Oct 10 2007
Postal strikes
I feel sorry for the postmen. Their frustration at the pension crisis, where the government’s tax and regulatory regime has done damage to so many people’s future pensions is understandable. Their leadership encouraging them to strike is making things worse,not better. The country is not grinding to a halt. More businesses are discovering they can do more by email and web, whilst others are using private sector competitor services for delivering physical items
It is difficult for managers to manage within each Post Office and local area,as they are told to cut costs but not given credit for growing the business and increasing revenue. This is bad for morale, as the way out is always seen as another cost cut rarther than winning new business. The strike will reduce business further, intensifying the managerial pressure for cost reduction. The sooner there are proper incentive schemes and a share scheme for employees the better. It looks very old fashioned to witness this Them and Us struggle. The losers will be all who work for the Post office if they go on for much longer.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
I too feel sorry for the postmen and women. This government has systematically destroyed the post office by taking so many services away from it, TV licensing, pension payments etc etc. They have also allowed private companies to cherry pick the profitable parts of the business without having to take on the less profitable areas.
I have written to the CWU and suggested that they should withdraw their funding of the Labour Party until they are more friendly towards that Great British institution that is the Post Office.
I accept that times have changed and that it is likely the workers are compounding the problem, but the government have stopped the Post Office in many ways from modernising and developing the business while taking the workforce with them. Post office managers should be allowed to manage and not have to be puppets of a power hungry micromanaging government.
Closing village post offices is a short sighted policy and using lack of customers as the reason is typical of this government especially bearing in mind that the reduction in customers is down to the government imposed cut in avaliable services.
[...] “Living a Life Less Ordinary” has an open letter Could bookshop sales increase thanks to the postal strike? The Bedside Crow is thinking of starting a Facebook Group Bocho on the Telegraph’s MyTelegraph blog service wonders if this is all a shot in the foot for postal workers Simon Bullen points out that yesterday was World Post Day - what a way to celebrate! John Redwood MP feels sorry for postal workers [...]
Exactly.
I’m not in any way bonused or ‘performance managed’ to promote ‘free online billing’ and comment on the unreliability of the post service, or even to make snidy remarks about trade unions.
But I do now, and I speak to a lot of customers every day.
Oh, and I should have added that my employer wants our customers to use ‘free online billing’, so all I get is a pat on the back for my trouble.
Postmen are unwise, or perhaps not sufficiently prescient to see that delivering bits of paper in the 21st century is an industry in decline. Lengthy industrial action will only serve to highlight how little impact their absence has on society and hasten their obsolescence. Royal Mail is not critical to the fabric of society and should have been privatised much earlier (possibly during the Major government).
Postmen have been left high and dry as the government allowed private sector operators into the market whilst failing to recruit competent senior executives to implement radical restructuring early enough. This could well have been for reasons of electoral expediency, but just as easily incompetence. In no PLC would the senior executives have tolerated being so constricted.
[...] trackback The one thing I didn’t expect to be doing this morning was agreeing with Tory MP John Redwood on the plight of the postal workers in the currently still-ongoing postal dispute in the UK. For [...]