At La Poste, union repression does not take a holiday. This Friday in Bordeaux, Willy, a postal worker for 15 years and a union member at Sud PTT, is summoned to an interview prior to a possible dismissal. I don’t know the exact reason, but it is clearly linked to my union activity. With my union, we have always fought against the destruction of public services, job cuts and degraded working conditions. ” he tells us.
This is not the first time that Willy has been attacked or threatened by management. Last year, management initiated a similar procedure, before “reducing” the request for a sanction to a reprimand, only to be ultimately dismissed. Barely had this procedure ended when a new one was launched against Willy, who is not the only one facing this union repression: “Every year, there are between 10 and 30 major procedures in the group. As far as I’m concerned, this is not the first time either.”reports the postman, whose colleagues are no longer even surprised by such relentlessness.
A national strike notice has been filed, and SUD PTT and the CGT are calling for a rally, with delegations of colleagues coming from all over France to support the unionist. He “I hope that other trade union and political organisations will also mobilise, because this is not a problem that only concerns Willy. It is to defend trade union freedoms that we must mobilise. My summons is an isolated case but in the face of all the attacks we must generalise the fight”
In fact, this attack is part of a national anti-union offensive led by La Poste. At the same timeseveral Sud PTT union members in Bouches-du-Rhône, including the departmental general secretary Yann Quai-Bizet, were summoned to interviews prior to a sanction for, according to the union, “having simply spoken in services”. This repression also affects the postal services of Yvelines and Hauts-de-Seine, with the aim of, according to Sud PTT“to eradicate protest unions” and militant unionism, a few weeks before the CSE elections at La Poste in October. In the same vein, at the beginning of June, six La Poste unionists from the Perpignan region were taken to court by their management for going on strike.
This is in line with the unprecedented repression that the workers’ movement has suffered since the end of the movement against pension reform: police summonses, dismissal procedures, permanent threats… it is a real repressive leap that has been launched by the State and the employers.
It is in this nauseating context, marked by the rise of reactionary ideas, that these anti-union attacks are being deployed. For Willy, “The bosses are repressing in a relaxed manner because our response to these attacks is not yet up to par. At La Poste, we were at the forefront of union repression with the dismantling of the public service against which we fought and continue to fight. The problem now is that we need a comprehensive response. In any case, we will not let this happen.”
As the postal workers’ state of mind shows, it is more necessary than ever to fight against the trivialization of union repression, by relying on collective responses that can serve as a basis for renewing offensive strikes and winning new gains. Like the recent victory of Christian Porta, CGT union delegate, and his colleagues, against the agribusiness giant InVivo, it is possible to reverse the dynamic.
So meet this Friday, August 23, at 12:30 p.m. in front of the La Poste headquarters in Bordeaux (Meriadeck) to support Willy and put a stop to the anti-union offensives.
