It’s postal workers who are forging a new path in Royal Mail

A YEAR ago this weekend the first Covid-19 cases were announced in Britain. 

While there’s a temptation to ask: “Who could have seen what would happen next?” the truth is that it’s been a year in which the deep inequalities and problems in our society, that many of us have long called out, have been exposed: the underfunding of the NHS, the neglect of the care system, crowded and inadequate housing and the prevalence of in-work poverty. 

The consequences of all of these things are now clear. In the most regionally unequal country in western Europe, Covid-19 has not been a great leveller: in the most deprived regions of the UK people have been 2.5 times more likely to die and no analysis of what went wrong can ignore the broken economic model that led us to this point. 

Across the trade union movement, this is a model we have rightly fought against. 

In March last year when the pandemic was gathering pace, the CWU announced a huge Yes vote for strike action in Royal Mail in a long-running dispute over the break-up and fragmentation of the company, over plans to water down its public service obligation and over the move towards a low-cost self-employment delivery model that would have signalled the loss of tens of thousands of good jobs. 

At the same time — perhaps unexpectedly — we announced that we wouldn’t be taking action and instead our members set to work as an additional emergency service to keep the country connected, looking out for residents, delivering essential goods and handling hundreds of millions of medicines, test kits and items of PPE. 

In an echo of trade union “work-ins” or the Lucas Plan some 40 years ago, they demonstrated the immense public value and potential of the very service the former CEO of Royal Mail was trying to dismantle. 

In December, we reached an agreement with Royal Mail that is currently out to ballot, that builds on our members’ efforts over the past year and maps out a positive future for the company that stands in stark contrast to business as usual and the race to the bottom that has become the default in Britain. 

The agreement secures pay increases worth 3.7 per cent over two years and takes an hour off the full-time working week. But just as important is the shift in the future direction of Royal Mail. 

Instead of looking to break up the business and hive off growth in parcels to a new low-cost operator, it commits Royal Mail to investing in its core operation and to protecting the thousands of jobs here for the long-term. 

Alongside this, it recognises that its number one asset is its long-serving workforce and their role, trust and presence in local communities. 

It commits to working with the union and staff to expand the role of postal workers — together with everything our members have done during the pandemic, for years we’ve seen successful examples of other postal operators supporting care services, tackling loneliness, working with local councils to provide information to residents on energy efficiency and providing more locally focused services to support small businesses. Royal Mail must now invest in this. 

Crucially, the agreement also recognises that the best ideas for making this work will come from those on the front line themselves. 

Their knowledge and understanding of the communities, people and businesses they support every day has never properly been tapped. 

Royal Mail is the only organisation, public or private, that has workers on every street throughout the country six days a week — rather than looking to employment models that exploit them, our agreement with Royal Mail puts their experience and knowledge at the heart of its future. 

In the wider postal sector, too many employers have taken the opposite path. 

Tens of thousands of workers delivering parcels are locked in bogus self-employment and lack the most basic of employment rights, from sick pay to the minimum wage. 

Such insecurity has been a major driver of the so-called “jobs miracle” of the past decade and amid the dire news for jobs over the past year, Amazon, Hermes and Yodel have quietly announced the creation of some 50,000 roles, dominated by self-employment, in the past six months alone. 

This is the very direction of travel that left us so vulnerable to Covid-19 in the first place. 

This of course points to the other appalling consequence of the crisis over the past year on the economy and people’s incomes. 

Just as the awful number of deaths and wider health impacts have fallen on the worst-off, the economic divide between rich and poor has become starker. 

The lowest-paid have been more likely to lose hours or their jobs or be put on furlough; encouraged by a stamp duty holiday, house prices have continued to rise while hundreds of thousands of renters face the threat of eviction; and wealthier households able to work from home have accrued significant savings, while millions struggle to make ends meet. 

When the government speaks of learning the lessons of Covid-19 and politicians of all stripes declare “never again,” they must get serious about the need to transform the economy, the way business is run and the world of work if these words are to mean anything at all. 

But we also need to get serious about these things in the labour movement. 

The CWU has long called for a New Deal for Workers, and never has that sense of ambition to emerge from a crisis stronger and more equal been more needed. 

Despite coronavirus, our members have been able to set a new path in Royal Mail, at a time when no-one would have expected us to succeed — only because they stood together. 

This is a lesson for all of us — now is the time to unite and mobilise around a shared set of demands and assert a distinct trade union agenda in this country.

Dave Ward is general secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union.