The battle was serious before, now it is in deadly earnest. After six weeks of sham negotiations Royal Mail bosses Adam Crozier and Allan Leighton presented an ultimatum to the CWU (see box).

Postal workers responded with strikes in early October that shut down the post for a week. Gordon Brown himself called the strike "unacceptable" and blustered "I want these people back to work", but an opinion poll commissioned by the CWU showed that over two-thirds of the public backed the union.

The first round of strikes over the summer, which 95% of posties came out for, were abruptly called off by our leaders Billy Hayes and Dave Ward for secret talks, breaking the strike's momentum. Royal Mail's ultimatum proves talks were always a cynical exercise; they had no intention of conceding a real pay rise.

Never again must we call off strike action simply for talks!

Strikes show will to win
But if their intention was to demoralise us, they got a shock. Disbelief and anger in delivery offices and mail centres turned to steely determination. The early October strikes were as solid as the summer's, and a broader layer of workers were prepared to discuss all-out indefinite strike action to end the dispute quickly. With higher traffic than in the summer, the backlog will soon return.

No doubt in some offices management will try it on, as they have after every other strike, suspending members for dissuading potential scabs, for "doing their job properly", or simply for carrying out union business.

If anyone has any doubts, look at the recent case in Burslem office, where management accused 12 members of bullying and suspended them in an attempt to break an office that has mounted walkouts in the past year. Or Watford, where workers refused to use their own car on delivery! Mass walkouts and legal threats challenged Royal Mail's attacks and in many cases forced management to retreat.

Let's meet any victimisation or bullying with wildcat strikes!

How to beat Royal Mail
Royal Mail now faces "rolling strikes" once again, with different sections of workers coming out on different days, each striking one day a week. CWU leaders call this "maximum disruption, for minimum damage to members". Strikes could run up to Christmas.

But why take the risk, when we could settle it here and now? Every time we've relaxed the pressure, Leighton and Crozier have kicked us in the teeth. Instead of limiting our action to what will make Royal Mail enter meaningless talks, we should force them to back down by extending it - up to an indefinite, all-out strike.

Postal workers do important work. Without us there is no alternative network. More and more communication is by email, but the growth of the internet has driven the mail order business. Customers would soon be screaming blue murder at the dent in their sales.

We have the power to beat Royal Mail hands down - and if we can unite with the other unions, we can beat the weak and indecisive Brown, too.

If our leaders want "minimum damage to members", then they should call an indefinite all-out strike and campaign up and down the country, explaining to every member that such a stoppage could win within weeks, if not days. A massive campaign for solidarity funds and action from other unions would provide hardship funds for those who could not otherwise afford such action.

Royal Mail's ultimatum
• Working into an early grave: no retirement until you're 65 and then a poverty pension
• Flexibility, sweatshop style: annualised hours, changing shifts at a week's notice, covering those off sick for free, cut off only at management's discretion, doing any job you're told to, delivering door-to-door and election materials for free
• Kicking out the union: a new industrial relations framework to cut out area reps, leaving offices to face management diktats alone
• No pay rise: 6.7% over two years, not even enough to keep up with inflation
• Later start times, extremely unpopular especially for parents, and no Sunday collections: both measures to cut pay

Watch Billy Hayes
Billy Hayes thanked Gordon Brown at the Labour Party conference for not privatising Royal Mail. Has he gone mad? Brown imposed the pay freeze back in March. He's the one behind the open market - which he has rigged in favour of TNT, UK Mail, etc.

Now that Brown has cowardly walked away from an election, it is likely that Hayes will seek to aid his rehabilitation with the public by trying to do a deal over the heads of the membership that will end the dispute. Even on 8 October, at the union rally in London, Billy Hayes was calling on Labour ministers to intervene. Doesn't he realise that, if they did, they would side with management?

Of course postal workers want the strike settled - but only on terms that will safeguard our jobs, pay and conditions, that will set back the privatisation bandwagon, if not overturn it completely:
• Defend jobs and conditions - no efficiency deals that trade jobs for pay
• Raise our pay to £400 a week - the average British wage
• Close the postal market and nationalise the private mail companies under workers' control with no compensation to TNT, UK Mail, etc.

However, we do not trust Hayes or Dave Ward to fight for such a settlement, to mount the action necessary to win it, or to allow postal workers to decide when we strike or what we negotiate for. That's why we call for rank and file control of the strike, for a delegate meeting of all those offices that want to escalate the action and for a rank and file movement in the CWU.