Solidarity spoke to Pete Firmin, branch vice-chair and political officer of London West End Amalgamated CWU

The deal is a crock of shite, to put it as politely as I can. If you look at it, Royal Mail have got just about everything they wanted.

The union is endorsing the new start times and giving the green light to management’s plans to promote “flexible” working, a series of changes that for many postal workers will mean a real terms pay cut. At the same time, if you go beneath the headline figure, the pay deal is actually almost identical to what we were being offered originally. If you discount performance bonuses they owed us already and a one off payment, it’s less than 3% a year for two years. It’s not even a buffer against the offensive on flexibility.

On pensions, the union and Royal Mail are giving very different pictures of the deal. Royal Mail says the changes are already agreed, while CWU insists there’s consultation under way. But given the union’s abandonment of its fight to defend the final salary scheme, who believes that management won’t get their own way? “The right to retire at 60”, even for existing workers, will mean the right to retire with with a worse pension.

At the root of all this, there is no evidence of serious opposition to liberalisation. Instead we’ve heard demands for a “level playing field”. There’s been no serious desire to organise workers in Royal Mail’s competitors to drive up standards throughtout the sector, let alone to fight for the nationalisation and consolidation of these firms.

Now the first thing for postal workers to do is to organise for a no vote, and that is already underway. There’ll be a meeting in London on Saturday [27 October], called by a network of activists from across the country that has come together specifically around the calling off of this dispute. Largely people from a left background, but it reaches out further than that too.

What are our chances? Well, both the CWU and Royal Mail machines wil go into overdrive to sell the deal, but on the other hand most postal workers think this deal is rubbish. So we have a lot to work with.

Beyond the vote, there’s talk of no confidence in both Billy Hayes and Dave Ward at next year’s CWU conference. Furthermore, Dave Ward is coming up for re-election, so it may be that there’s a left challenger to him. Activists, particularly in London, have maintained more illusions in Ward than in Hayes, but some of that has rubbed away with this dispute.

The elections for the postal executive should be interesting too. What I hope is that out of the opposition to the deal a more permanent rank-and-file network will emerge.