The Inexplicable Capitulation of the CWU

On Friday 21st April, the Communication Workers’ Union announced via social media that they had reached an agreement with Royal Mail in their long-running and bitter dispute over pay and terms and conditions.

The agreement, which CWU bureaucrats will be trying to sell to their members, includes:

• A three year pay deal totalling 10% across the whole three years (the Retail Price Index currently stands at 13.8%) plus a one-off payment of £500
• A guarantee of no compulsory redundancies before April 2025
• An ‘independent review’ of conduct cases arising from the dispute
• The inclusion of Engineering staff in the deal

The CWU published a document on 21st April for its members to peruse, entitled ‘We Are Still Here’, giving a brief summary of the agreement which the union had reached with Royal Mail’s management. Their social media team found themselves fighting a rear-guard action against dozens of angry members, excoriating the union for what they saw as a capitulation and with some threatening to leave the union altogether, with the target of most people’s ire being the pathetic 10% pay rise, 2% of which has already been imposed by Royal Mail, along with a one-off payment of £500, which is unconsolidated (that is to say non-pensionable). 

‘We Are Still Here’ also briefly detailed changes to sick absence and ill-health arrangements. To quote from the document:

“sick pay, standards and ill health retired whilst less favourable than the current arrangements are materially better than the employer’s original proposals”

In other words, “you should have seen what they wanted to get away with!”. 

Too often, hard-won terms and conditions are eroded through negotiation with trade unions, with officials dressing their defeats and compromises with the tinsel of claiming to have moved employers from a totally unacceptable position to a ‘comparably worse, but much better than where we started’ position. Royal Mail’s win and CWU’s capitulation on sick absence and ill health is just another in a litany of examples of this.

Also concerning was the ‘agreement’ reached that Royal Mail workers who took part in strike action and found themselves under investigation or, worse still, under threat of disciplinary action and even dismissal for alleged transgressions whilst on strike, would be subject to an ‘independent review’. Despite the union’s repeated declarations of fighting for justice for members and union officials threatened with the sack on trumped-up charges for doing nothing more than exercising their right to withdraw their labour, they have accepted, as part of their agreement, a review chaired by none other than Charles Falconer, now known to those who know him best as Baron Falconer of Thoroton, who was not only Lord Chancellor but was Secretary of State for Justice in Tony Blair’s loathsome government from 2003 to 2007.

One can only speculate as to how Baron Falconer, a loyal and faithful servant to both the British ruling class and British imperialism, will independently review the cases of members based on evidence supplied to him by Royal Mail, but it is entirely fair to question the independence of such a review, as well as to question what on earth the CWU were thinking in handing the futures of their own members to a Baron. A fighting and militant trade union would have used those members and their plight as leverage against Royal Mail, demanding that every single member sacked is reinstated and any charges or investigations outstanding against them be dropped as a condition of acceptance of this settlement.

Another key tenet to this ‘settlement’, which the CWU cooked up for their members to swallow, was a guarantee from Royal Mail that there would be no compulsory redundancies for a period ending in April 2025. It should be stressed that there are very few, if any, public sector or public sector-adjacent employers, including Royal Mail, who have used the threat of compulsory redundancies as anything other than a cudgel to beat trade unions with to gain concessions for workers in other areas of their terms and conditions. It is also true that trade unions have used agreements which include embargoes on compulsory redundancies to mask poor settlements without material gains for workers. It should also be stressed that these embargoes, and this one with Royal Mail in particular, do not include voluntary redundancy or voluntary severance, which gives them carte-blanche to reduce headcount and buy off jobs, just for a higher price than they would have to pay in the case of compulsory redundancy. To dress this up as a victory is to be wholly disingenuous.

The CWU’s social media strategy in the face of an uprising of its members has been to record a podcast from the union’s General Secretary, Dave Ward, and other members of the union’s bureaucracy, explaining the benefits of the agreement and why the CWU’s 115,000 Royal Mail members should accept the deal. Coupled to this has been a campaign on Twitter of retweeting anyone who has sung the praises of the union and their ‘win’ (many of these tweets have been responded to by CWU members, questioning whether they even work for Royal Mail or hold any understanding at all of the magnitude of CWU’s collapse) while openly challenging angry members on their criticism of what, at least on its face, looks like a complete capitulation of the union.

CWU’s Royal Mail members were balloted and re-balloted (as is required by anti-trade union legislation) and on both occasions gave the trade union bureaucracy a huge mandate to take industrial action in support of their wholly legitimate claim. They have lost in the region of £1,400 in wages participating in this strike action – some have even paid for their action with their jobs. And for what? This complete surrender on the part of CWU, who did not call their members in Royal Mail out on industrial action for a single day in 2023 – a sure sign that the bureaucracy of the union was going to find a settlement with Royal Mail: anyway, anytime, anyhow.

This is not the first time that the CWU has capitulated in a major dispute. In December 2022, after days of strike action taken by CWU members in BT, the union agreed a deal which included a below-inflation pay rise, claiming that “it is the maximum that can be achieved by negotiation leveraged by your industrial action”.

But why has this happened? Why has a trade union, with such a dominant membership base in Royal Mail, collapsed so swiftly and so completely? The answer, or at least a part of it, lies in the disconnection between the trade union bureaucracies and their membership. There has always been a disconnect between these two key groups, but this has become more stark during the period since the defeat of the miners in 1984-5. The trade union movement, defeated and despondent, switched its focus from the ‘organising’ model, which included class-based education and a maintenance of at least an active internal democracy, to a ‘servicing’ model, which eschewed the class-based education and agitation of rank and file members and focussed instead on the maintenance of the existing membership, the rejection of recruitment in un-unionised areas and, as a result, allowed the atrophy of internal democracies to set in.

Trade union bureaucrats, where elected, now face almost no democratic accountability as the main body of the membership either don’t care, don’t know that these senior positions exist or, if they do, don’t understand what role they perform and, critically, why they should stand for election themselves. One notable example of this is the election of Sharon Graham as Unite the Union’s General Secretary in 2021. Ms Graham, now General Secretary of one of Britain’s biggest trade unions, was elected on a mandate of just 4% of the total membership of the union, a paltry 46,696 votes in a trade union of some 1.3 million members. Another example is an Executive Committee member in the small transport union TSSA being elected unopposed on the basis of one single branch nomination, the lowest possible criteria under which the post can be gained.

This lack of democratic accountability means that the ‘churn’ of members from the rank and file up into the senior ranks of the union and from those senior ranks back into the rank and file means that comfortable and, in some cases, well-paid bureaucrats can act with almost complete impunity, building friendly (or at least ‘working’) relationships with employers at senior levels, which can only compromise their key obligation to act in the best interests of their members.

CWU members are already apoplectic with rage at this ‘settlement’ in Royal Mail. As individuals, they already know how to respond to this capitulation on the part of their trade union officials. What is vital is that they go into their workplaces, talk to their colleagues and ensure that every single member of the CWU in Royal Mail rejects this rotten agreement in its entirety and puts real pressure on those responsible for negotiating such a wretched agreement to pay for their treachery with their handsomely-remunerated positions.

Beyond this, trade union bureaucracies thrive on the apathy and disconnection between them and the trade union rank and file. A concerted, class-based campaign to educate and actively encourage trade union members to not only understand the democratic structures of their union, but to become an active part of it, must begin immediately.

Listen to our podcast where we discuss the capitulation of the CWU and more here.