18.07.1996

Playing for the same team?

The decision by the Communication Workers Union to call a whole series of strikes against Royal Mail’s ‘Employee Agenda’ teamworking proposals has provoked a hard-line reaction from the government.

The department of trade and industry last week threatened that the post office’s monopoly on the delivery of mail under £1 could be suspended during the strike. Then on Wednesday John Major, in a reply to a staged question from a Tory backbencher, agreed that not merely a suspension, but complete abolition, ought to be considered. He added that the “application of the laws of contract” might be used against the CWU.

In another move timed to undermine the strike, the Tories have announced new plans to privatise the Post Office for inclusion in their election manifesto. Major thinks the strikes will lead to greater support for his plans. More importantly, he is convinced that the “biggest gains” will come from “changing working practices”: privatisation will allow what Royal Mail has so far been unable to achieve - the greater exploitation of the workforce, through schemes such as teamworking, and the crushing of the union.

None of this has cowed the postal workers however. Local union reps from all over the country are reporting that morale is still high. Ronnie Slater, an Edinburgh official, told me that the Tories’ bluff would be called: “From the beginning we have had a disciplined reaction from the workforce and the feeling is still the same.”

Mick Lynch, Birmingham area rep, confirmed the very positive attitude. “You might have expected the members to get nervous about the 36-hour and 48-hour strikes, but no-one is unduly worried. The government has raised the spectre of privatisation,” he added, “but that is just vindictiveness.”

The postal workers’ determination has remained high: “99.99% will come out,” an activist at Mount Pleasant, London, told me. But this determination can easily be undercut by the way in which the CWU leadership is mounting its campaign. The latest union journal carries two articles which in effect advise Royal Mail to drop teamworking on the grounds that it will not succeed in exploiting the workforce as RM hopes.

“The Royal Mail remains the most efficient postal service in the world,” states a reprint from The Observer. In the second article, an American “labour academic” reports that the US post office has dropped teamworking as ineffective. He writes: “Reading between the lines, they had not achieved more work from less people and a weaker, more pliable union” (CWU Voice July).

The union leaders get themselves into a right muddle over the question of Royal Mail’s profitability. On the one hand they claim the organisation is making record profits and can therefore afford to drop team-working and meet the CWU’s claim, while in an adjacent article in CWU Voice they accuse the government of squeezing Royal Mail dry, thus forcing it to put up the cost of postage.

The leadership is clearly playing for the same ‘team’ as Royal Mail already.

The union’s job is not to advise the bosses on how best to rake in the cash. Workers should fight for what they need, and forget what the employers say they can afford.

Peter Manson