Harlow Royal Mail strikers picketing this week. Now strikes have to escalate
Royal Mail bosses have threatened to slash up to 10,000 jobs—including 6,000 sackings—if union leaders don’t end strikes and give in to their demands.
The announcement, early on Friday morning, came just days after leaders of the CWU union said “things are shifting” when bosses agreed to new talks. Now those bosses have sent a message—talks mean agreeing to what they want, or they’ll launch a jobs massacre.
It’s a challenge that has to be met with more determined strikes—and escalation. The alternative is defeat.
Chief executive Simon Thompson is on a mission to push through changes that bosses have wanted for years after Royal Mail was privatised in 2013.
He wants to break up Royal Mail into a parcels company—run like any other private courier, with working conditions to match—and run the rest of it down.
That means he wants to pay workers less—and demand more “flexibility” in when they work. Bosses’ current plans include later shift times, Sunday working and annualised hours—working shorter days in the summer and longer in the winter.
He also wants to bring in new ways of tracking and managing workers’ “performance”—finding ways to squeeze them harder. And he wants new starters on worse working conditions.
Royal Mail workers’ strikes have stood in Thompson’s way—so now he’s threatening them with the sack.
In a statement, Thompson directly linked his threatened sackings to the strikes, which he said had lost the company business. “There is now an urgent need to reduce the size of our workforce in response to the impact of industrial action,” he said. “I have again urged the CWU to immediately call off their planned strikes.”
The CWU said in response it would stick to its meetings with Royal Mail “because we continue to act in good faith.”
During a Facebook broadcast on Friday, CWU general secretary Dave Ward said the union’s leaders were “not moving back one inch—we’re going to take this head on.”
But he added, “Our job is to still negotiate an agreement. I believe the company are still in a place where they’ve got to look to the union to find a solution to this.”
Many Royal Mail workers know Thompson can’t be trusted. As one, Steve told Socialist Worker while on strike on Thursday, “We’ve shown goodwill in the past and bosses have stabbed us in the back.”
On the broadcast on Friday, the CWU’s head of communications Chris Webb said he’d seen “mixed opinions it’s fair to say,” on whether it was even worth carrying on with talks while Thompson wants only to press ahead with cuts.
“A lot of people are asking, they’ve really escalated things today, is it in our minds to escalate things? Will we be naming more industrial action for the December period?”
Acting deputy general secretary postal Andy Furey replied that union leaders were looking at more action but “hopefully it won’t come to that. Hopefully, Royal Mail’s minds will be focused and concentrated, and they will wish to avoid the rolling plan of action in November.”
Yet Thompson wants to use the talks to make union leaders back down—not the other way round—using the job cuts as a threat. The best way to show him that his threats won’t work is to step up the action.
Adam Cochrane, a Royal Mail worker at Stanstead airport, told Socialist Worker, “The only response to this is to escalate the action.
“They’re showing us a complete lack of respect. We can’t appeal to their conscience. The only way to get them to respect us is to escalate the action and show them we won’t be broken.”
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But where there is repression, there is resistance.
Strikers are demanding an unallocated €1.6 billion go towards workers' pay rise
London march on 27 October
