Saturday 31 October 2009

Post strike dates announced... again

The ongoing dispute over modernisation continues with both sides maintaining that the blame lies with each other for failure to bring the dispute to resolution. The general public is now beyond caring whose fault it is. The spectre of millions upon millions of items of undelivered mail and the Christmas season just around the corner means that pretty much any sympathy that was ever coming the way of the CWU (Communication Workers Union) has been exhausted.

The underpinning theme of the dispute is job security in the face of modernisation. At a time when many workers in the UK are living with pay freezes, pay cuts and the prospect of redundancies there is no empathy left for this aspect of the dispute. The walk sequencing machine (which would incur these job cuts by sorting the letters for the rounds) can only be a good thing, if the state of my post at home and work is anything to go by - regularly receiving letters not only for different buildings in the same street but for buildings in different streets altogether!

The problem is that the longer the disruption from this strike action continues the more and more we are finding that actually we can live without the Royal Mail. Extremely prolonged strikes will, in the end, damage the Royal Mail's business - possibly beyond repair.