Royal Mail and its secret plan to undermine its workforce

Actually Alan, by all accounts the staggered strikes of 2007 were actually quite successful in disrupting deliveries while minimising loss of wages to the workers. (Although admittedly they did cause problems when some groups of postal workers were expected to cross the picket lines of striking groups of others)

Surely if one were aiming for maximum disruption with minimum loss of pay, it would make sense to bring out the delivery staff the day before the mail centre staff, not the other way round as is being done.

Devrim

well the strikes did create a massive backlog, putting pressure on management. the problem was the CWU then called them off for "meaningful negotiations." you could argue staggered strikes ensure control remains with the union since there's no alternative structures to co-ordinate them, whereas an all-out strike is more amenable to wildcat action, but that's a different argument to the effectiveness of staggered strikes per se.

Student and unemployed anarchists and syndicalists must join Royal Mail's strike busting force of 30,000 casuals. Produce leaflets in support of the strike and deliver them with the rest of the mail. Learn the issues from available sources. Undermine the project from within. If you can join in 2's and 3's for mutual support, get the casuals out on strike if you can, they are being treated like animals by the managers.Take photos and record breeches of labour law, health and safety etc.Sow the seeds of miscontent. We Must Win this Strike!!!

As I read it they were claiming that these people are not being recruited as scabs, but that they are recruiting 15,000 extra Christmas casuals to help with the expected backlogs from the strikes.

Of course, they could be used as scabs, but in my opinion, putting an extra 15,000 untrained* people in there will not run a service that is normally run by over 100,000 experienced workers.

In my opinion, they are much more likely to be used on deliveries to clear the backlog that the strikes will cause. Of course the union strategy of one day strikes will allow this to happen.

I don't think that we should advocate people joining these casuals, and that the thing about putting pro-strike leaflets in with the mail is a diversion. Strikes are not won by public sympathy, but by workers power.

Devrim

*Being a postman is not skilled work. However, to do the sorting and prep at any sort of reasonable speed you must be used to it. In general casuals are used mostly for deliveries and not for sorting and prep.

Hahahahaha yeah right. I just bet they do it every year.

~J.

Yes, they do, but not in those numbers. They clearly state that they are bringing in twice the amount this year. When I worked there, over twenty years ago, we didn't have Christmas casuals at our office, but many did. I think that most, if not all, offices have been forced to accept them now.

Devrim

of course, in numbers alone, let alone accounting for inexperience meaning slower work.

yeah the ones i found are at Gatwick Mail Centre, so i assume that's sorting bulk mail to go to particular delivery offices, as opposed to sorting mail into individual walks.

really? when i follow that link 'Graduate' is just one of the options under 'Occupation Type'

Something that seems to be forgotten: workers in the Royal Mail have staged all sorts of unofficial strikes in recent years, and shown themselves a fighting section of the working class. However, the union have turned this particular dispute into a campaign which will not spread the struggle, but isolate it in one sector. And this campaign might well spread the idea that struggle can only fail. Billy Hayes says he is in a stronger position than Scargill. And Scargill's strength was a major factor in the defeat of the miners' strike,

Public sympathy is neither here nor there: 48% of people are apparently against cuts in public expenditure, but a clear majority of political parties go along with the massive restraint of public expenditure. What does public sympathy amount to? If we see expressions of struggle in solidarity - that will show what workers think... . but apart from that ....?

the posties are one of the most consistently militant sections of the working class here and have a history of unofficial action as well as official strikes. Royal Mail is trying to force through major restructuring and cuts - which the CWU union already agreed "in principle" in the 2007 national strike 'victory.' posties are pissed off at the cuts and the increased workloads demanded of them, the union is pissed off it's been denied the 'consultation' role it agreed in 2007 in return for accepting the cuts.

thus the union is facing up to the fact it may be being sidelined by management, and so may take on a more superficially militant stance, while workers are significantly in favour of strike action over the aforementioned issues. all sides see this as more than a simple industrial dispute, but one about the future of a whole industry. for this reason both the press and union leaders have been evoking the miners strike of '84/'85. of course that was a crushing defeat for the working class, and we really can't afford another.

I am not sure if it would even hurt morale that much. Of course it is good to feel supported, but I don't think that it is the most important issue in determining workers' confidence.

On the other hand, campaigns for public support have been used in the past to directly argue against effective action. One example, in England, could be the News International (Wapping) strike in the 80s. SOGAT 82 built its strategy around a boycott of the Murdoch papers. They argued against bringing all of Fleet Street out on strike, which was seen by many at the time as necessary, and by many more in retrospect, because it would mean that the only papers coming out were the NI papers, thus reducing the effectiveness of the boycott, and they wouldn't be able to pay strike pay.

That is an extreme example, but in many cases campaigns for 'public support' are used to convince workers that they can do something without taking industrial action for example in campaigns over Crown Post Offices.

Devrim

Just quickly, I think public opinion is important for two reasons. One, that workers themselves are susceptible to what the people they know say, and what they see in the media. According to people I've spoken to on the tube, the intensity of the media onslaught did make many RMT members feel reluctant to go out, particularly a second time.

Two, it matters whether people blame the inconvenience they suffer on the workers, or the goverment, because if the government see that they are being blamed, they have an interest in wrapping it up quicker. If it just builds up a layer of resentment against workers, they have less to worry about.

Also, related to those things, we should be concerned as a political matter about how the working class in general view mass strikes, because it relates to the ideas they have about class relations, and whether they can justify taking militant action themselves. Better to have these arguments in concrete terms - i.e relating to a particular dispute - than in the abstract.

I agree with the gist of comrades above on the import of this strike and it’s confirmed by the way the bourgeoisie as a whole have wound it all up with a view to delivering a blow to the whole class. I don’t think that public opinion, for me, the opinion of the bourgeoisie’s media, has much weight here and the CWU have used this question of public opinion in their campaign to show that they are only being “reasonable” in wanting a somewhat slower and more “negotiated” implementation of the attacks without any trouble. This is something that the involvement of ACAS, up to now rejected by the state, could possibly provide. Of course the more workers that support the post workers, the better, but the real key is not public opinion as such, but active solidarity both within and outside the postal sector.

In the meantime, more agencies of the state are becoming involved. The Observer reports yesterday that the Association of Chief Police Officers has already, probably in conjunction with government meetings, etc, issued guidelines to police forces on dealing with large-scale strike action. The article deliberately wound up the question of “possible violence on the picket lines” and Acpo said it “was closely monitoring the situation”.

firemen on strike in M'ter, threatening to spread to Merseyside and Essex.