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Up the Workers!
Now, I’ll be honest. I hate strikes. I always feel that they are a way of a union punishing not only those they have a grievance against but also the innocent customers who rely on a provided service.
And that usually includes me and I – like 99.9% of humans – am a selfish bastard.
So my initial reaction to the current postal strikes was one of “oh for the love of Camelot, do you have to? Can’t you just go into arbitration and sort it out between you?”
I have, however, rather come round to the CWU’s way of thinking. Not least because it’s the Royal Mail management and Lord “of Darkness” Mandelson who are refusing to go to ACAS so I can see why the balance has tipped.
Plus, the Conservatives have pledged to privatise the Royal Mail should they come into power and since everything they are I am not, I can’t support the changes suggested in that area. And more to the point I believe Royal Management are manipulating the figures and are, essentially, a bunch of lying bastards. This article here rather illustrates why.
So no, I think the Royal Mail management should be sacked and replaced and the system left in public hands with workers treated fairly. The Royal Mail is too important to be fucked up like this, and there’s never been a single public-turned-private institution that I’ve ever had satisfactory dealings with. Private companies don’t really understand public services.
Now by an astonishing coincidence I am reading Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal” at the moment, and it’s proving to have some remarkable parallels – not least of which is Lord Vetinari’s comment about the service which has become a joke.
“Unfortunately the Post Office came to be seen not as a system for moving the mail efficiently, to the benefit and profit of all, but as a money box. And so it collapsed, losing both mail and money. A lesson for all of us perhaps.”
Echoes a bit doesn’t it?
Posted on October 22, 2009 | Filed Under The World we Live In
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