For you nonBrits who are reading this, the background information you need is that the Royal Mail has been convulsed off and on for the past 4 or 5 months with wildcat strikes by its members in various places. As the postal workers in Southwark are particularly Bolshie, we have had more strikes here than perhaps anywhere else in the country. The Communications Workers Union (CWU) has now balloted its members and has announced that the first of a nationwide series of strikes will be held next week on Thursday/Friday.
The strikes here have left businesses unable to pay their bills as their customers’ cheques are still “in the post”. Millions of letters and parcels are stacked up in sorting offices waiting to be delivered. When the letter carriers are working, they have so little time during their rounds that they do not ring your doorbell when they have a package for you—they just drop the notice in your mailbox. This creates more work at the sorting office (which has to retrieve the packages) but gets the letter carriers off work earlier.
My copy of The Economist has not arrived on Friday for months now. Sometimes I get it on Saturday; more often I get it on Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week, by which time any interesting new it contains is, regrettably, very stale. My Private Eye should have arrived last Wednesday. I will be lucky if I get it today.
The CWU says that Royal Mail is bullying its members over modernisation. Royal Mail says that the CWU is blocking modernisation in a bid to bulk up its membership by requiring more postal workers. The CWU is trying to get Royal Mail to the arbitration service ACAS (right up the street from me at the Borough) but Baron Mandelson of Hartleypool and {somewhere else I forget}, the Business Secretary, says that arbitration would not be helpful.
Meanwhile, postal customers are leaving Royal Mail by their thousands. Just as e-mail has dried up the art of using dead trees and opaque liquid to communicate via snail-mail, the fact that I can transfer money to a creditor via my computer and my bank’s payment system means that I rarely post a cheque to anyone in the United Kingdom. Amazon has announced that it is reconsidering its contract with Royal Mail to deliver parcels under 500 gms (a bit more than a pound). As most CDs and books are under a pound in weight, this will be a major blow to Royal Mail, as Amazon is its second largest customer.
A few days ago, in the Grauniad, a letter-to-the-editor mentioned that it is now possible to go to most W.H. Smith shops (the major British newsagent) and send something via DHL for a small sum—more than a first-class stamp, but less than most other courier services.
Yesterday, a member of the CWU wrote that using DHL in this way was tantamount to being a scab and trying to break the CWU strike. WTF?
The Royal Mail is saddled with inefficencies, overstaffing, arcane labour practices that date back to the days when labour was cheap. The CWU is convinced that a national strike will bring Royal Mail to its knees.
Earth to CWU: The Royal Mail is already on its knees. No one will thank you if it expires under the weight of a huge undelivered backlog of letters, parcels, Christmas cards, and gifts from Grandma and Grandpa to their doting grandchildren. And no one will blame Royal Mail either, even if (as you say) it deserves part of the blame for the strike. They will blame you for:
- Businesses going under because their bills aren’t being delivered and their payments not received;
- Periodicals no longer being timely because they have been delivered weeks after their cover date;
- Children crying because their grandparents’ gifts are part of the backlog so that Christmas gifts arrive in time for Pentecost;
- Queues outside sorting offices reaching 300 yards away because letter carriers don’t bother ringing the doorbell when you have a parcel;
- Junk-mail purveyors losing so much business they close so that Royal Mail will lose income from delivering their post…um…maybe that’s good?
- Businesses who rely on direct-mail to publicise their businesses going under because of lack of customers.
Oh, and CWU, if you think that Royal Mail will settle because they want to protect their Christmas business, you have another think coming. Around December 20th, when the strikes haven’t yet forced Royal Mail to the table and some budding entrepreneur has started a Pony Express business in the UK and is making millions, it will become painfully clear that it is to Royal Mail’s advantage to let the CWU carry all the blame for the strike thus keeping Royal Mail itself relatively blameless. You’ll call off the strikes, but it will be too late. Ask Arthur Scargill about the effects of strikes on a monopoly industry in the United Kingdom.
When the smoke clears and the parties settle, as they will, both the union and Royal Mail will have kneecapped each other. Universal postal service in all parts of the United Kingdom will be a distant memory. Operations such as DHL will cherrypick the easy bits such as London, Manchester, Cardiff, Birmingham, and Edinburgh. No one will want the Orkneys or the Scilly Isles. We will have 5-days-a-week delivery—businesses that depend on 6-days-a-week delivery to get cheques in faster will have to whistle for it. Packages will be delivered by an alphabet-soup of agencies (DHL, TNT, Amtrak, UPS, FedEx) which will deliver at any and all times of the day. If one doesn’t have an e-mail address (hi, Great-Grandmother!) one will be out of luck when utilities stop sending paper bills to those who want them and require e-billing and Direct Debit for payment. Royal Mail and the Post Office will become a purveyor of commemmorative stamps for philatelists, a doler-out of state pensions, and a receiver for licenses and passport applications.
And Royal Mail (and the government, which by this time will be firmly Tory, I believe) will blame it all on the CWU. At that point, when even Radio 4’s “Today” program won’t interview you, you’ll know you’ve totally and utterly lost the game.