Royal Mail strike

[Mellors]

Good or bad?

Obviously bad in the sense that we haven't had any post today, but overall are strikes which inconvenience the public a bad thang or an important part of the democratic process?

[SteveT]

I hadn't noticed, so not an important process then.;-)

[Huguenot]

The right to strike is a fundamental cornerstone of a democratic nation.

It's a weapon of last resort, as it's intrinsically destructive.

The right to strike itself is misused when the impact of the strike far exceeds the potential cost to the worker.

A great example of this is the Tube.

The system won't be allowed to fail, and there are virtually no 'real' alternatives. Hence the workers can strike with impunity and frequently do over insultingly unreasonable demands. Ther salary, working hours, holidays, perks and delinquent behaviour are quite out of step with their qualifications and commitment.

That's not a victory for workers rights, it's greed and indolence.

For those who don't know the figures, it's over 40 grand a year starting salary (after 3 month probation), 35 hour week, 43 days annual leave, free travel for drivers and their families (an estimated 10 grand a year value).

[????]

Two good mates of mine are tube drivers and are like pigs in shite and admit it - back on topic to be frank I think teachers striking is a disgrace too. Of course, hugenot is right about it's place in a democracy and the importance of the right to withdraw your labour as an important freedom

[Huguenot]

I think history will judge the Royal Mail strike to have been pointless: a twentieth century solution to a twenty first century problem.

They're inefficient and hugely indebted. The unions want the government to guarantee jobs that aren't required for a product the public don't want on the terms they're prepared to offer.

[DaveR]

The CWU mistakenly believe that they have the same sort of clout that the tube drivers do, but the truth is that changes in the sector and general decline in the importance of mail services have made them politically impotent.

[Tony.London Suburbs]

Will inconvenience The Business Community far more than the residential one.

At home I like to receive as little post as possible as "no news is good news".

On a wider scale The Tube Drivers do now have plenty to Crow about but would anyone here like to work in their conditions?

The heat can be overwhelming and can make a Tube Drivers life extremely uncomfortable.

Not for many here, including me, I suspect.

Usually striking is the last refuge of a scandalous Union.

[macroban]

All tube train driver cabs air-conditioned since the introduction of the 1972 stock?

[Pugwash]

I have never been on strike in all my working life (40 odd years). If it was a question of keeping my job with a 1% pay rise or risking cut backs in staffing for a 3% pay rise, I would accept 1%.

To me, my working conditions ( flexible working hours) location and my work colleagues, as well as an interesting and varied job, are more important. It is better to work to rule. refuse to do overtime to cover for staff shortages, etc than to strike.

[immaterial]

Personally, in 30 years of selling my labour, I've been on strike on at least 8 occasions (4 alone in the last 7 years!), not including sit-ins, walk-outs and go-slows; both in the private and the State sector. It's never an easy choice, withdrawing your labour, you lose pay, you can split the Branch, creating inter-workforce conflict, you risk alienating the public and for me, and I believe most of my comrades, as well as National full-time paid officials, it is always the weapon of last resort.

Workers in struggle; whether greedy, over-paid train drivers, Trotskyist teachers, back-ward looking C20th Posties, sacked Vestas turbine workers, comrades at Visteon (Ford)all deserve public support and respect, not the opprobrium generated by the bosses press. Cut-backs, pay curbs and the dreaded privatization all impact on the public in the long term.

With regard to the posties' struggle, after conversations with the fella who delivers the mail in my part of SE22, he cannot see the point in widening the dispute nationally in Sept.; says there's not the appetite for it.

In my sector of the Public Service, we now have the carpetbaggers in to review our operations, but from brothers and sisters in recently reviewed divisions (pre-consultancy 100% in-house, post: 25% poor buggers remaining!) we have learnt of their modus operandi. What will we do? We'll rely on the support and expertise of our full-time negotiators; we'll call for workplace meetings to inform our members and counter any plans to shed jobs, formulating strategies based on the ideas and proposals that arise from the membership. Then, if all else fails: talks break down, continuing managerial intransigence to our counter-proposals, and only if we think we can galvanize our constituency into action, would/will we ballot for strike action. That's how it works in the majority of cases; a weapon of last resort.

