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SEA welcomes support offered by MLA Mitchel McLaughlin to Derry postal workers

Thursday 2nd March 2006

The Socialist Environmental Alliance welcomes the support implicitly offered by MLA Mitchel McLaughlin to Derry postal workers facing the same assault on jobs and conditions as experienced by their colleagues in Belfast.

Throughout the Belfast postal dispute, the SEA argued for the maximum solidarity and unity. We pointed out that nobody but Royal Mail management would benefit from divisions in postal workers' ranks. We said that what management was doing in Belfast today, they'd do in Derry tomorrow. They wanted to pick off workplaces one by one.

It was for this reason that, from the outset of the Belfast dispute, management set out to split worker from worker and isolate the strikers. They blatantly lied about the cause of the strike, tried to play off one area against another and even resported to hints of sectarianism.

This is a ruthless, dishonest management which is out to cut jobs and destroy conditions and which knows it needs to divide and weaken trade union organisation to get away with it. In face of this, the SEA continues to argue for unity between all grades and all areas.

The issues involved in the Belfast stoppage were not just Belfast issues. Management propaganda suggesting that particular workplaces or individuals had sparked the dispute were just that---propaganda. The issues involved in Derry are not just Derry issues, either.

Royal Mail management wants to cut a total of 40,000 jobs across Britain and the North. They want to create a two-tier workforce, with a much reduced core of permanent staff and a large contingent of part-timers, many no doubt supplied by agencies and with few rights.

Royal Mail management has also resurrected plans for "team-working", in which "self-motivated units" of between eight and 15 workers, each headed by a "team leader," would compete with one another. Each team would be expected to cover for any member on holiday or out sick or on compassionate leave. Their vision is of a dog-eat-dog world in which workers see other workers as rivals they have to compete with---not brothers and sisters they should show solidarity with.

They want a regime based on bullying from on high and a divided and demoralised work-force down below.

Addressing a meeting of 400 union reps. in Newcastle during the Belfast stoppage, Dave Ward, deputy general secretary (postal) of the Communications Workers Union, referred to the liklihood of a ballot for national industrial action in the near future, precisely because the issues behind the Belfast dispute affect all Royal Mail offices.

Postal workers in Derry and elsewhere are entitled to support across the North and beyond in defending their jobs and resisting management aggression





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