A series of recent disputes in Royal Mail have ended with some partial gains for postal workers:
• In Manvers, South Yorkshire, 19 days of 100 per cent solid strikes over four months and a threat to spread the dispute across the North East region have forced management to withdraw its changes to shift patterns and agree to negotiate these with the union.
• Eight hundred postal workers in Stoke struck three times in December in protest at full-time posts being converted to part-time, including unofficial action in Burslem office. They too have won concessions and forced Royal Mail to sign up to a national agreement on converting full-time to part-time vacancies only with union agreement.
• Although Royal Mail used the anti-union laws to block a strike ballot of 10,000 HGV drivers this month, the government-owned company has upped its pay offer in an attempt to avoid crippling industrial action. The union executive has accepted the offer, though the details have not yet been released.

All three disputes are testimony to the willingness of postal workers to take strike action to ward off a sustained management offensive. But they are also testimony to a union leadership that has not got a serious strategy to defeat this offensive.

The Manvers strike was limited to 120 workers and managers from across the region scabbed to limit its effect. Some of the strikers in the Stoke area are out again this week because a key activist has been suspended. In Exeter, two activists, who led an unofficial strike in December, have also been suspended and another sacked. Brave local strikers are being victimised as Royal Mail tries to soften up militant branches for future attacks. Nationally, the union is sitting on its hands and doing nothing to defend them.

Work harder - bring privatisation nearer
The rot started on 1 January 2006 when Labour opened up the postal market to competition. Royal Mail has lost an increasing number of contracts with big businesses and government departments, representing the company's biggest source of income and hitting its market share. It expects to lose over 10 per cent of the market in 2007.

Last month, BT - one of Royal Mail's top ten customers - announced it was moving the work worth #90 million over three years to TNT. Government departments, themselves now opened up to the market, are also jumping ship, with the Department for Work and Pensions recently moving contracts worth #12 million to UK Mail, another leading rival.

So far Royal Mail has clawed back revenue by its downstream access agreements, where competitors, without their own delivery system, pay to use Royal Mail's posties to deliver to addresses. But now arch-rival TNT plans to set up delivery in major city centres, which would allow it to skim not just major contracts but the medium sized and small business market, opening the door to a real crisis for Royal Mail.

It is this constant threat of losing business to the profit-making private sector that has ratcheted up the pressure for increased workloads, flexible shift patterns and cuts in jobs and hours in Royal Mail. These pressures will intensify in 2007, driving the company down the route of a radical restructuring along the lines of TNT's "Dutch Model". This is based on a two-tier workforce with indoor operatives running machines to sort the mail and a majority part-time workforce to deliver the mail. Royal Mail is already taking steps towards this with a ban on recruitment of full-time workers and new contracts limited to 25 hours!

The privatisation of state-owned Royal Mail is the ultimate goal of management and the Labour government, but so far attempts to move in this direction have been warded off. Under pressure from the CWU and many Labour MPs, who are conscious of the anti-privatisation sentiment in the public at large, ministers have rejected Royal Mail's proposed employee share scheme, which management's stalking horse for privatisation (and their own enrichment!)

But then Royal Mail executives threatened to resign en masse, so the government proposed a "phantom share scheme" instead, worth up to #5,300 per worker over five years, dependent on productivity gains.

Why bother with a phantom share scheme? Department of Trade and Industry mandarins are clear: "Ministers are very concerned about the scale of the losses. The key element there is to get proper incentives in place for the workers." In the DTI Secretary Alistair Darling's eyes, the employee incentive plan is to help Royal Mail management implement changes to make it more competitive, including "major job losses". (Observer 21.01.07).

This exposes the real nature of this "incentive": to drive a wedge into the workforce in order to get them to accept a massive blow to their jobs, conditions and workload. In a parallel move, Royal Mail is proposing to close its final salary pension scheme to new employees, creating over time a two-tier workforce on different conditions. Divide and conquer, the oldest trick in the book.

Neither the phantom share plan nor plugging the pensions deficit will save Royal Mail from privatisation. They are meant to help drive through changes that would completely restructure the company. The logical end-point of this process, as Royal Mail downsizes and TNT and UK Mail expand, is privatisation. Why should one company be public when it is no longer any different from the private company? Why should employees be allowed to hold "phantom" shares in 20 per cent of Royal Mail, but the British public not get the chance to share in this "iconic" company?

