For our last postal workers' bulletin, see here.
The last three days have seen thousands of postal workers across Scotland walk out on unofficial strike in solidarity with victimised colleagues, and the strikes have now apparently spread to a number of cities in northern England.
On Monday 30 July, thirteen drivers from the St Rollox mail centre in Glasgow were suspended after they refused to cross an official picket line at Edinburgh Airport. (Airports are one of the functional grades which the CWU has decided to call out separately from sorting offices and delivery staff.) The 20 or so other delivery staff at St Rollox walked out in solidarity, taking the rest of the mail centre with them.
When managers took the work to Glasgow's delivery offices, what they ended up transporting and spreading was not letters, but the strike. By the middle of Tuesday, with the mail centres now out on scheduled, official strike, most delivery offices were on unofficial strike.
The strikes spread to Motherwell when their drivers were suspended for refusing to cross a Glasgow picket line, and then to Edinburgh mail centre because of letters from Glasgow being redirected there. It is now being reported that wildcat strikes have spread to Aberdeen and English towns including Newcastle, Liverpool (where postal workers held a mass sit-in) and Chester.
While Workers' Liberty believes that the CWU's strategy of a programme of rolling, partial strikes, causing maximum disruption per working hour lost, is currently the right one, it raises the question of what happens when postal workers from one section confront the picket lines of those from another. Working-class solidarity says that those who refuse to cross are 100% right, and that the union must give them their full support. Anything else allows management to stage provocations followed by victimisations of activists.
The events in Scotland and the North, even more dramatically than the unofficial strike in Oxford last month, show that Royal Mail managers are eager to up the ante by picking fights. Postal workers are right to strike back.
