On this page...TOP STORY - KEEP THE POST PUBLIC/ TORIES THREATEN WORKERS HEALTH AND SAFETY/ABOUT THE UNION'S POLITICAL FUND

KEEP THE POST PUBLIC

The CWU is launching a national campaign to stop the LibDemCon coalition government from selling off Royal Mail. The coalition has announced it plans to privatise the Royal Mail and has asked Richard Hooper to update his original report. Much has changed since the first Hooper report which recommended partial privatisation to ‘modernise’ the Royal Mail.

- The modernisation of the industry has been moving forward and a national agreement is now in place called Business Transformation – 2010 and Beyond - this deals with all of the challenges the Royal Mail is currently facing and will secure a viable future.

- The historic pensions deficit is being resolved without the need for privatisation by extending the repayment period to ensure long term stability.

- Privatisation will lead to vital resources being taken out of the industry.

- There is no public mandate to privatise the Royal Mail - only the Lib Dem manifesto carried a commitment for such a plan – the Conservative manifesto made no mention of this plan whatsoever.

- Polling has consistently showed that the privatisation of the Royal Mail is hugely unpopular.

- Rural communities will be particularly hard hit with the potential of the ‘one prices goes anywhere’ 6 days per week universal service being under threat leading to customers either with reduced deliveries or having to pick the mail up from central locations.

- The ‘decline’ in letter volumes is not in line with original forecasts.

- The Royal Mail remains successful and profitable yet the companies touted to 'take-over' RM have not been successful over the last year - TNT’s profits in 2009 were down by 25.4% and Deutsche Post’s profits reduced by 36.5% - during the same period the Royal Mail’s profit increased

TORY THREAT TO WORKERS HEALTH AND SAFETY

DAVID CAMERON - "REDUCING THE BURDEN AND IMPACT OF HEALTH &SAFETY" [THE TORY THREAT]

Tory Leader David Cameron delivered a speech attacking Health and Safety at Work in which he said there
were too many regulations and a volume of bureaucratic gold plated rules imported from Brussels in what he called the UK's over-the-top health and safety culture.

One in a long line of similar Tory speeches over recent years, he and the Tory Party want to sweep away health and safety laws and regulations at every opportunity, bringing back common sense, discretion and personal responsibility so he says!

Cameron's latest speech gives a real insight into the Conservatives health and safety thinking. There is no coherent strategy and no developed proposals. Cameron's advisers and speech writers are clearly out of touch. He says there is too much health and safety regulation. In fact there were more than twice as many health and safety regulations and laws 35 years ago than there are now and today's safety laws are simpler and easier to understand.

The speech also faces both ways! On closer reading, there is an acceptance from Cameron that the health and safety regime is overall both robust and effective! and ironically he even praises trade unions!, saying “trade unions remain a bulwark against most abuse happening”.

Despite stern all-round opposition from Trade Union and Professional Safety bodies, the Conservative Party will also press ahead with a scheme to let companies bar HSE inspectors from their premises.

David Cameron has never done a hard days work in his life. Brought up into an illustrious family and with a £30 million fortune in the bank, he lives on a different planet and can never even begin to imagine the types of workplaces in which 250,000 UK workers were injured last year - something he and his Tory colleagues has never, ever mentioned.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: "These proposals is as close to being relevant to the needs of the modern workplace as Alice in Wonderland. "Anyone who believes that there is a culture of over-compliance needs some basic lessons in the reality of working life. Last year 30 million days were lost due to injuries and ill-health caused by work. And a quarter of a million people were injured at work. These were caused by employers failing to comply with health and safety regulations. "There is not one shred of evidence that there is any over-compliance. Research has shown that over half of all small businesses have not even done a basic risk assessment as required by law. "We now have less than half the number of regulations than 35 years ago, and they are generally simpler and clearer. Yet businesses spend, on average, less than four minutes a day on health and safety - hardly a major burden. "There is no place for any lowering of standards or reducing regulation. Instead we need more support for those businesses that want to do the right thing, and more enforcement action against those that do not."

DAVE JOYCE, CWU National Health, Safety and Environment Officer

________________________________________________________________________
ABOUT THE UNION POLITICAL FUND

Under law the union has to hold a full membership ballot every 10 years in order to keep a Political Fund. Each time members vote 4:1 in favour of keeping the fund and giving the union a voice in Parliament.

Without a Political Fund the union will have no voice in Parliament. Every campaign with a political aspect, even a stamp on a letter to a Member of Parliament has to be paid for from the unions Political Fund. The union is not allowed to use money from its General Fund to pay for any activity deemed to have a political aspect - the Tories made this illegal!

In the last few years the CWU has used our Political Fund to campaign successfully for:

• Equal Rights For Agency Workers - campaigning in the European Parliament and Westminster - Legislation going through Parliament at the moment.
  
• Campaigning against the Break-Up of BT - into separate companies. This would be disastrous for terms and conditions, national pay bargaining and pension funds - Openreach set up with 'chinese walls'.
  
• The Remote Sourcing 'Pink Elephant' campaign - to keep Call Centre jobs in the UK. We lobbied MP's and the DTI. We organised fringe meetings at party conferences and the TUC - public awareness campaign hugely successful and companies now bringing back substantial numbers of call-centre jobs into the UK - including BT.
  
• Regulating the regulators - we lobbied to ensure industry regulators, such as OFCOM & POSTCOMM were accountable to the public and had stated aims to protect public services - not just to increase competition - OFCOM & POSTCOMM have 'maintaining public service' as a stated aim.
  
• The Broadband Campaign - We arranged seminars with small businesses and a DTI minister on universal access. We achieved changes to the OFCOM bill ensuring the new communications regulator was given public access to broadband as a target and funded research papers into wireless broadband and circulated them to rural MPs - UK has high levels of Broadband coverage and we are currently lobbying re; the funding of fibre optic network.
  
• Protecting Pensions - Measures have been put into UK law to protect the future security of Pension Funds - our former Deputy general Secretary (Telecoms), Jeannie Drake, was instrumental in putting into place the Pension Protection Fund into UK law which protects 90% of the worth of a final salary pension scheme.

It is essential that your Union has a Voice and is able to fund political campaigning.

We need to keep a Political Fund to campaign to protect YOUR JOB!

PLEASE VOTE 'YES' TO A POLITICAL FUND AND HELP US CAMPAIGN BY OPTING IN