension of the action just as it was gathering increased momentum. Some had a more wait-and-see approach – along the lines of “surely the union must have gained a lot to suspend the strikes”?
Confusion blended with anger
– and that confusion, suspicion and lack of clarity on what has been
won by the CWU still prevails three days after the Interim Agreement
[IA] was announced (8th Nov).
Union not smashed!
A few things seem crystal clear in the midst of many unknowns. For months
– even years – Royal Mail bosses have colluded with the sole shareholder
in RM, the Labour Government, in their ambition to smash or castrate
the union, railroad through horrendous attacks on workers’ conditions,
and thus clear the path towards future privatization of the profitable
chunks.
The wider desire of the capitalist New Labour government was to confront
one large public sector workforce and their union, to teach them a lesson,
and thereby weaken the resistance of the broader trade union movement
to catastrophic assaults on the public sector as a whole. But the power
and unity of national strikes – on the heels of numerous local strikes
since April – has stopped the destruction of the union, certainly for
now. That is the positive side of what is expressed in the IA.
What might have been?
The negative side is that it falls drastically short of the aspirations
and demands of the postal workers who brought the service to a halt,
some of them losing up to four weeks’ pay. A lot more concessions could
have been won by going ahead with the two-day all-out strike, from bosses
already in retreat from the previous action.
As one Glasgow CWU rep told me, “RM didn't want to concede on a few of the points in the Interim Agreement, but I still think if we had held out more and continued with the strikes then we could have achieved more. Because let’s face it, up to around three weeks ago RM higher management would not even sit at the same table as Dave Ward and co. So if we have pushed them towards a back-down on certain issues then how much more could we have achieved?”
Playing for time?
The CWU membership have good reason to be suspicious that RM (with shadowy
figures from the Labour government in collusion) only signed this document
in the face of a furious and escalating strike that had widespread
public support in order to buy time; to gain a “period of calm” up
to and including Xmas, when mail is at a peak, so as to then aim at
ramming through attacks with a vengeance in the New Year.
In fact, this is no deal at all; it is a truce in the war for Royal Mail’s
future, during which talks are to proceed, this time fully involving
the union, rather than the RM and government hawks’ preference for side-lining
the union and imposing ‘change’ through ‘executive action’.
Again, on the positive side, the strikes have forced RM to co-sign an
IA that states:
- “no further change will be imposed during the course of these negotiations”;
- “in all offices where change has been implemented in 2009 the local
parties will undertake a review…. Where change has been implemented without
agreement the local parties will engage in genuine negotiations to reach
local agreement”;
- “it is important there is no victimization”;
- “RM confirm that the process of taking people off pay is a response
to industrial action and is not a measure to deal with individual performance
issues. Where there are disputed cases of individuals who have been removed
from pay these can be raised by the Union and will be reviewed”;
- “normal facility time [for union reps] will be reinstated and additional
time will be provided as appropriate”;
- “traffic which has been diverted during the dispute will be returned
to its parent office”.
These various clauses in the IA represent a far cry from the arrogance
and belligerence of the bosses before the national strike, where their
secret strategy document asserted plans to “impose change with or without
union agreement”, and to slash union facilities if a strike occurred
– a de facto union de-recognition strategy.
Very concrete questions unanswered
However, behind the verbal retreats, what is the reality? Several very
concrete questions remain unanswered. For instance, is there the option
of the actual reversal of detrimental changes previously imposed at local
level?
Meantime, what is to happen to the back-breaking workloads and extended
delivery spans imposed by executive action – including absorption of
additional work into shifts without an extra penny in pay - and again,
can they be reversed during negotiations? What measures are to be taken
to end the intimidation meted out by bully-boy local managers, who have
been whipped up into a frenzy against workers and their conditions by
the top dog bosses of RM for the past year or more?
And whilst the IA suggests the backlog and other expanded pre-Xmas work will return to the ‘normal offices’, what exactly is to happen to the ‘out houses’ established to conduct the 30,000-strong scab operation?
Strikes do work!
One of the most critical messages that needs to come out loud and clear
from this phase of the struggle is that industrial action does work!
RM’s secret strategy document on the eve of the national strikes brazenly
stated that a key task for them was to prove that strikes do NOT work!
The fact the union is to be fully engaged in negotiations is living
proof that the strikes have wrung concessions out of bosses (and behind
them their government allies) who were forced to retreat from cocky
talk about imposing change and the strikes being “suicidal”, to a strategy
of engaging with the union.
But that still leaves the outcome undecided. A tune running throughout
the IA document is that “a period of calm free of industrial action”
will prevail during talks up to the end of 2009; as it repeats, “no further
local or national industrial action will take place during the negotiations”.
