Royal Mail

In spite of Labour's manifesto commitments the government plans to privatise the Post Office. Lobbying Labour MPs, who have shown in the past that they will settle for cosmetic changes to avoid defeating the government in Parliament, won't stop this. Post Office workers have the organised strength to mount the campaign of industrial action needed to defeat Labour's plans.

The election was hardly over before the government began to brief journalists that it was considering privatising the Post Office. This is a complete reversal of what appeared in the Labour manifesto that stated there were “no plans to privatise” and that Labour wanted a “publicly owned Royal Mail”. Not that we should be alarmed, because Labour leaks are making it clear that should it go ahead it will not be a nasty Thatcherite privatisation but rather a nice New Labour affair under which the workers themselves will take control of the Post Office.

Here we are with the world teetering on the edge of economic depression and having to spend trillions sorting out the mess caused by banks and what does the Labour government come up with - the part privatisation of the Royal Mail! It just demonstrates how market thinking has captured the very soul of the Labour Party, even at a time when the free market is causing havoc they still cannot see any alternative to privatisation. One wonders just what it will take for Labour to kick their free market addiction.

Workers at Royal Mail have voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action over management plans for job cuts. 76% of workers who responded to the ballot voted in favour of industrial action. The roots of the dispute go back to the settlement that ended the 2007 national postal strike.

At the time it was announced as a victory, but in fact the CWU union agreed to management plans to cut jobs. The ‘victory’ was that the CWU and Royal Mail management would negotiate the details of the cuts at a local level. Now postal workers are unhappy with the results of those negotiations. One trigger is the Royal Mail’s refusal to “Pay for Change.” In unilaterally imposing such changes by so-called ‘executive action’, Royal Mail have reopened the dispute.

8-page leaflet looking at what we can learn from the 2007 postal strike, the 2008 public sector strike and the 2009 Visteon occupation.

The leaflet was produced for a demo against the Labour Party Conference on Sunday 27th September. It is based on several previously published articles and we try to draw the lessons of recent relevant struggles in the UK.

For Workers’ Control

Lessons of recent struggles in the UK

Recent years have seen promising signs of a working class fightback, after decades of attacks on working class living standards.

But it is still early days. What can we learn from recent struggles? How can we turn isolated victories into a class-wide fightback to improve our working and living conditions, and resist the further cuts that have been promised in the next few years? We can start to answer these questions by studying the lessons of recent workers’ struggles in the UK…