TECHNOLOGICAL revolution is changing the world of work.

Our two main industries in the Communication Workers Union, postal mainly in Royal Mail and comms in BT, are changing enormously. 

The way surveillance technologies and AI are being rolled out is putting inhuman pressure on workers. Management are using new technologies to degrade pay, terms and conditions and infringe basic human rights.

Our union won’t stand for that and we have a motion calling for steps the TUC can take to address inappropriate use of technology that undermines workers.

But we know change is under way and we aren’t about trying to block that. The question is how can we make change work for our members and communities.

Developing broadband to the highest level should be considered an essential service. It’s an extremely competitive field — but that should be our aim.

Ofcom has announced a review of the universal service obligation at Royal Mail too. Royal Mail can continue to provide a universal service — but only by changing what it does, expanding the role of postal workers.

We’ve been through a bitter dispute in Royal Mail over the past year because of their attempts to attack postal workers — but that doesn’t mean we oppose change itself.

I’m not letting Royal Mail managers off the hook. I’ve interacted with managers back to 1979-80, and what I’ve seen is an incredible decline in their ability to grow businesses or adapt to change.

Royal Mail is in crisis, and I don’t think its management are capable of getting it out.

If we’d never been in dispute with them they would still have led it into a crisis — because these people don’t know what the assets that could allow the company to grow actually are.

The greatest asset is the employees. Imagine the level of individual contact that postal workers have with the public. 

During the pandemic the one group of workers that went everywhere, every day, was postal workers.

Millions of people, especially those living in more distant areas, particularly elderly people, were relying on their postie.

That should have demonstrated to the company that if you want to grow this business, use this asset, expand this social role.

Instead they take the easy route — trying to break up the company, split off letters, a sector where decline has accelerated since the pandemic, from parcels which has been expanding. Ultimately, ditch Royal Mail and become a parcel courier service.

That’s why their approach has been so short-sighted.

When profits soared because of a rise in deliveries during the pandemic, they took the decision — and I know a lot of their shareholders weren’t even pushing for it — to give away £650 million in dividends and share buybacks when there was an economic crisis staring us in the face. That’s got to be one of the most terrible corporate decisions ever taken.

Ultimately there was a scapegoat for that, the CEO Simon Thompson had to go, but he should have been sacked a lot earlier.

He’s gone, but others he brought in to break the union also need to pay the price and the business won’t start to grow again until they do.

They took their eye off everything to destroy the trade union. Not just on strike days, every day of the week.

They employed disgraceful strategies, psychological strategies. Chaos management. Not clearing the office, so the quality of service falls. It’s about making the universal service seem like it can’t be delivered, running it into the ground.

Our dispute this year was never just about pay, but real threats to the company’s future.

The agenda stems back to privatisation in 2013, and I’m proud our members have stopped them. They haven’t broken up Royal Mail.

They wanted to put parcels in a subsidiary company, brand it whatever and bring in self-employed workers. We’ve stopped them.

In the eventual settlement there were some difficult things to swallow, including on pay, because of the financial state of the company, but we were in no doubt an agreement had to be reached, and that was overwhelmingly endorsed by members.

It didn’t satisfy everybody and I’m as committed to fight for the concerns of the 25 per cent who didn’t want the deal as to those of the 75 per cent who accepted it.

The deal commits the company to maintain the universal service, and to build a proper business case for expanding the role of postal workers.

We can build a universal service fit for future generations by focusing on two key areas. 

One is how we take on a greater social role. The company would be mad to abandon the infrastructure of the universal service and a workforce as embedded in communities as ours.

The second is rebuilding the economy. It’s rigged against working people.

We’ve been looking at community wealth building, the economic strategies that underpin that, working with the likes of Matt Brown in Preston, metro mayors like Andy Burnham and Jamie Driscoll.

We need bottom-up business growth, where local services are valued and procurement is designed to build a more democratic economy. Postal workers are perfectly placed to support that.

But today’s business leaders only know how to take money out of services, not grow them.

I’m proud of what our members have achieved this year, and welcome the rise in industrial action across the movement.

Unions, and their members, have learnt a lot about what we’re up against and seen some of the wider economic causes of the endless decline in their pay and conditions.

We’ve not won everything we wanted to, and in my view what could have strengthened these disputes over the last year is a trade union-led political campaign with a clear agenda about changing the character of the economy.

The appetite was there as we saw at some of the Enough is Enough rallies at the height of our dispute — with crowds of thousands reminiscent of Corbyn at his peak. We need a vehicle that connects industrial work with political work and allows unions to regroup and go again.

That campaign hasn’t been maintained at that level for various reasons, including that we and other unions were just stretched to breaking point by the disputes we were engaged in.

But I don’t think the moment has passed for such a movement, not a new political party, but something that drives an agenda for change and applies pressure on politicians and employers at all levels.

I don’t think Labour’s New Deal for Workers goes far enough — but more, I don’t think unions can be reliant on a government delivering it.

We have to agree that common bargaining agenda, we have to start raising pay and conditions on a sectoral level through our combined efforts.

That’s why we have a motion calling for greater co-ordination by unions, including strategies to counter the right-wing media with our own media, one reason the CWU is proud to support the Morning Star.

What we’re doing individually isn’t the answer. Union density is still declining, which is why we want to see a joint recruitment strategy aimed at growing the whole movement.

It’s now or never.