Dangers of a straitjacket
If the national CWU leadership allow themselves to be tied up in such
a straitjacket it could spell disaster in the battle to defend jobs,
conditions, acceptable workloads. Granted, the IA also has a clause that
sets up an independent monitoring of progress in the negotiations, with
a fortnightly review. This hampers to some extent the RM bosses’ room
to string out the talks, stall them towards Xmas, and then wield the
big club over workers’ heads come the New Year, when the volume of mail
is drastically lower and the impact of strikes therefore drastically
reduced. Furthermore, the CWU national leadership has insisted that RM
“accepted that the national ballot and all local ballots remain enacted”.
However, as one west of Scotland CWU rep said to me, “There will be an independent third party to watch over what is happening. But who will decide whether adequate progress is being made or not? And when there is a failure to achieve agreements at local level with regards to the imposition of new duty structures, etc. - and let’s face it there will be, especially in offices that have lost vast amounts of hours and duties - the only solution to that predicament is to take disagreements through the Industrial Relations Framework, which takes time. So we have a situation where both sides are following the correct procedure, so neither is in the wrong and both are sticking to the words of the Interim Agreement. Meanwhile the clock is ticking...”
Union power – not faith in bosses
It would be precisely “suicidal” of the union to rely on a ceasefire
and a sudden outbreak of good will on a RM management – from Crozier
downwards to local level – to defend workers’ conditions or jobs. Already,
less than a day after the IA was signed, there are several cases of
managers breaching the agreement locally – including in Edinburgh and
Glasgow Mail Centre!
The ‘out house’ in Bathgate is now closed and the temps laid off for two weeks to be brought back in for the Xmas pressure. The manager told the union in Glasgow Mail Centre on 7th that Bathgate would shut and that overtime would be booked in Glasgow. Two days later he denied saying this and the overtime didn’t get booked. This was a breach of the IA before it was a day old. Similar events took place in Edinburgh. The leopards find it difficult to shed their spots!
The national CWU cannot drag its feet the way they did in previous months
over initiating the national ballot, or indeed in granting local ballots;
they will need to agree and back up urgent, immediate local strike action
where the need arises, to force through the reversal of imposed changes
and continued bully-boy methods. And the inherent danger of leaving it
to local strikes is that it could leave weaker areas to perish, to have
drastically worse conditions imposed than in the stronger centres of
union power.
Clear, fighting demands
In the national negotiations, the CWU leadership need to sharpen up and
popularise the very concrete demands they are making – such as for a
35 hour week without loss of pay, instead of “accepting the need for
job losses through mechanisation; and concrete demands for national standards
of acceptable workloads and duty spans, rather than a patchwork of localized
conditions; for continued payment for D2Ds (door to door deliveries of
‘junk mail’); and an explicit demand for actual reversal of unacceptable,
locally imposed changes, not just a moratorium on further changes.
Name the days!
And if substantial rapid progress on such issues is not achieved in the
first two weeks of negotiations, they should name the dates for renewed
national strikes.
As a Scottish postie expressed it to me, “If say London makes progress
on talks but the west of Scotland doesn't, do we have another national
strike or is it divide and conquer?”
It was the power of members on national picket lines, and plans to blockade
the scabs’ headquarters in Bathgate and elsewhere which forced RM bosses
onto the back foot. So that power should not be squandered by allowing
RM to drag the talks out towards Xmas, getting rid of the backlog and
the Xmas rush in the process, whilst still blarging through their plans
to slaughter jobs, heap excruciating workloads on postal workers’ backs,
slimming down RM in readiness for future privatization.
War is unfinished
The war for the future of a public postal service is unfinished. The
‘truce’ represents a tactical retreat by the bosses of RM and the anti-trade
union Labour government. But unless the CWU is willing to re-mobilise
its troops nationally as well as locally in the period of greatest strength
– pre-Xmas – around a series of very concrete and visible demands, they
will play into the employers’ hands and let down the heroic fighters
in their ranks who staged the strikes that won the concessions.
In fighting for job security and dignity at work, as well as a public postal service that puts people before profit, postal workers need to force the CWU to break the chains that tie them to the anti-union, privatising Labour party. It is absurd that the union gave their arch enemies £5m since 2001, a million of that in the last year, when the warfare had intensified. It is like bribing an arsonist to torch your own home – with no insurance cover! Far more rational would be for postal workers to join the party that has unflinchingly supported their struggle for survival, the Scottish Socialist Party, to campaign alongside fellow-workers and local communities for a socialist future that puts people before profit.