TUC 2024 Together, unions can secure collective bargaining across the British economy

BRITAIN is ready for change after 14 ruinous years, and it’s up to us now to deliver that change.

Services are on their knees after years of mismanagement, and that’s certainly true of Royal Mail, privatised by the Tories and Liberal Democrats in 2014. People across Britain rely on its unrivalled delivery network and skilled, trusted workforce, but current management have run the company into the ground.

Frankly, the CWU doesn’t have confidence in the current board or believe it has what it takes to turn the company’s fortunes around.

Our ultimate aim for Royal Mail is renationalisation. That is our union’s policy and we continue to make that case.

But we recognise at the moment, with the position Labour has taken regarding public finances, that isn’t going to happen right away.

We have to deal with the reality of the ongoing takeover bid by Daniel Kretinsky and ensure a better deal for the workforce and the public emerges from it.

We’ve made clear to his company the EP Group that we do not believe the contractual obligations they’ve given to Royal Mail are strong enough to ensure terms, conditions and the quality of service is protected — and we’ve made that clear to the government as well.

We’ve got concerns about the financing: £2.5 billion of the bid is debt-financed. There’s a clause in the contract that says the company would only have to pay that back when they’re at a 2-1 cash-to-debt ratio, which is not unhelpful, but we still think EP needs to answer questions on when it would pay that back, how, and what the impact would be on jobs and services.

We want agreements against outsourcing, and a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies and improvement to postal workers’ terms and conditions, which have been attacked by Royal Mail management.

We’re looking for agreement on the universal service obligation (USO) that guarantees deliveries at a standard price right across the country. That’s been in the news again lately, with Ofcom suggesting an end to second-class deliveries on Saturdays.

That’s not as bad as some previous proposals which would have seen letter deliveries cut to three or four days a week. 

We understand that letters are in decline and unless you put more products on top, it becomes economically unsustainable. That’s why it’s key to us that we push for Royal Mail and the EP Group to guarantee that Royal Mail staff will be delivering parcels and that parcel delivery remains part of the USO.

We’ve proposed a wider range of products and services are included in the USO — we want Royal Mail to be ambitious, to rediscover the idea of innovation and growth instead of managed decline.

And we’re pushing for a new model of ownership, one that gives employees a stake in the business.

I don’t mean giving staff shares that can be traded on the market, but a collective stake for employees, run as a collective trust, that gives staff a say in how the company is run — which might involve employee payouts if there was money left over after pay bargaining and capital investment.

There has to be a complete change in what CEOs and board members are remunerated for, rewards need to be aligned to progress in growing the business, service quality and creating jobs.

Kretinsky says he buys up failing companies and gives them a future — well, this is a test both for him and for the Labour government on how serious they are about Royal Mail’s future.

But as we meet for the TUC Congress, there are tests for the trade union movement as well.

We’re extremely proud that the new deal for workers is being shaped into law — we were the first union to call for the new deal, we pushed for the first national demonstration demanding it and we remember the Morning Star backed it from the very beginning when there wasn’t universal support across the movement, including with a wrap on the paper at that demonstration.

But the next step is to deliver collective bargaining across all sectors of the economy, not just the social care sector, though we understand why that has been prioritised as the first step.

That’s why the CWU has a motion to Congress demanding a collective bargaining summit within six months, and for the TUC general council to agree a collective bargaining strategy covering multiple sectors.

It’s not enough for unions to have individual conversations with Labour about what they want, we need a collective trade union policy we can campaign for and negotiate with government and employers.

We need to be providing the ideas on how we reform the economy, level up the country and stop it being rigged against the working class.

Then we can more effectively build support for our ideas in the Labour Party, and support left MPs fighting for trade union-backed policies, rather than see them being punished for doing so as we saw over the two-child benefit cap.

We’re open to all methods when it comes to raising pressure for change, including grassroots activism to mobilise support for a new economic model, which was why we backed the Enough is Enough initiative; and just because Labour is in power that doesn’t mean we should turn our backs on the role of street campaigning and public demonstrations.

But before we can engage the public in such campaigns, we need a collective set of demands as a movement that we want to campaign for. 

There are great leaders in our movement who have raised the profile and the size of the trade unions in recent years, and won better deals for their members in sector after sector.

If we can harness that power as a collective, we can transform the world of work.