Staff Unions & Associations

Staff employed by the Post Office have had many staff associations, unions and representative bodies acting on their behalf in the modern era. Staff associations became increasingly prominent in the twentieth century.

Image of UCW protest 1993 The Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) has had the largest membership. It has been involved in all of the major wage negotiations since its inception in 1919. In 1980 it became the Union of Communication Workers (UCW). Then, in 1995 it merged with the National Communications Union to form the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU). Pictured here is a UCW protest in 1993.

In 2005 it had a membership exceeding 250,000, comprising men and women working for the Post Office, British Telecom and other telephone and communication companies.

Secret beginnings in the nineteenth century

Post Office Staff Associations have their origins in the nineteenth century. The first efforts to improve staff conditions occurred in a number of meetings held in secret in and around St Martin’s-le-Grand in the 1840s. A ‘confederacy’ was formed protesting against low pay and extra duties, with the support of some societies, clergymen and journalists.

In the 1850s, similar small groups of Post Office employees joined with Lord’s Day Societies and gained temporary successes in abandoning Sunday work. A small ‘London Committee’ concerned with the interests of letter carriers remained active through the 1860s. They even met with Postmasters General a number of times, although the leaders of those agitating for increased pay were often sacked.

The following decade saw the entry of telegraphists into Post Office employ and these were amongst the first to strike in 1871. Despite increased organisational endeavours, all efforts at creating a formal union failed until 1881 when the Postal Telegraph Clerks Association was created.

The importance of the early association movement

In the final 20 years of the nineteenth century, there was a ferment of proto-union organisation across the Post Office workforce. This included the founding of:

The United Kingdom Postal Clerks Association, founded by provincial Post Office clerks (1887)
The Postmen’s Union (1889)
The Fawcett Association, comprised of London sorters (1890)

Although the major pay claims were unsuccessful, the right to meet in public was secured over this period. The first large scale strike occurred in 1890. By the turn of the century, every Post Office grade had gained a representative association.

From this time until the outbreak of the First World War there were a number of large-scale public enquiries into the grievances of Post Office employees. Arguing the case of the lower grade workforce was the National Joint Committee (also known as the Amalgamated Postal Federation), which was a precursor of the UPW. There were five main hearings that were respectively overseen by:

Tweedmouth (1895-7)
Bradford (1904)
Hobhouse (1907-8)
Holt (1912-13)
Gibb (1914)

By the time of the Hobhouse inquiry, the union associates were recognised for the purposes of negotiation. A more
thoroughgoing representation of Post Office employees was secured by the time of the Gibb inquiry.

By this time the British labour movement had become heavily unionised and the period 1912-14 was one of acute industrial unrest on a broad scale. Many important concessions were gained during the Holt inquiry.

From associations to a mass union: the birth of the UPW

Title page for the Post Office Engineering Union Journal January 1920 In 1919, the 44 representative associations of various workers employed by the Post Office were amalgamated into the Union of Postal Workers (UPW). The UPW would go on to play a major role in the history of British trade unionism.

The amalgamated UPW was set up at the time when the government introduced the Whitley Councils, in 1919. The Whitley system dominated inter-war wage bargaining for the civil service as a whole. Arguments presented for increased pay tended to be based on demands for a wage sufficient to cover the cost of living. That was comparable with wages in the private sector and was thus guided by the market value of pay.

Here, successive governments were cornered into having to ‘set an example’ in the formulation of reasonable wage schemes, especially following the economic downturns of the early 1920s and 1930s.

During this period, and despite having little involvement in the general strike of 1926, the UPW became subject to the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act. This prohibited civil servants from joining unions affiliated to the Trade Union Congress.

This state-enforced ban on trade union collusion in pursuing joint industrial interests circumscribed the effectiveness of the UPW until the end of the Second World War when this legislation was overturned.

Keeping the UPW unified

For the remainder of the twentieth century, the history of Post Office unionism was dominated by secessionist groups and the difficulties of keeping the UPW unified in its industrial negotiations. Because the amalgamated UPW acted on behalf of a variety of job types, special interest groups composed along similar lines to the pre-amalgamated associations continued to exist. They broke away from the UPW and competed for their respective and often conflicting interests.

After the Second World War

Image of front cover of POEU journal March 1954

The major secessionist groups in the post-war era were:
The National Guild of Telephonists
The National Association of Postal and Telegraph Officers
The Engineering Officers (Telecommunications) Association
The Clerical and Administrative Workers Union
The Association of Professional Executive Clerical and Computer Staff (after 1972)

In the immediate post-war period, the new Labour government changed the political and economic environment by committing to full employment. In addition, an enlarged civil service gave the UPW more bargaining leverage and gradual, significant improvements in pay and conditions were secured through the 1950s.

Pictured here is the front cover of the Post Office Engineers Union journal, March 1954.

The Conservative-dominated 1960s saw a more concerted effort to control wage levels. This precipitated a spate of negotiation and arbitration between the UPW and the government. The initial wage increases were too modest for many, leading to strikes in 1964. A national all-out official strike was avoided, however, when a more substantial pay increase was achieved later that year.

The 1971 strike and beyond

Image of Tom Jackson at UPW conference 1971 In 1965, Tom Jackson (pictured here at 1971 conference) became the UPW General Secretary. The following years were turbulent times for the UPW with protracted negotiations over capital and labour and instances of industrial action. These culminated in the largest strike in the history of the Post Office in 1971.

This was a six-and-a-half week national strike of all UPW members in January and February 1971. The UPW failed to gain the wage demands it had made in October the previous year when its members voted 14-1 to end the strike.

The whole affair is estimated to have cost the Post Office millions in lost revenue. The strike had long-term consequences for the UPW and Post Office wage bargaining. This was a result of coming as it did at the beginning of a period in which the Post Office ceased to be a government department and in which it was stripped of its telecommunications functions (this was privatised as BT in 1984). In addition to this, the more recent restructuring has included the more general amalgamation of Post Office Associations with the wider communications workforce in Britain.

Bibliography

Alan Clinton, The Post Office Workforce: A Trade Union and Social History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984).

POST 65 contains thousands of documents on the formation, functions and administration of Post Office unions and associations for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

POST 115 contains over 1,000 volumes of Staff Associations and Union Publications.

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