POST APOCALYPSE

POSTAL WORKERS STRIKE AS YET ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE IS NEO-LABOURISED

Selfish postal workers are threatening to ruin Christmas as thousands of aunty knitted jumpers get caught up in a mail back-log thanks to a series of commie strikes.

Just think of your local bus service or overpriced, unreliable trains if you want to see what prospects are in store if private companies take over the Royal Mail. Yet the government are at it again, and want to break the union, cut workers pay and conditions and parcel up the service to the highest bidder, heralding a privatised, fragmented service.

One postie told SchNEWS why he is supporting the strike: “Royal Mail recently announced that mail traffic was due to fall by 10% a year and to counter this they were going to engage in a period of ‘modernisation’. The reality is that they’re going to lay off 30% of the workforce, freeze pay indefinitely and engage in a period of Executive Action which would see a postie’s workload increase between 30-40%. All of this bypassed a previously negotiated agreement with the Communications Workers Union.

“Not a single one of us wants to go on strike and lose money but neither do we want to be exploited for poor wages while the guys at the top continue to earn massive bonuses for what, they keep telling us, is a failing company. A company in so much trouble that they managed to make profits last year of ONLY £321 million.

“Of course really Royal Mail is worried about the massive self-inflicted pension deficit, not to mention their desperation to sell off the loss making deliveries sector to the highest bidder. So, for modernisation read privatisation. Try and send a birthday card to your relatives in Inverness for 39p after all this happens.”

While 3,500 post offices have closed across the country, the wages of Royal Mail boss, Adam Crozier, have shot up from a just-scraping-by £114,000 a year when he started in 2003 to over a million quid today. Meanwhile he has been busy telling the union to shut up and is employing 30,000 scabs to break the union resolve.

The CWU are going to the High Court to apply for an injunction against RM taking on workers to cover strikers, an employment practice which is illegal. RM claims the temps are there to clear backlogs in the run up to the festive mayhem. In Slough, Manpower has even set up a recruitment office to get scab posties - more short-term insecure contracted posts and money to middleman recruiters.

Nine-lives-Mandelson says not enough capital will be raised in the current climate if the Royal Mail is put on the market, so privatisation has been deferred. But when it’s pared down after ‘modernising’, it’ll be a different story.

Whatever happens over the next couple of days, the post office faces considerable squeezes now and in the near future. This means more ordinary folks will lose their jobs and the likely just-as-expensive-to-run RM will offer a service which is less affordable and equitable (especially for those in the sticks).

The talks with Royal Mail continue behind closed doors at the TUC, with all sides posturing and brandishing their plans of attack. David Barber of the CWU says that the last three days have been productive, but strikes will go ahead, on November 6th and 9th. Well over a hundred and twenty thousand are set to strike unless the proposal they have tabled is accepted.

At least we won’t have to wear those f***ing jumpers.