How to deal with scabs and scabbing?

I think with regard to the current postal strikes, it's not much of an issue. It certainly hasn't been in any of the other disputes in the post in the past few years.

In the strikes, there have been over 100,000 strikers, and only a tiny handful of scabs and a few managers working. But they can't clear a backlog of 100 million items of mail.

Even these 30,000 agency workers -15,000 more than usual - will be untrained, and won't be able to clear a significant amount of the backlog.

Of course, I think it's worth appealing to workers not to take these jobs (or maybe to some to take them but then sabotage it), like we did in the last round of strikes, but the main issue is that if the control of the industrial action is entirely in the hands of the union officials, then it will be defeated - as happened in 2007 when the union called off the strike action, which had paralysed the mail, in order to hold "talks" for weeks. These talks proved pretty much fruitless, but by then the workers were demobilised, with thousands of workers on wildcat strikes left to fizzle out.

Firstly, I used to refer to the laws as that: "anti trade union laws". But then someone on here pointed out that that was a misnomer. Because what the laws do is effectively outlaw any industrial action which is not completely under the control of the unions.

So a more accurate name would be anti-strike or anti-worker laws.

But of course, these laws to restrict workers ability to fight, and they do force unions to act in more anti-working class ways. For example, instead of mass meetings, industrial action ballots must be done in secret by individualised workers from home - this makes votes in favour of strike action much less likely.

This hugely strengthens the argument that the way unions are set up structurally they often act against workers, rather than in their interests. It's not because they are run by bad people, or nasty bureaucrats or whatever, it is their structures, which have been integrated into capitalist society. This is why if workers want to win we have to go beyond union-controlled struggles.

With these postal workers strikes, we have seen that this problem has arisen again - and like I said it was not those few scabs which have demobilised the industrial action, but the CWU.

Exactly. In mass meetings people get a collective sense of confidence. Also, antisocial or cowardly actions like scabbing or voting against action are discouraged by peer pressure - these two points evaporate with home ballots. This has had a massive impact on reducing numbers of strikes.