[Tony.London Suburbs]

After reading your post immaterial, I can only wish all your Comrades and brothers and sisters in the recently reviewed divisions and elsewhere in your organisation, the best of luck in your continuing struggle.

It can't be easy being at the sharp end.

[DaveR]

Workers in struggle; whether greedy, over-paid train drivers, Trotskyist teachers, back-ward looking C20th Posties, sacked Vestas turbine workers, comrades at Visteon (Ford)all deserve public support and respect, not the opprobrium generated by the bosses press.

Immaterial, did you fall asleep in the mid-70s and wake up yesterday?

[immaterial]

Stuck in the 70s?

I've just returned from a short stay in Italy where 3 workplace occupations were taking place against factory closures and the threat of privatization; garnering popular support and relatively sympathetic media coverage, . Two of the struggles were successful and the third, occupying the upper tier of the Colosseo, was still ongoing up until a few days ago.

I suspect that the majority of the Forumites in this room would be aghast at such 'un-democratic' attacks on property rights and such a scandalous, cavalier attitude towards industrial relations, in defense of workers' rights and against job losses.

Or am I wrong?

[Huguenot]

Ha!

You're setting up Italy as an aspirational target???

Good man, good good man.

You would also be aware of the working class support for the Lega Nord, including separate trains for immigrants - and indeed "dress them up like hares and bang-bang-bang".

It's so 70s it's like a cross between 'Love thy Neighbour' and 'Rivers of Blood'.

Mind you, if you're going to get all Italian on us (I suspect a significant part of your immersion course in Italian workforce relations) you'll be aware that the definite article 'the' is attached to the proper noun 'Colloseo'.

Hence you can either have 'il Colosseo' or 'The Colosseum' but none of that pussy-footing in between.

[immaterial]

The Drawing Room...

"This is a place for discussion about serious issues and current affairs..."

Doesn't really hold true does it Hugenut?

I make some observations in an earlier posting related to strikes and the processes involved in the lead-up to this form of industrial action; only two cynical, sarcastic responses and no engagement with the politics.

Then another observation, in the vain attempt at some level-headed political discourse, about economic conflict abroad and comparisons with our "pussy-footing" around here and BANG!: La Lega Nord ( or is it The Northern League ? ), snide comments about immersion courses and grammatical corrections.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear....

[Huguenot]

You held up the Italian workers for admiration, I suggested they deserved no such pedestal.

You made a snide generalisation about forum users with no basis in fact: "I suspect that the majority of the Forumites in this room would be aghast at such 'un-democratic' attacks on property rights and such a scandalous, cavalier attitude towards industrial relations, in defense of workers' rights and against job losses."

I gave you back what you dished out, and like Sir Alan Sugar, you don't like it.

The Royal Mail strike is not about 'workers rights' unless you regard employing people to do things that don't need to be done is a 'right'.

It is in fact old-fashioned totalitarianism and state interference.

In that case your allusion to Italy came full circle as it became apparent the this totalitarian approach is still celebrated in the country that brought us Mussolini.

[immaterial]

The usual muddle, bluster and arrogance; ignoring the points and even managing to introduce IL Duce into the 'argument'.

How do you, or rather, why do you do it?

[Huguenot]

I'm not sure Immaterial old chum, but I'm thinking that the psychoanalysis you kindly offer is a little offtopication on this thread.

I'm sorry you struggled to get the point.

To repeat... you held up the Italian workers for admiration, I suggested they deserved no such pedestal.