The original plan for an employee share scheme was rightly condemned by the CWU as backdoor privatisation, but for the government and Royal Mail managers a phantom share scheme is an acceptable halfway house to their goal. It will get the system up and running and workers used to "owning" and swapping shares. When the political climate is better, the government can simply rush a bill through parliament and turn the phantom share scheme into a real one with ease.

Yet the union tops are reported to be adopting a wait and see approach to the phantom share scheme! This is a dangerous divide and rule tactic, it should be rejected out of hand.

Learn the lessons of last year
2006 was a wasted year where the CWU leadership, centred around the Deputy General Secretary Postal Dave Ward, has frittered away a national ballot agreed at conference, signing up to Royal Mail's cuts plan instead.

First they signed an agreement over the heads of CWU members without a ballot - the March 2006 Efficiency Agreement. This banned strikes against Royal Mail's cuts, forcing reps to negotiate and sign up to the changes. Supposedly there was a silver lining of productivity-based bonuses - wrung out of the sweat of our increased workload - and the union tops promised to campaign for postal workers' pay to rise to the UK median of #400 a week.

Instead last summer the CWU tops campaigned for us to accept a crap under-inflation pay deal of 3.9% - in reality a pay cut and nowhere near #400 a week. In the process they abandoned once again the chance to fight Royal Mail's regime of cuts. They won the ballot, with a majority of members not even bothering to vote, such is the demoralisation brought on by the leaders' inaction and morale-sapping collaboration with Royal Mail.

In those local offices where workers refused to sign up to swingeing cuts, Royal Mail hiked up workload, victimised union militants, left vacancies unfilled, and converted full-time positions to part-time without agreement. Management showed its determination to get the cuts through by any means possible and meet their budgets set from above, completely sidelining whenever necessary the Industrial Relations Framework our leaders stick to religiously. Stoke, Manvers and Exeter were just three of the local strikes arising from this management offensive.

The leadership, instead of using these strikes as rallying points, has kept them isolated and out of view of the rest of the union for the most part. The CWU monthly magazine Voice has not covered these struggles or sought to spread them, it has become little more than a propaganda sheet pushing the line "recognising the industry has changed" and "we can't say no to efficiency" to members. The CWU website discussion list was shut down early on in 2006, cutting off activists from being able to discuss the changes and network across the country.

But anger among postal workers is rising as the recent ballots and strikes show. The union leaders are being forced to act, so the deadlock at the top is beginning to break up between the rising frustration from below and the hammer blows of Royal Mail's attacks. So how can the union turn the situation round?

What way forward?
Royal Mail is developing a whole series of attacks on our conditions: a doubling of our door-to-door (junkmail) workload, attacks to the attendance procedure, threats to seniority, later start times with a loss of early shift allowances, teamwork, pension cuts, and up to 30,000 job losses. This adds up to a wholesale challenge to postal workers' jobs. On some issues like teamwork, the union tops are talking tough, but on other issues like door-to-door, the union tops are trying to reach an agreement that hits postal workers jobs and conditions. Why? Because "we can't turn away work" and "we can't say no to efficiency" - the failed strategy of 2006.

But even the Efficiency Agreement might not provide enough scope for the job cuts needed, and Royal Mail could demand mass job cuts to accompany the introduction of mail sorting machinery, not just efficiency savings through shifts being absorbed and vacancies going unfilled like they've done so far. The union leaders can at last hear the alarm bells ringing and are saying in December's Reps Brief that the first months of this year are a "key time in dealing with change in the industry".

Either we stand up to these attacks or the union will be in danger of suffering a real defeat.

There is increasing pressure on the leadership to call a national strike, and the leadership is set to discuss a national ballot. That's excellent, but branches and regions need to make sure that this isn't another token ballot on limited issues that restores the "status quo", with Royal Mail giving assurances that it intends to negotiate all change with the union, develop a "more positive relationship" based on "dignity and respect", and so on.

