At the end of March 2002, Post Office bosses announced a mass redundancy programme. The Socialist Party argues that this has to be resisted and is calling for:
- Strike action in defence of all jobs in the Post Office.
- 0ppose privatisation – stop the sabotage of the public sector.
- For a national demonstration against the mass job slaughter in the Post Office.
- For a one-day public sector strike against New Labour’s privatisation programme
Up to 40,000 postal workers, one fifth of the total, face the sack because New Labour is allowing the greedy privateers to carve up the postal delivery market, held by the Post Office since 1660.
Fifty out of the 101 Parcelforce depots are to be chopped with the loss of 6,700 jobs out of the current 11,700. The transport fleet will be cut by 2,500 vehicles and four mail delivery centres are to shut.
Nearly, 3,000 urban Post Offices will be closed, reducing even more local community facilities in some of the most deprived areas of Britain’s cities and towns.
Patricia Hewitt, Trade and Industry secretary, has gleefully welcomed the mass slaughter of jobs, saying the government has given the Post Office “commercial freedom”.
Now the private-sector vultures are queuing to pick up the pieces. Companies such as TNT, DHL, UPS, have a record of total hostility to unions, and will be the first to move into the market from next month. The postal regulator, on New Labour’s behalf, is opening up the market for bulk delivery of business letters as a prelude to the whole letter market being privatised.
The Post Office made £2.5 billion in profits over 20 years and the privateers will eventually get rich pickings from this. Of course they won’t be interested in delivering mail to your door at 27p for a first class stamp – they will demand “the market rate”.
In all other countries where postal services have been privatised, there has been a huge increase in the cost to ordinary working people. In Sweden, half the post offices were shut and prices went up 100%. In New Zealand, 400 offices where shut and the price of a stamp for outlying areas doubled.
The unions have to fight back against the bosses’ plans. Unfortunately, the union leaders’ initial response has been less than what’s necessary.
Billy Hayes, the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) general secretary – with 285,000 members, two-thirds of them in the Post Office – has said that they will only strike if there is any threat of voluntary redundancies. This has been echoed by Peter Skythe, national secretary of the Amicus union who said “the bottom line for us is that there must be no compulsory redundancies”.
Billy Hayes, in an interview with the Financial Times, seemed to be ruling out strike action against the privatisation of the Post Office’s market when he said: “It didn’t take strike action to convince the Conservative government to drop privatisation, it took political argument”.
This predetermined limiting of industrial action will be a major mistake. Mass pressure from the rank and file of the union must be exerted on the leaders to end such an approach. Firstly, limiting strike action only to oppose compulsory redundancies, allows the Post Office maximum room for manoeuvre against the workers. If the membership see their union is not serious about defending every job then they will be open to all the bosses’ pressures.
The Post Office is already setting aside £400 million (out of its £2 billion reserves)”for generous severance packages”. By dangling this sort of money – similar to what the miners had put before them at the time of the pit closure programmes in 1992 -this could undermine any campaign against Post Office privatisation.
Where will future generations of workers get jobs if there is no fight to protect the ones we have today? By ruling out mass industrial action now, it will be that much harder to mobilise to defend jobs in the recession, which is now beginning to grip the whole economy. Of course it is possible (and probably likely) that the Post Office will demand compulsory redundancies, for example in Parcelforce. They have said that workers in the depots earmarked for closure will be offered alternative jobs.
But in the last round of closures in Parcelforce there was much anger and opposition to the alternative jobs that workers were being offered. Now this will be much worse as ten times as many places are closing.
Postal workers will demand that union leaders fight the whole programme of closures and not just the limited fight against compulsory redundancies. Political pressure on the New Labour government will not be sufficient. In 1993/4 the Tory government toyed with the idea of privatisation of the Post Office by selling it wholesale to the private sector and not just as this government proposes by allowing the private sector to move into the market. It was particularly the reaction to the threat to rural Post Offices that frightened Tory MPs who faced losing their majorities. That caused a U-turn by the Major government.
It was also the threat by the National Association of Sub Post Masters (effectively an organisation of small businessmen and women) to oppose the closure that stopped the Tory government. Now the same organisation has welcomed the deregulation of the market by the Postal regulator.
The postal unions, led by the CWU, should organise a mass demonstration against closures, job losses and privatisation, thus ensuring that the full strength of the unions is mobilised.
They should appeal to the whole trade union movement to get behind them in defence of the public sector. This demo should be a prelude to organising strike action in defence of jobs. Now is the time to act!
