The Independent talks bollox!

[NEWS]

Over the top lads. Unions are said to be confident of winning a clear mandate for strike action at Royal Mail in this week's ballot, but it is the folly of the First World War trenches to believe they can win. Nominally about pay and conditions, the underlying issue is Royal Mail's plans for modernisation, for which read automation and a lot fewer posties than exist at the moment.

The Royal Mail board is refusing to blink and promises to deliver the post itself if the strike goes ahead. At this stage, directors appear to have the backing of the Government in refusing compromise, but there is no telling how robust this might be after a few weeks of strike action.

Public sympathy for the plight of the postal workers is in all likelihood close to zero, while modern communications technology makes strike action less disruptive than it would have been 10 years back. The country can no longer easily be held to ransom. What's more, public money - some £3bn to £4bn of it - has been committed to modernisation of the Royal Mail Group, so it has to be assumed that whatever the politics of the strike, ministers will stand firm.

In gambling that they won't, unions are taking a huge risk. For the biggest reason for thinking that strike action will prove largely ineffective is that there are these days plenty of alternatives to Royal Mail, and not just email either. Deregulation of postal markets means that big, high volume users of the mail services can already go elsewhere. It will only be the little guy that suffers in a strike, and of course Royal Mail itself, which will find its services privatised by default as customers desert never to return.

Royal Mail directors are said to be about to pay themselves big bonuses in recognition of improvements in quality of service last year. Unions are angrily accusing them of deliberately delaying publication of the accounts to avoid disclosure ahead of the ballot.

Yet infuriating though these payments may be, they are really quite irrelevant to the future of the Royal Mail, whose workers are in serious danger of voting themselves out of a job. Fast-growing and multiplying rivals have none of the legacy costs and baggage of Royal Mail. There is no alternative to modernisation.

Allan Leighton, the chairman of Royal Mail, has just written a book on leadership. Persuading workers that their best interests lie in accepting painful change is one of the most difficult leadership challenges of the lot. When it is the protected public sector, it becomes doubly so, for people believe that immunity to change is part of the quid pro quo of working in the public sector.

Unfortunately for them, there is no industry or service now immune to the ravages of global competition and technology. If postal workers don't accept modernisation, their jobs will simply go elsewhere.

[IWW Fellow Worker]

I see. So we choose a day to take action and the previous day all those e-Bay sellers and firms like Play.com, Amazon etc turn up at the local TNT or Parceline office expecting our rivals to deliver the stuff? Some alternative. Any chance the Sky magazines will be turned over to Murdoch's own postal service to deliver? I doubt it.If Royal Mail are refusing to blink, why are they worried enough to keep on sending their propaganda out and putting their posters on every available wall asking us to vote No?
It's not about modernisation, it's about screwing the workers and in turn the customer.
If The Independent and the rest of the so-called quality press want to ask questions, they might ask how Royal Mail management turned a business making profits of £1.5m a day into one losing £1m a day. How come noone was hauled before a Commons Select Commitee? Why? Because Royal Mail are liars.

[mdtomuk]

HI GANG! THE INDEPENDENT IS 'MY' PAPER AND I'VE JUST READ JEREMY WARNER'S PIECE IN HIS 'OUTLOOK' COLUMN. GUESS HE HAS WRITTEN IT FOR THE BUSINESS COMUNITY. I'D ADVISE YOU ALL TO GIVE HIM AN EMAIL, JUST TO PUT HIM IN THE PICTURE ABOUT WHO ACTUALLY HAS BUSINESS'S FUTURE IN FOCUS. HIS EMAIL IS j.warner@independent.co.uk OK? I'M CONTACTING HIM LATER THIS AFTERNOON.

[bristolchris]

To hear is to obey, have just e/mailed. The article was the `usual` not a balanced view at all!

[DirtyHarry]

I just love the press, don't you ? .................. Apparently, there's absolutely nothing any working man/woman can do to prevent from
being exploited , guaranteed an uncertain future , or reversing the capitalist juggernaut hurtling us all the way back to our grandparents
time , when management could do whatever the hell it liked , and the working classes were grateful just to be working, even if that
work barely put food on the table. B%ll%cks !

If we don't deliver the post , the post won't get delivered , that's a fact. If and when the RM board, and this quissling
government, decide they want the mail to flow throughout the country as it normally does,
they are both going to have to change their stance with us , that's also a fact.

It's in an awful lot of people's interests to keep pedalling the inane propaganda that workers are powerless to
defend themselves , we
should not fall for it , for it most certainly is not in our best interests.