Opinions differ3 May 2020 08:22
Communication Workers Union folds 48 hours after Royal Mail threatens 20,000 jobs
By Thomas Scripps
2 May 2020
On Wednesday, Royal Mail Group (RMG) announced plans to scrap Saturday letter deliveries from May 2 until further notice, putting 20,000 jobs at risk.
In less than 48 hours, having initially threatened strike action, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) organised a shameless retreat.
Speaking on a live video conference yesterday evening, General Secretary Dave Ward and his deputy Terry Pullinger announced that, after meeting with the Conservative government, the industry regulator and Royal Mail, the union had “secured correspondence… that this is now definitely only a temporary change.”
Ward said company CEO Rico Back “has made it clear that there will be no job losses” and that “duty changes on a temporary basis will be voluntary and negotiated on a local basis.” He claimed that “all parties are now accepting that this temporary change is only linked to the… coronavirus pandemic.” Therefore, no industrial action is going ahead.
This miserable surrender was touted as a “major breakthrough”, made possible, Ward said, by a “fantastic response from the public” to Postal Workers’ Day on Wednesday—“I have to say including over 50 Tory MPs who have done videos in support of postal workers (!)”.
Ward and Pullinger were even more thrilled at the possible intervention of Britain’s 94-year old monarch in support of their triumphant exercise in labour relations, with Ward saying, “It’s entirely possible the queen has intervened.”
Workers are dealing with an organisation that has renounced any connection with the social interests of its members and will not fight the employers under any circumstances.
Who do Rico Back and the CWU think they are kidding? Claims that Royal Mail’s action is temporary and motivated solely by the pressures caused by the pandemic are lies and the CWU know this very well. RMG has been seeking to undermine the Universal Service Obligation—guaranteeing six-days-a-week delivery—for years, as a step towards increasing the exploitation of the workforce. If there were any genuine concern for post workers’ workloads, the ever-increasing door-to-door deliveries of junk mail would already have been cancelled.
RMG are using the pandemic as a pretext to advance their long-planned cost-cutting agenda, as postal workers knew they would. Postal workers went into this crisis having given an overwhelming mandate for strike action against precisely these plans. But from the outset, the CWU’s policy has been to prevent that confrontation taking place, while seeking to utilise their members’ ballot as leverage to gain the union bureaucracy a well-paid seat at the company’s table. Their goal is to return to the cosy relations enjoyed with management before Back decided to dispense with their services—relations which saw concession after concession forced on postal workers.
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