Your Italian example was presumably to demonstrate that in Italy they deliver on the promise... "Workers in struggle; whether greedy, over-paid train drivers, Trotskyist teachers, back-ward looking C20th Posties, sacked Vestas turbine workers, comrades at Visteon (Ford)all deserve public support and respect, not the opprobrium generated by the bosses press."

I don't have any problem supporting anyone who has a reasonable case to make. The only one in your list that currently has a reasonable case is the Vestas workers, but my anxiety with those chaps is that they seem to think the government should bail them out.

I guess that would fit in nicely with the totalitarian state you propose?

[immaterial]

No struggle, because I find it, like most of your points, to be naught but meaningless muddle.

Any group of workers, not consulted and instructed by diktat (as in the case of the Posties, in which agreed-upon plans for modernization and consultation have been torn up by Management), who decide to strike, occupy workplaces and resist the command and control of a system in crisis - whether they are Italian, French, Chinese, British or Spanish - do, in my own biased opinion, deserve respect and support.

Never once have I proposed a totalitarian state, nor do I believe the resistance of autonomous workers' movements to an economic system in crisis to be a stepping stone towards the establishment of such a state. In fact, I believe the only answer to the current crisis in the democratic states are greater doses of democracy.

Useful link: http://www.cwu.org/news/archive/biggest-week-of-postal-strikes-looms.html

[HAL9000]

immaterial Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> No struggle, because I find it, like most of your

> points, to be naught but meaningless muddle.

Ha! Join the club.

[Huguenot]

"Any group of workers [...] in my own biased opinion, deserve respect and support."

Why? You don't care about the arguments, or the realities?

I'm sure there are worthy strikers, but it's facile to suggest that they all deserve respect and support. Those who 'struck' (striked?) two years ago in the LU fiasco over whether they had 'kettles' or 'urns' were patently deserving of neither respect nor support.

[HAL9000]

immaterial Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> No struggle, because I find it, like most of your

> points, to be naught but meaningless muddle.

Ha! Join the Club.

OB: The postal service is so bad these days it is difficult to tell whether it's on strike or working normally.

[immaterial]

I repeat:

Any group of workers, not consulted and instructed by diktat (as in the case of the Posties, in which agreed-upon plans for modernization and consultation have been torn up by Management), who decide to strike, occupy workplaces and resist the command and control of a system in crisis - whether they are Italian, French, Chinese, British or Spanish - do, in my own biased opinion, deserve respect and support.

Of course, you appear to have edited out the key middle section of my brief paragraph in which I express support for self-defensive actions only in the eventuality of Management reneging on agreements or not consulting their employees over changes in their terms and conditions.

I do care about realities, along with reasoned, considered, un-edited, accurate arguments.

Your reference to a dispute over tea-making facilities for ASLEF train drivers took place 7 years ago and a fuller account can be found here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/storm-in-a-tea-urn-threatens-the-tube-665828.html

[PeckhamRose]

Spoke to a local postie this morning, as he sat on a box waiting for the delivery van with six bags of post to deliver. Since it was late and he was having to wait that's his manager upset with him, and his average 4 miles an hour delivery walking time down the pan. I told him I was one of the few who had bothered to write to my MP about the situation and she had written with a reply from the Communications Minister or some such person saying as Royal Mail was a limited company it was down to them (Mr Crozier). He told me a few years ago the posties in his area was told a big new clever sorting machine was being installed that meant it would do things so much faster and more accurately. The night staff were fired before the machine was installed. To date that machine has yet to be installed. All the day workers are doing the extra work. The Casuals are paid MORE than the regular posties who know the rounds. I support the postal workers 110% and think the whole service should be re-nationalised. But that's me.

[Netquest]

Striking!?! i can't believe it's still happens in 2009!!

My posty will be happy as i will now use suppliers who use privat carriers, so he can enjoy lighter bags...

Regarding the tube, well where i am from (originally) the tubes run computer controlled. They don't strick and are on time.

Surely a first world country can resolve this situation....