Mount Pleasant gate meeting. Photo: Rob W
Mount Pleasant gate meeting. Photo: Rob W

CWU member, postal worker

Royal Mail workers in the Communication Workers Union, over 150,000 of us up and down the country, are gearing up for a ‘yes’ vote on our strike action ballot, which opens on 28 June.

As soon as the announcement was made of a 2% pay offer followed by a further 3.5%, with strings attached long enough to tie us all to a workbench for life – the mood clearly became very angry.

But workers are also bemused. After being hailed as keyworkers during the pandemic and, in 2021, making the company 20.9% more profit domestically than the year before, we all thought we had a fat pay rise to look forward to.

But it seems that rising prices have done nothing to change the outlook of the pound-mad board. They decided to award shareholders £400 million for staying at home while we were facing hundreds of potentially Covid-infected households daily to deliver all necessary (and not so necessary) items to the public.

The mood in the workplace meetings has been solidly behind the union for strike action, especially following the £200 lump-sum so-called ‘sweetener’ thrown to us to try and keep us quiet. The reaction of many was: “Great that will cover three days strike as a start”. And now, with the ongoing rail strikes, we see we are not the only ones being insulted by private companies turning their noses up at the ones who are the real source of their profits: us workers. Full steam ahead for our first strike in over a decade!