UK: Royal Mail and Post Office workers begin first of a series of strikes, BT to follow

Royal Mail and Post Office workers took national strike action today, covering a combined workforce of up to 120,000.

There were large turn outs on picket lines at delivery offices, mail centres and Parcelforce depots across the UK.

The national strike at Royal Mail by 115,000 workers covering 1,500 workplaces is an initial one-day stoppage out of four scheduled over the next two weeks. For Post Office workers across 114 Crown offices and in the admin and supply chain, this is the fourth round of stoppages since the start of May.

Both sections of workers are members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), as are 40,000 call centre workers and engineers at telecoms giant BT and its Openreach subsidiary who are due to begin a second round of two-day stoppages from next Tuesday.

The six days of selective action by over two-thirds of the CWU’s 200,000 membership is part of a growing rebellion by workers against corporate and government decreed pay restraint. Post and telecoms workers have now joined with national rail strikes, indefinite strike action on several regional bus networks, and eight days of strike action at the UK’s largest container port at Felixstowe.

The CWU were forced to announce strikes because the privatised utilities of BT and Royal Mail have unilaterally imposed below inflation pay awards in April and June of between 3 and 8 percent, and 2 percent respectively. The government-owned Post Office has refused to reverse a pay freeze from last year or offer more than 5 percent in line with its overall policy of pay restraint among public sector workers.

The union is frantically seeking a pretext for a sell-out. It faces an increasing mood of opposition among workers aware that unaffordability claims by the companies are exploded by profits paid out in windfall dividends and management bonuses while their own income is eaten away by inflation that has reached over 12 percent.

While CWU General Secretary Dave Ward pays lip service to workers’ anger, the CWU repeatedly invokes the mantra of corporate responsibility, seeking to restore its comfortable relations with the employers that have facilitated a decades-long offensive against postal and telecom workers.

The week leading up to the strike saw forlorn attempts by the CWU to find grounds with management to call off the action. The CWU prepared for Post Office stoppages by entering arbitration through ACAS. While forced to acknowledge that a 5 percent rise was inadequate, National Officer Andy Furey claimed the latest revised offer including an insulting lump sum of £500 was a step in the right direction.

Furey has pointed out that last year’s pay freeze was aimed at delivering £38 million yearly profits, the benchmark at which management bonuses are paid, noting the Post Office has recorded a further £39 million profits this year.

At Royal Mail the CWU has bemoaned the fact that Chief Executive Simon Thompson has not attended pay talks and that the company turned down its appeal for talks at a “summit” with Royal Mail Chairman Keith William.

Royal Mail’s response to such peace overtures, following the CWU’s delay in naming strike dates, has been to mount a strike breaking operation, hiring agency staff and transferring work from its Parcelforce subsidiary to transnational delivery rival Evri (Hermes).

The central rally organised at Mount Pleasant Mail Centre in London was fronted by CWU leader Ward with Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT. It was an exercise in empty militant tub thumping and political apologetics for Labour.

Lynch reprised his role in shielding Labour from workers’ growing anger, claiming Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer had to make up his mind and “wake up and smell the coffee look out the windowthe people are on the move”. But millions of workers already know Labour is unreservedly on the side of big business, with even the token presence of frontbench Labour MPs on picket lines outlawed by Starmer.

Lynch dropped even a passing reference to a general strike, speaking instead of a “summer of solidarity” continuing until next spring. Both Lynch and Ward were silent on the role of Unite, led by General Secretary Sharon Graham, in helping to facilitate what amounts to a strike breaking operation by Royal Mail.

Unite instructed its members among management grades to report to work as normal today despite knowing the company intended to use them to break the strike, reporting that around “300+hubs” had been set up as part of this agenda. The union bureaucracy is not prepared to defy anti-strike laws even when they involve playing a supporting role alongside scab firms and agency workers in line with legislation introduced by the Conservative government.

Ward admitted that postal workers had even been denied basic equipment during the pandemic which had led to the loss of many lives. But this was presented as “heroic efforts”, which “kept Royal Mail going.”