Interim injunction means no immediate Royal Mail Strikes

Royal Mail won an interim injunction in the High Court this Wednesday, removing the threat of the CWU calling immediate Royal Mail strikes over Black Friday and in the run up to Christmas.

The CWU executive are spitting feathers at the decision calling it not only a massive injustice to CWU members but also an injustice to every worker in the country. Blaming the establishment for stacking the odds in favour of businesses and making it harder to win a strike ballot in recent years than it has been in the past, their message to Rico Back and the Royal Mail Board is that they cannot face away from the reality that their victory in court will be short lived. You can read the full CWU statement here.

The injunction focuses on Royal Mail workers intercepting their post at delivery offices and completing ballot en masse, often photographing or filming themselves doing so. This, said the courts, was exerting undue influence on posties who should have been able to quietly consider the ballot and carry out their vote in the peace of their own homes. You can read the full Royal Mail statement here.

From the CWU perspective, they point out that not a one single person out of 110,000 who were balloted complained to the independent scrutineers that their right to vote was interfered with. They view it as having carried out a hugely successful campaign with a resounding ‘Yes’ vote for strike action. One might even think that solidarity of the workers wanting to vote together was merely a sign of how committed to strike action they were.

From the Royal Mail perspective, it was viewed as clear evidence of planned and orchestrated breaches by CWU officials of their legal obligations. If the vote wasn’t carried out according to the rules and people felt pressured to vote in favour of industrial action that that’s not fair.

What really happens is what happens next. CWU General Secretary Dave Ward said “CWU members will be and are extremely angry and bitterly disappointed that one judge has granted Royal Mail an injunction to invalidate our ballot for strike action”. and that will guide their future actions. The are considering appealing the injunction, re-balloting for a strike mandate and are likely to call on members to make lives as awkward as possible for the Royal Mail.

Whilst official strikes can’t be called, workers can implement work to rule. This could include anything from refusing overtime, implementing all health and safety procedures no matter how minor, refusing to delivery if their hand held batteries run out and a host of other actions.

It is very likely that CWU members will do everything in their power to carry on collecting mail and parcels and getting them into the network with the aim of then delaying the post and clogging up the entire network. As we’re approaching the busiest time of the year when the postal network is strained to the maximum, it will be easy for disgruntled post workers to implement a go slow work to rule and simply allow the expected deluge of parcels to arrive and take their time sorting and delivering it.

A work to rule and parcels and letters clogging up mail centres could be a worse problem for Royal Mail than a couple of days strike action would have been. It also solves nothing as if the CWU re-ballots members, having voted ‘Yes’ once and having their mandate summarily dismissed as invalid isn’t likely to do much to persuade many to vote differently the second time around. If the CWU win a second ballot, although that probably delays strike action until the New Year, it would be no surprise to see workers down tools for Royal Mail Strikes lasting a week at a time rather than just a couple of days.