08.08.2007

Who's going to deliver?

While support for Royal Mail strikes remains solid, the leadership of the Communication Workers Union is at a loss over how to combat the highly political onslaught by a government-backed management. Jim Moody writes

While support for Royal Mail strikes remains solid, the leadership of the Communication Workers Union is at a loss over how to combat the highly political onslaught by a government-backed management.

Before the dispute started, and in advance of the strike ballot, the national union bureaucracy sent members a letter promising not to call all-out strikes. Hardly, then, a clarion call to action. Now news is filtering out from union ranks about a conflict that has built up between, on the one side, Billy Hayes (general secretary) and Dave Ward (deputy general secretary, postal) and, on the other, members of the postal executive over the direction that the dispute should take.

It has become pretty clear among union activists that both officers have been dragging their feet over the stepping up of industrial action beyond the current series of one-day strikes. When Hayes and Ward proposed setting up a command sub-committee on strategy composed entirely of officers, the postal executive quashed it in short order. Nonetheless, there have been continuing rumblings that the unelected director of CWU communications, Kevin Slocombe, has taken the running of the dispute upon himself.

Not only union activists, but also ordinary members, have become frustrated over the manner in which the dispute has been allegedly 'escalated'. Certainly, most want to step up action from the 'one day every two weeks' that was adopted initially. Following the two 24-hour strikes, postal workers have embarked on two weeks of localised strikes, based on Royal Mail functional units or specific sites. The danger here is that the action will become atomised rather than more coordinated.

Introducing the 'rolling strategy', which sees different sites on strike at different times, has produced a large effect in backlogging mail. But it has meant that no-one is completely sure when others are coming out. As a direct result, unofficial stoppages have arisen in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, for example, when mail and personnel have crossed picket lines: something that should have been entirely predictable.

The rolling programme also helps Royal Mail by enabling it to move managers and office workers around in its efforts to break the strike, or at least make it appear less effective, which obviously has an effect on workers' morale. There can be no doubt that action across the whole postal system stretches management much more and hampers its ability to undermine the strikes.

Further undermining the strength and potential of the strike action has been Dave Ward's written offer to Royal Mail management offering a "period of calm" if it enters into "meaningful negotiations". It does not take a genius to realise that an astute management could easily use this as a device to drag everything out, demobilising members over a period. And for weeks Ward has been emphasising his call for management to negotiate rather than calling on them to drop their proposals on changes in postal workers' conditions, which is what the dispute is about. It must appear to management that he would settle at the drop of a hat. The stink of imminent compromise must be immensely encouraging to Royal Mail.

Next Monday, August 13, management has announced that unilateral changes in starting times will operate at most delivery offices, depriving workers of the allowance that they get for starting before 6am. Apart from a weak call for affected branches to submit requests for industrial action over this provocation one by one, the union bureaucracy is playing it down and not initiating any action itself. There has been little indication within the union of branches taking up the question before the new arrangements are in place.

Much of the left has called not only for escalation, but for linking the dispute with those of other public sector workers in order to forge a common front. Prominently displayed on the front page of last week's Socialist Worker (August 4) was the agitational open letter from Jane Loftus, president of the CWU, co-signed by the vice-president of the Public and Commercial Services Union, Sue Bond. All well and good as far as it goes, in making 'An appeal to trade unionists' to rally round the postal workers and their fight. But Marxists and revolutionaries have to do more than act as cheerleaders for such struggles, which spontaneously are carried out only at the level of trade union consciousness. Sadly, you will look in vain inside the same issue of Socialist Worker for a political, as opposed to a purely trade union, approach to the question.

The response of the Socialist Party in England and Wales is also inadequate. A recent editorial in The Socialist correctly stated: "Members forced to take unofficial action must be supported. After all, much of the action taken by union members to further their cause is only classed as 'unofficial' because of the discriminatory anti-trade union laws supported by the Labour Party precisely to hold back effective action" (July 26). An article in the same issue headed 'Their fight is our fight' called for defence of "a great national institution".

Neither the Socialist Workers Party not the Socialist Party wants to be seen to criticise the CWU bosses. But generalising the postal workers' strikes and giving it political coloratio'n should now be on the agenda for revolutionaries keen to make this industrial action bite. And we want it to bite the capitalist class as a whole and its state, not just those who manage Royal Mail. It is all very well criticising the anti-trade union laws brought in under Thatcher and continued gleefully by Blair and Brown. But what about advocating breaching them? Workers' solidarity must move beyond accepting 'their law'.

Of course, the dispute must be escalated and union members must take control of it. At present they are being called out on strike thanks to the union bureaucracy's cunning plan ... and it is not working. Beyond that the political attack on postal workers' pay, conditions and jobs continues, and it needs to be answered politically. Unsurprisingly, this is something that the union leadership is most reluctant to do; tragically it is something that most of the left is reluctant to do too.

Both the SWP and SP are concerned only with recruiting to themselves and their own fronts, not on building a united working class political force capable of taking on New Labour in every field, whether on the picket line or in the ballot box.