Tonight:
4°c
We face a second wave of postal strikes. The selfdestructive machismo of the Communication Workers Union in the face of the unquestioned need to modernise has brought us another display of the hardliners' muscle, with no regard for the consequences for Royal Mail users.
The disruption has already cost London businesses perhaps £500 million. What the run-down Royal Mail needs as it adapts to competition and the rise of email is new investment and expertise from outside.
Yet because of the resistance of backbenchers and the union the Government has failed to deliver on its declared policy of partial privatisation.
Meanwhile, some individuals and small businesses whose livelihoods are threatened by the CWU are asking whether postal workers, as providers of an essential service, should do without a right to strike just as the police do.
This would be an unusual condition of employment but then no one is obliged to work for Royal Mail as opposed to taking another job.
It is unfortunate that more mechanisation will mean redundancies but it is inevitable. Of course, the cuts must be properly handled by management under existing agreements.
However, so many industries have been through upheavals of this kind that it is hard to see why postal workers are entitled to disrupt national life when it is their turn to face cuts.
Their action damages their own company by forcing countless businesses, including major players such as Amazon, into even greater use of rival couriers.
TNT is experimenting to see whether it could take over "the last mile" of deliveries, making further inroads into Royal Mail's turf, and not necessarily in a form that would serve all of the public well.
For their own sake as well as for that of the rest of us, the postal workers should get back to work.
Beyond the pale
A senior manager at the London Development Agency has been sacked after using the "n-word". It will shock most of us that, in a diverse city where as many as one in three workers was born abroad, there are still people who think it is acceptable to use such demeaning language but it has happened.
Rightly, the offender was immediately dismissed following formal complaints.
However, the incident is a reminder that for some people, even those working at a senior level in an organisation committed to helping ethnic minorities, racism has not entirely been eliminated.
This newspaper defended the right of the BBC to invite Nick Griffin, the BNP leader elected to the European parliament, onto Question Time.
Attempts to silence elected representatives feed their claims of a conspiracy to suppress their views. But his racist ramblings will not, for some people, put him beyond the pale.
In a country where the chairman of the Equalities Commission, Trevor Phillips, has warned that ghettos are developing in some places, rather than the mixed communities that inoculate against racism, no one can afford to be complacent.
Lucky for some
It seems surprising only days after confirmation that Britain was still in recession but Pierre Koffmann's 80seater pop-up restaurant in Selfridges is to extend its life by another six weeks.
Of course, there are always winners as well as losers in an economic downturn.
But expressions of confidence and entrepreneurial spirit like this one are in their way good news for Oxford Street and for London.
Reader views (2)
Dream on,the likes of TNT will deliver only to commercial customers in towns and cities.The posties are being shafted.They have every right to defend themselves.
- Colin, barking essex, 29/10/2009 17:02
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Two issues here:
1. The mechanisation of the postal system has actually done nothing to speed up the delivery of postal packages. I live in a Sorting office and maind distribution town CM1,CM2.
When I first lived in Chelmsford 25 years ago, I used to receive my mail by 07:00 each morning. These days I am lucky to see it much before mid-day.
Mail workers have had their round sizes increased and the number of rounds reduced in the name of efficiency. And yet the cost of a postage stamp has gone up and the letter sent, classified, not just by weight, but about how wide and deep it is! Naturally incurring yet another increase in its cost to remit. This is getting absurd.
Whilst I find the mail workers strike very annoying, equally I sympathise with their argument about the way they are being handled. I don't see the senior members of The Royal Mail (and why should the Queen be lumbered with the inference that it is her fault the mail does not get delivered, and other poor levels of service) dropping their salaries or increasing their work load.
As more former Public Workers and Nationalised Industry Workers are actually moving back to the same situation they had in the 1970's, it would not surprise me if we have a repeat performance of 1979's "Winter of discontent".
In the meantime, on the private employees side of the market, more of our skilled people are leaving the UK to work overseas.
Well done Gordon: yet another cock-up!
- Chris Richards, Chelmsford Essex, 29/10/2009 13:08
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