Dear colleagues
For 500 years, our postal service has been a vital element of our national life. Today, our postal workers once again have to strike against pay cuts and threats to their basic terms and conditions. A CEO who gets the equivalent of an annual lottery win in wages and bonuses wants to make life worse for essential workers, in order to ready our national postal service for sale to a foreign conglomerate.
The ‘profits above everything’ approach is bad for the Royal Mail customers too – and that means all of us. After stopping Sunday collections in 2007, Royal Mail bosses now want to end Saturday deliveries. The price of a stamp has gone up by 58% since privatisation while the service has become poorer. When the only goal is to maximise profits and the resulting bonuses for a handful of individuals at the very top of the organisation, neither workers nor the public count for anything.
More information about the pay dispute is available here
www.cwu.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/06817-Proposed-RMG-2022-pay-dispute-leaflet-A5-gb.pdf
Postal workers are essential workers whose goodwill has been taken advantage of for too long. They deserve our support. And in one important respect, their campaign for justice is much more difficult than ours.
At St Mungo’s, we don’t want a strike and your reps’ team is working hard to avoid one. But if it turns out that only a strike can achieve a just settlement, we will receive generous strike pay to protect us from hardship. Lower paid St Mungo’s workers will actually get more money on strike days than when they are working. And even those higher up the pay scale will have a large proportion of their lost wages replaced by strike pay. That is possible because our union, Unite, has well over a million members and we are only a tiny proportion of that number.
The Communication Workers Union has just under 200,000 members, of whom more than half are employed in the Royal Mail. Strike pay for that many workers would use up all the union’s resources very quickly. Our comrades at the Royal Mail do not receive strike pay to replace their lost wages, and families are suffering real hardship as a result.
So I would like to ask you to consider making a donation to the Royal Mail workers’ hardship fund. Donations can be made by bank transfer using the following details:
Unity Bank
Account: CWU General Fund
Account number: 33019822
Sort code: 60-83-01
Reference: strike hardship
I know these are difficult times for many people, and I do not want to ask you to contribute if you can’t afford to. But if you can donate £5 or £10 without really noticing, please do so. This payday, even more than usual, we have reason to appreciate what the union has done for us. And the best way you can show appreciation for the benefits of union solidarity is to show that same solidarity to someone who really needs it.
Best wishes,
Jacob
Jacob Sanders
Unite convenor, St Mungo’s
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