News

Dave Ward is the new General Secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union – the UK's largest trade union for workers in the postal and telecommunications sectors. We caught up with him at UNI Head Office during the UNI Post and Logistics world meeting.

Dave, congratulations on your new job as General Secretary of the CWU. What are your key priorities for the union going forward?

The most important priority for us is to ensure that in the sectors in which we have members and are able to improve conditions for workers that we challenge as a result of stronger recruitment and stronger organisation the balance of forces that exist within the world of work today. I’ve been doing a lot of work around the reality of how the world of work has become a lot harsher place and what the reasons are for that. There’s no one objective or solution to this but I think it’s about making your union stronger and a more membership-led union. We need to have better engagement with the members and gradually grow the union to attack some of these employment models that exist, particularly in the sectors in which we organise.

How important is the international side of the work to you?

Well this is my first world committee meeting and I found it very interesting. It is an opportunity to share experiences and to join up and connect issues that you’ve been thinking about. You hear about another union in your sector that has had a similar problem and it enables you to connect firstly with what the problem is and then to perhaps start thinking about a solution to the problem. I feel this meeting has been helpful in prompting and pushing me. I’ve made a lot of notes and I hope to take them back and put them into action. I think the international side plays a really important role. I would say it needs to play a greater role because when you look at globalisation and digitalisation, the world of capital and its endless fight against the world of labour, capital at the moment has the edge. But globalisation has made the world of capital a much smaller place and what we’ve got to do is to get trade unions to come together in order to counter that and UNI is essential to this.

Your predecessor Billy Hayes was very involved in UNI Post and Logistics and yesterday you reaffirmed your own commitment. Why is that?

I recognise that Billy did a good job for UNI and I said so on the rostrum. I may have had my differences with Billy - that happens in trade unions - but we’ve also worked together in the past and I wanted to recognise his contribution and also make sure that people understood that I am equally committed to carrying on that work and making sure that the CWU plays a big part in the development of UNI.

The UK government’s Trade Union Bill is threatening the basic right to strike in your country. Can you explain to UNI’s members around the world what’s happening?

The trade union bill that the government has brought forward in my view is a more serious and far-reaching piece of legislation than anything that Thatcher brought forward in the eighties which was seen then as a major attack on trade unions. I say this for two reasons – one because you have to look at the totality of the package. It’s the impact of the combined package and how that is going to stop unions’ ability to defend and advance the jobs, terms and conditions of workers. Secondly, it’s because of the context of what has happened in the world of work and the timing of this being brought in. I’ve argued that this is the last time that any fair minded person can say that unions are out of control or that workers have got it too easy. So why do you need to legislate even further to attack trade unions?

What are the details of the bill itself?

Well there are new thresholds for ballots and new minimum turnouts for any industrial action ballot. Where that gets worse is in key public services - and it’s yet to be defined what those key public services are – in these services they are introducing what’s called a double threshold. Because of the way the numbers pan out that would actually mean that you have to get over 50% of your members voting for strike action, and I understand to some extent that we need to get lots of members voting, but secondly, for these key workers, the double threshold means that for those that are eligible to vote, 80% would have to vote yes for strike action to enable you to have a mandate. They are also going to bring in a law that means abstentions count as a no vote and will include the whole of the workforce that works for a company, even those who are non-members, so non-members will also count as a no vote.

They are also going to introduce new laws where companies can use agency workers to break a strike, which is currently illegal. They are criminalising pickets – there will be a lot of new laws about not just how many pickets you can have but what their role and responsibilities are. We will need to have letters of authority and anybody in the public can challenge us at any point along the way.

One of the things that has gone under the radar and needs to come up the agenda is that they are also requiring us to give details of our campaigns for strike action. That means social media, demonstrations, protests and literature that goes out to our members are now open to surveillance by police which is a breach of human rights.

There are so many parts to the legislation that we need to watch. They will force us to hold a new ballot for a strike mandate every three months. Imagine if you were negotiating with an employer and it was a particularly difficult dispute, why would the employer do the deal with you? You’ve got them under pressure but they know they are coming up to the point where they can force you to re-ballot for your mandate or the strike becomes illegal.

In my view this is all designed to undermine collective bargaining and has been put in place to put up so many hurdles – financial and administrative -  for us to overcome to make it possible for us to stand up for workers. It needs to be opposed in every way possible. We need to go further than we’ve ever been before to oppose these laws. Even if it becomes law we can’t see that as a defeat. There’s a big demonstration taking place in the UK on October 4th which I’ll be speaking at along with other trade union leaders and we need to come together to oppose this bill.

What can the international union movement and UNI’s affiliates do to help UK unions in this fight?

The international movement can bring attention to the situation in the UK. It can start taking it through the ILO and to talk about this as a basic attack on freedoms. We talk about it being an attack on unions but I think we need to reframe that. It’s an attack on workers and their rights as individuals to come together collectively. I think the international movement can bring attention to it and give us advice and support. We’re not going to defeat this just through the law, we’re only going to defeat it by being very clear in our opposition and being prepared to come together and stand against it.

We’ve seen a change of leadership in Labour Party in the UK with Jeremy Corbyn becoming the new leader. How will this help your fight and the cause of unions in the UK?

It will definitely help us because for too long the labour party has been embarrassed about the relationship with trade unions in the UK and Jeremy has already come out and said he will be completely opposing this bill. I think he will do it in a different way. They won’t pull any punches in their opposition to this bill where before we used to get some Labour people saying that they didn’t like it but never really following through with actions. He’s already committed that if Labour get back in power they will repeal the Trade Union Bill but they will also go further and introduce a positive bill for workers’ rights.

What Labour can do? I’d encourage them to up the ante at this time and talk about what we should be doing for workers across Britain and what rights we are going to bring in that will challenge the forces that exist in the world of work. I think that will be a very practical position for them to take at the same time as the Tories are trying to undermine us. I’m confident Jeremy Corbyn’s election will bring about positive change in the Labour Party. There are some people who think that Jeremy is not electable. When I heard people like Peter Mandelson saying that on television, it wound me up because I thought “you’re not electable,” I wouldn’t want to elect him because he just says and does the same things as the Tory party. People should see this as a moment when the Labour party starts to listen to its members again, grows as a social movement, gets out of Westminster and starts getting back in touch with people on the ground. I think if you stand up for workers with the right policies then you will find that the Labour party will be electable again. Whether or not Jeremy Corbyn becomes the next Prime Minister, I think some of things he’s doing will change politics in Britain and that’s a good thing.

You’re here for the UNI Post and Logistics meeting. What are the key issues affecting workers in this sector?

I think the key issue in all honesty is the explosion of insecure employment models. If we use the experience of Royal Mail, we see competitors coming into the market at a time when the market itself is shrinking anyway and potentially the traditional areas of the market are in decline. For example, Whistle was a company that was the main competitor to Royal Mail in the UK and was able to operate on the basis of 40% less pay terms and conditions. That was the deal they put to their workers. Obviously that creates pressure on Royal Mail. Through the work that our union has done over many years, we set the benchmark for high pay and terms and conditions, it puts the pressure on your own members’ terms and conditions to come down. The other side of it is that they were allowed to compete on an unfair basis so they could choose where, when, and what they deliver and of course they only choose to deliver in the profitable parts of the UK. So that puts pressure on the overall service that we provide to 29 million addresses and deliver to every single day. That’s why we’ve launched our People’s Post campaign which has a very defiant message – we’ve been privatised and we didn’t want that – but we still stand up for the service. Our message is that you may have changed the ownership of the company but the service still belongs to the people of Britain and we’re going to make sure that continues.