115 Royal Mail workers at Bridgwater Delivery Office-members of the Communication Workers Union/CWU, have voted overwhelmingly-an 80% majority-to strike on three successive Saturdays starting midnight Saturday June 29th.
These are the immediate local issues at stake:
1. Bullying and Harassment by too many managers: we are being treated like dirt for too long and we've had enough
2. Full time duties being reduced to part time; RM say this is just for the summer but we don't believe them.
3. RM owe us £800 from previous savings which they refuse to pay out.
4. RM are breaking national agreements on consultation and negotiation and trying to ignore the CWU here, which has been a militant thorn in their side for at least 20 years.
5. RM are ripping up a local signed agreement not to 'lapse' duties.
6. RM need to remove the current Bridgwater Delivery Office Manager.
However, this dispute is in many ways a West country opening of the national dispute to stop impending Royal Mail privatisation.
The reason CWU members at Bridgwater are being bullied into working harder for less reward is so the office-like RM as a whole-can be 'slimmmed down' in terms of staff and wages, and so 'fattened up' in terms of profit, so it is a more attractive privatisation prospect.
So the fight to stop the sell-off of the UK's oldest and much loved public service starts in Somerset on June 29th!
Picket-line visitors and messages of support from FBU members welcome: we RM workers understand the death by 1000 cuts that Somerset and West Country fire fighters are suffering from, and hope that later this summer we can link up with your pensions fight and combine in a double national strike!
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