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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2007 11:32 am Post subject: Stand up, posties, and deliver your message |
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| Quote: | Stand up, posties, and deliver your message
Mick Hume
Call me old-fashioned, but can I just say, taking everything into consideration as reasonably as possible: Victory to the Striking Posties! I realise that this is unlikely to be a popular view of the postal dispute. In a world where we are all supposed to think as individual consumers, the default reaction is to moan about the strikes delaying our junk mail and gas bills. Our Labour Prime Minister, eager to be seen as the consumers’ champion, has told the greedy strikers to be grateful for what they are given.
But when a national strike is about as rare as a Penny Black, there must be something seriously wrong for up to 130,000 moderate workers to walk out together. And what is at stake here is a postal service that is rather more than a business model in British life.
The Post Office remains one of the few institutions that still helps to bind communities together. Unlike the anonymous Fed-Ex guy, the local postie is likely to be your neighbour, or the father of your child’s classmate. Many people still know them by name.
Of course these ties have been weakened. All the more reason to try to cultivate what remains, not trash them. There are loud complaints about plans to close local post office counters, so why don’t we also stand up against the threat to posties? It is already a hard enough job to do. I know, because I was that postal worker. Almost 30 years ago I spent nine months in a Surrey sorting office. It was arduous work, long on hours and short on rewards, where postmen needed overtime just to pay the bills and the grind was broken only by graveyard humour, dirty stories and the occasional outbreak of violence.
Many British posties will recognise the sentiment of the Los Angeles postal-worker-turned-novelist Charles Bukowski, who in his forties decided he had “two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy . . . or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve”. Back then, the unions ran the sorting office. Many postmen were ex-soldiers and the shop stewards were grizzled NCOs, making the decisions while managers cowered in their office. That has clearly changed, with Royal Mail management under its chief executive, Adam Crozier, pushing through job cuts and intensifying work in the name of flexibility and modernisation. Whether the service has improved as a result is another matter. Remember when there were two deliveries a day, the first one before you left for work? Sunday and Bank Holiday collections are soon to be a memory too.
But, Mr Crozier and his minions insist, we cannot be held to ransom by these greedy posties – apparently 40 per cent underworked and 25 per cent overpaid – and their outdated “Spanish practices” that fiddle even more pay for less work. Leaving aside the issue of why the thoroughly modern Mr Crozier uses such outdated language, there has been little explanation of what all this means in practice for postal workers.
So here is a posting on the BBC website, at the time of the original 2.5 per cent pay offer in June: “A postman earns a basic wage of around £325 before tax” – some way below the national average. As for the supposedly lucrative perks of those Spanish practices, well: “He also receives £30 or so for door-to-door items (leaflets) and an average of £12 per week as an ‘early start’ payment.” The insatiable greed of these people! Given that the pay offer of £8 a week was contingent on ending those two payments, the correspondent noted: “The offer is actually a PAY CUT of up to £35 per week.” The slight improvement in the offer since then seems more than made up for by the planned attacks on the pension scheme and working practices.
Anyway, postal workers appear angry less about the specific proposals than a general sense that “flexible” always means them bending over backwards. Having claimed that there were 92 different Spanish practices, management has had quietly to admit that, er, there were actually 92 examples of the same ones in different places, and none were “endemic”. But never mind, the mud has already stuck to the posties.
Who wants to be on the same side as Mr Crozier, the Saatchi & Saatchi man who almost “modernised” the English FA into oblivion? His current £370,000 bonus has inevitably become the focus of bitterness. I think that is a sideshow – after all, if they distributed it among the workforce it would barely buy a pint each. But Mr Crozier is a fitting symbol of how distant the managers and politicians pronouncing on the postal dispute are from the real lives of working people.
Don’t get me wrong. I hold no brief for leaders of the Communication Workers Union. Like union officials elsewhere, they seem most concerned to defend their own corner, and delivered Mr Crozier a propaganda gift by stupidly claiming that postal workers are slaves – an open goal that even he did not miss, dismissing it as “a load of cobblers”.
No doubt it is also true that the “flexible” tide of history is now against the postal workers, not to mention the tide of e-mail. But this old libertarian Marxist still thinks it important to support people trying to shape their destiny rather than accept their fate. Yes, I know this is not the 1970s, thanks. But posties of the 21st century still need to stand up for decent jobs and pay, and the rest of us still need to stand up for our communities. Is that an unacceptable Spanish practice? In the language Mr Crozier understands – cobblers. |
from http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mick_hume/article2641499.ece |
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