Royal Mail national strike: “A fight to the finish”
By a CWU member
Members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) are taking their first national strike action since 2009, in what is looking like being an extremely bitter dispute.
The dates are Friday 26 and Wednesday 31 August, followed by Thursday 8 and Friday 9 September. The result of a second ballot on terms and conditions showed massive support for action with 98.7% voting for action on a 72% turnout.
On the evening of Wednesday 10 August, the CWU national negotiators suspended talks with Royal Mail, due to the way the CWU was being treated with complete contempt – not just in the negotiations but all over the country.
The CEO has not even been attending national negations, but spends his time on social media attacking the CWU.
At the same time, the Royal Mail negotiation team have made no concessions. At a time when Royal Mail claim to be losing money at a rate of £1 million a day, they have hired a strike-breaking fleet of vans, and 2,400 agency staff.
They are using the Tory government’s latest anti-union law allowing the use of agency staff during strike action.
All Unite members in managerial grades have been instructed by Royal Mail that they must carry out CWU-grade work, performing the work of other trade unionists out on strike. This must be met by the strongest action by Unite.
Royal Mail bosses have no intention of attempting to open most delivery offices on strike days, but only open what they are calling their new ‘parcel hub units’ and tell all scabs to report to there.
They aim to remove all packets above shoebox size from all delivery offices and put them into the delivery hubs – work that would never return to the delivery units.
This will have a huge impact on all units across the country. This is clearly a serious turn and looks like Royal Mail plan to try to break the CWU. They are preparing for a fight to the finish.
But the CWU has an angry membership which is also preparing for a long battle and if required will be prepared to escalate the strike.
Mass picketing of the hubs where the agency workers will be used to strike break may be needed.
We should be calling on the whole union movement to come to our side.
