Back
to SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage
Royal Mail strike for 5 days is reminiscent
of how the printers ruined much
of their UK industry
Editorial
Filed 04 Oct 07
©www.land-care.org.uk
The Royal Mail go on a nationwide strike starting
noon today. It is to last for 48 hours, to be followed by another
48 hours starting Monday. That means that, effectively, the Royal
Mail is closed down for 5 days, not to mention the disruption when
its members return to work on Wednesday.
Allegedly the strike is over the introduction
of new technology and the adjustment of working hours in the attempt
to make the Royal Mail profitable, instead of losing 5.2p on every
letter that it delivers.
The situation is reminiscent of the attitude the
printers in the UK took to the introduction of computerised technology.
Much of their industry within the UK was decimated and much of it
has never recovered in this country. Edinburgh in its heyday was
a centre of excellence in printing. But the action of the printers'
union put an end to most of that. A vast amount of printing simply
went abroad and never came back, because our foreign competitors
had become the real experts in the field.
May be, just like the rest of us trying to run
small businesses in the private sector, the members of the Royal
Mail might just have to get used to working shifts according to
what the business demands, if they want to keep their jobs. Perhaps,
if they do not like that, they might like to set up as being self-employed
and run their own business. They might get a severe reality check.
While the Royal Mail workers have a certain amount
of public sympathy because the Government would seem to have gone
out of its way to take business away from the Post Office, that
sympathy is unlikely to extend to supporting such extensive disruption.
The strike is bound to increase the efforts of
businesses, and of private individuals, to use the internet to an
even greater extent. Internet communications in this area gets better
and better with technological advances, such as Acrobat version
8 now available, including certification of documents, ready archive
filing, search facilities within documents, etc.
For those in cities, where the majority of Royal
Mail's customers are, there is the option of independent companies
acting as postman. Courier services are also available, Indeed,
courier services are likely to be the ones that deliver internet
purchases to wherever you are within the UK.
But neither the internet (with its extensive broadband
facilities) nor courier services can entirely replace the Royal
Mail. This is well known by the postal workers, so they hold the
country to ransom.
That is the big difference between the head-in-the
sand attitude of the printers union in days gone by and the stance
taken by the postal workers today. The printers lost most of their
jobs and their industry, but the country just went elsewhere. for
their printing. That is not quite so easy with the Royal Mail, but
not impossible. I seem to recollect that the Dutch have rather a
good reputation for delivering postal services.
Sympathy for the postal workers will vanish. May
be it is time that the public sector, not just the postal workers,
got real.
Gordon Brown, along with his predecessor
Tony Blair, have been in office for 10 years and have failed to
tackle the issue of the extravagant expenditure incurred by the
public sector. Gordon Brown is going to be a brave man if he chooses
to hold a general election this autumn. But then perhaps he might
choose to do just that, before matters get precipitously worse and
the consequences of failed Labour policies come to roost with a
vengeance.
©www.alnd-care.org.uk
|
