EVERY time a group of workers take strike action to defend their working conditions, pay, pensions and jobs they are subjected to a barrage of abuse from the “New” Labour government, Tory opposition, managers, “business-friendly” media and, on occasions, some of the public who are inconvenienced by the action.When you vote in a secret ballot to withhold your labour, you know that is almost certainly going to mean suffering a severe financial hardship both for yourself and your family. It is a last resort and workers certainly do not do it lightly.Those who condemn strikers as reckless fail to suggest any meaningful alternative.
Then there are a sinister bunch of characters who seek to ban strikes altogether because they damage the economy or the business community.
Of course people get fed up when they are inconvenienced, but the reality is; if you are forced to lose money by striking you want someone to notice that you are actually on strike.The current postal strikes are about more than the interests of postal workers (however justified their position is). They are also about the defence of the entire postal service.
Royal Mail’s cost-cutting business plan will mean more cuts in our postal services, more hikes in stamp prices, fewer collections and deliveries and even more post office closures.
Royal Mail has been starved of investment for decades and now faces utterly unfair competition from private operates who, for a discounted price, collect and sort profitable bulk business mail before passing it on to the Royal Mail to deliver over what is known in the industry as the “final mile”.
The result is Royal Mail has lost millions in revenue while the profits of private competitors have soared.
Now they expect postal workers to pay for this “private contractor promotion” by attacking working conditions, pay and pension rights... together with the potential axing of an estimated 40,000 postal workers’ jobs.While postal workers are asked to accept all this, including lugging about sackloads of private competitors’ mail, postal bosses like Adam Crozier will continue to accumulate sackloads of excessive salary.
Workers are told by the “New” Labour government that they need to make better occupational pension provision for themselves – we are constantly told the state pension cannot provide – but when postal workers take action to defend their occupational pension rights they are attacked... by the very same “New” Labour government.This is happening at the same time as the Post Office is trying to “spin a yarn” and persuade us that the branch closure of the main post office in Carlisle is actually a “branch change” according to the leaflets on the counter!
The same leaflet adds: “Pos****ch recognised that the decision to transfer to a franchise partner is a commercial decision to be taken solely by Post Office Ltd and is, therefore, not subject to public debate or consent.”
So here we are in Britain in 2007 – and the Post Office now thinks it can tell us what we can debate!.
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