They will be empty words. Just like what happened after the CWU leaders pulled the strike off last summer, in a couple of months Royal Mail will be back to its old tricks of executive action. Another ballot like that will mean Royal Mail takes the union even less seriously, holds out for even more concessions, and our members get more demoralised and fed up with "the union', when it is it the leadership that is the problem.

A national strike must go beyond just calling on Royal Mail to withdraw its executive action here and there and return to the Industrial Relations Framework. It must centre on winning guarantees on the other issues facing us - no team working, defend seniority, a pay-hike above inflation rate and a deadline for #400 a week, the 35 hour week with no loss of pay to make the new mail-sorting machinery benefit postal workers. A key immediate demand must be for a moratorium on cuts and closures. All this means rejecting the efficiency agreement.

Ultimately we will need to link the strike into a strategic overturn of the main planks of Labour governments' strategy - the open market, Postcomm's rule over the market, the contracts with competitors. This is the only way to stop the growing pressure for cuts and efficiencies.

The Left in the CWU
These are the issues that rank and file activists need to address. However, despite the continuing ability of CWU branches across the country to deliver effective, unofficial strike action, at a national level they are weak.

Many of the militant areas - like London and the south west - are victims of their own success, and have adopted a syndicalist approach: "We rely on our own strength and have no need for a wider strategy to inflict a political defeat on Labour, or even to challenge the bureaucratic leadership of the union." This abandons the less well organised regions and will eventually lead to the isolation of the vanguard regions. Victimisation of leading militants is part of Royal Mail's strategy to soften up these militant branches.

The opposite error is that of the CWU Broad Left, which barely exists in the post. It concentrates on challenging the right wing in elections, but does nothing to organise to challenge the misleadership on the ground and organise the rank and file in action.

Post Worker, a paper which is led by executive member Jane Loftus and the Socialist Workers Party, appears at first sight to offer a much better bet for a fightback. It combines an electoral strategy to fight for leadership, support for unofficial strikes, and politically exposes Labour's neoliberal and imperialist anti-working class programme. For this reason, Workers Power has actively sought to get Post Worker to launch a fight for a national strike, and call a conference of rank and file activists to decide on it and agree to fight for it - with the officials if possible, without and against them if necessary.

Unfortunately, we have come up against the SWP's flawed concept of "unity" with the left bureaucracy. General Secretary Billy Hayes is always given free space to mouth off in Post Worker but never subjected to demands for action. Indeed, placing demands on the "left" bureaucrats, like Hayes, Bob Crow (rail) and Mark Serwotka (civil service) is viewed as a threat to "unity". The SWP is afraid to argue for what postal workers need to win their struggle, for fear of scaring off the trade union bureaucrats at the top. They say the time isn't right yet. For centrists like the SWP, as the revolutionary Leon Trotsky noted, now is never the time to fight for what needs to be done; it is always "too soon" - until it is "too late".

Now is the time to strike
Well, it is not "too late" yet, but it is certainly not too soon! Militants in the post should call on the national executive, especially Broad Left and Post Worker supporters, to initiate a ballot for an all-out national strike in defence of jobs, working conditions and pensions. In place of the "phantom share scheme" we should demand #400 a week for all now, and a pay rise to compensate for rising inflation. Most importantly, we should demand the return of Royal Mail's letter monopoly and an end to the threat of privatisation. Why wait till TNT has a scab delivery network up and running? We must act now.

Strike action must be linked to the goal of closing the postal market if we are to remove the source of the pressure on our jobs and conditions. This will mean confronting not just Royal Mail but also the Labour government. It will mean breaking the anti-union laws. All this is necessary, but instead the CWU leadership has accepted the open market and says "there is no alternative". The union tops are fiddling while Rome burns, with a strategy of agreeing to changes based on "efficiency" that will lead to destruction of thousands of jobs, the conditions of our work and ultimately to privatisation.

The only way to avoid this outcome is to organise the CWU rank and file into a movement that can force the leadership to change course or replace it with a new democratically-controlled leadership, one committed to defeating Royal Mail's plans and, with them, the privatisation policy of the Labour government. That would be a blow not just for us but workers everywhere.

Postal workers have shown in the last few years that they have the courage to fight and the power to deliver victory. Now is the time to bring that power to bear in a decisive struggle for our jobs and livelihoods. No more time wasting by the union tops - now is the time to strike!