Official strikes staged by postal workers before and after the weekend before last, have been followed by a wave of unofficial strikes, mainly in Mersey side, Scotland, London and the Manchester area.

Why? Partly because the threat of Royal Mail imposing flexible working conditions on postal workers and closing their final salary pension scheme, was still there. And partly because Royal Mail managers were provoking the workforce by trying to implement some of the flexibility measures even before they had been agreed.

Meanwhile the CWU was still negotiating with Royal Mail. By Friday, a deal was announced which was to be referred first to the union's Postal Executive and then, if agreed, to the membership.

At the time of writing the union executive was still discussing the deal and its content had still to be published. But leaks showed that there was no change in the main issues, on job flexibility and pension. The only new elements were a little bit more money and the fact that the job flexibility measures were to be trial-run before being negotiated at local level.

This way of trying to bribe workers with a few quid and getting the union to help in enforcing the management's plans at local level, is well-known at Royal Mail. This was how they made massive job cuts over the past 3 years with the cooperation of many CWU officials.

The odds are that this is, once again, what the leadership of the CWU will try to do: instead of refusing this rotten deal point blank and organising serious action, they will ballot the membership, in the name of democracy. As if they were concerned with democracy, when they kept hiding the content of their negotiations behind a thick veil of secrecy over the past months! No, the only purpose of such a ballot, which is bound to last a month at least, would be to dampen the postal workers' anger and to demoralise the most militant among them.

But such a manoeuvre may fail. The fact that so many Royal Mail offices have been taking unofficial action over the past week shows that there is a deep suspicion among workers against what is being cooked up behind their backs. This healthy suspicion and militancy may help them to do what their union leaders are incapable of doing: to use their numbers and organise a solid fightback against Royal Mail's attacks. If so, they should get all the help we can give them.