Some 130,000 post office workers in the Communication Workers Union (CWU) have brought mail deliveries in Britain to a standstill by holding two 48-hour strikes over pay and working conditions. The strikes, which began on October 5 and October 8 respectively, are over management plans to axe 40,000 jobs, to close workers' final salary pension scheme, to offer a below inflation pay rise, and to tear up all existing national and local agreements on working hours.
The pay offer of 6.7% over two years looks good on paper, but a CWU member explained to the October 5 Scottish Socialist Voice: "For this we are expected to sell our souls. They want total flexibility. Under their proposals a manager can just give you one week's notice of starting times that can be two hours earlier or two hours later than normal. So you could be expected to start at 5am or 9am instead of 7am. Nobody can plan their lives that way. Alongside that they want Annualised Hours — working longer in the winter, shorter hours in the summer. We would lose overtime payments in the process — and face extremely long hours in the winter weather, which is horrendous."
Another postie told the Voice that management plans to change the rules about payment for delivery of special items like election material would hit pay-packets hard: "Combined with the loss of overtime through their plans for total flexibility, this would mean most posties losing £40 or £50 a week. Last week I earned about £25 for door to doors and £15 in pressure overtime. If Royal Mail has their way this £40 will disappear, and there is no way the 6.7 per cent over two years would compensate for it."
The Morning Star reported that at an October 8 rally, an official from the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) said that British Labour PM Gordon Brown is an enemy of people such as rail and postal workers. CWU deputy general secretary Dave Ward spoke of the consequences of management attempts to undermine previous agreements on working hours: "It's now commonplace for people to come to work by 6am, do a full day's work and, at the end, a manager can arbitrarily say whether they have worked hard enough. I call that slavery."
As workers went back to work after the second 48-hour strike ended on October 10, a wave of unofficial strikes broke out as managers attempted to impose on-the-spot changes to working hours and conditions. The October 11 Morning Star reported: "Workers in more than 20 sorting offices, including Glasgow, Merseyside, Lancashire and parts of London, took action in protest at management's imposition of last-minute changes to their flexible working hours. Members of the CWU involved in the unofficial walkout protested that they had arrived for a shift starting at 5am but were told that they could not start until 6am."
Official strikes scheduled for October 15 and 16 were called off by the CWU after a court ruling declared them illegal. Despite this, CWU leaders reached a provisional agreement with Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier on October 13. Details of the provisional agreement have not yet been made public: the CWU national executive met on October 15 and 16 but failed to reach agreement on whether to recommend the offer to CWU members, and further industrial action scheduled to begin on October 17 was suspended. According to the October 18 Guardian, the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber invited Royal Mail and the CWU leadership to further talks that day "so that the CWU can clarify the remaining outstanding issues". According to a statement posted on the CWU website on October 18, "Talks between the union and Royal Mail were held today at the TUC. Those talks have continued onto this evening and will continue tomorrow. A further report will be made tomorrow."