Louise Nousratpour talks to the victimised Burslem postal workers making a stand
Sunday July 18, 2010
The Morning Star
Just weeks after the 2007 national postal dispute Burslem delivery office managers summarily sacked 12 union activists in what the union describes as a "conscious decision" to bust the "strongest and most organised" postal branch in the country.
Dave Evans is one of four men who have taken Royal Mail to an employment tribunal to win their jobs back and expose the company's "corrupt" and "bullying" management.
The Burslem 12 were locked in the canteen for the best part of that morning, weren't allowed out, and were eventually told that they had been suspended due to "complaints and allegations" made by members of staff, Evans says.
The sackings triggered a five-and-a-half-week solidarity strike by the entire workforce of the Burslem office over the 2007-8 Christmas period.
The solid strike, the third longest in the Communication Workers Union's history, forced management to launch an internal appeals process which resulted in six of the workers being reinstated and all charges against them dropped.
And after a further six months, a year to the day, another was reinstated.
Of the remaining five, one has since left the industry. Evans, along with Mick Gardner and former reps Dave Scarratt and Paul Malyan, took their case to the tribunal, fully backed by the union. The tribunal finished earlier this month with the results due in September.
"Not one person crossed that picket line for five and a half weeks," Evans recalls. "One of the guys on the picket line told me: 'My kids aren't going to have a great Christmas, but I'll explain to them when they are older why they didn't have any presents that year'."
Paul Dawson, one of the original 12 who was reinstated, says: "They would not have walked out for so long over the busiest time of the year when they could have earned the most money if we were bullying anybody.
"They stood up for us and we are forever indebted to them."
I caught up with Evans and Dawson at this year's CWU conference in Bournemouth where they were minding a stall adorned with framed cut-outs of local press coverage of their fight, and offering passers-by solidarity badges and information leaflets.
Dawson made front-page news locally when he was sacked for a second time last August after staging a rooftop protest at the Burslem office demanding a written apology from Royal Mail, part of the deal during the initial reinstatement victory.
"My protest was successful in that I got my apology faxed to me on the spot," Dawson says proudly. "But a few weeks later, I received a letter saying I had been sacked for 'gross misconduct.'
"I exhausted all the legal channels with Royal Mail to get the apology, to clear my name and for the unnecessary trauma my family and I had gone through. But they were not big enough to give it to me until I climbed the office roof."
Dawson says he cannot understand why he was originally reinstated, but Evans and the others weren't.
"I believe it was a clear divide-and-rule tactic, but it didn't work because we're still here, shoulder to shoulder," he adds.
Evans, who has been unemployed for nearly three years and has had to rely on his wife's income and financial support from the union, brands the sackings a "total stitch-up."
He explains that the allegations of bullying and harassment levelled against the 12, all of whom happened to be reps or active members of the branch, were based on complaints made by one member of staff.
As for the internal appeals hearings, Evans says: "There were no witnesses, just one judge who decided to sack us all on balance of probability, even after admitting that the evidence wasn't there."
Dawson adds: "The corrupt managers wove a cunning plot and coerced one person in a 100-strong workforce into making complaints against 12 people and that stood."
He also says that, the day after the initial suspensions on September 11 2007, the managers ransacked the Burslem branch office and removed union documents.
"They got a locksmith to break into the filing cabinets and took agreement books containing records of union meetings and staff complaints against management harassment and bullying," says Dawson. "These books suddenly went missing."
Thanks to Thatcher's anti-union laws brought in during the 1984 miners' strike, even if the four win their tribunal case Royal Mail has no legal obligation to reinstate them.
"I have no doubt that I'll win the case but whether or not I'll get my job back is another matter," Evans sighs.
Dawson, whose latest sacking will be dealt with through separate channels, declares his readiness to defend his colleagues till the bitter end.
"If they lose their case, or win it but don't get reinstated, I think we should organise a fightback, including strike action and even a trip to the EU Court of Human Rights.
"If we let them get away with it, they will do worse in the future. It's no longer a question of individual cases, but an attack on the whole movement."
And both Evans and Dawson say that their ordeal has made them even more determined to get involved in union business and continue to defend workers' interests.
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