The postal strike planned for the end of this week is “completely bonkers”, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Royal Mail is facing a serious challenge to its very existence so management is installing new technology that will help it compete. “Yet this investment is being greeted by strikes.” Why? To advance demands that are so vague and unreasonable as to make it “impossible for management to yield to them”.
That’s not quite true, said Jackie Ashley in The Guardian. The Commercial Workers Union may not have handled its PR very well, but this isn’t a story of dinosaur posties “whingeing about sore backs”, refusing modernisation and demanding unaffordable pensions. There are too many stories of “aggressive and bullying behaviour” by managers for them all to be union propaganda. Moreover, a huge number of job cuts have been agreed and implemented, and there has been a pay freeze.
But whatever happens, everyone is likely to lose out, said Finkelstein. Businesses will defect from Royal Mail (Amazon already has) and the strikers don’t stand to gain. Economists from the London School of Economics conducted a study of strikes in the 1980s and found that the average increase in annual pay produced by strikes was only 0.3% while the average strike lasted 11 days. So the “wage gain would have to be retained by individual employees for 30 years simply to break even”.
Since strikers are “prepared to fight to the bitter end”, could this redefine an entire industry as the miners’ strike did 25 years ago? asked Melissa Thompson in the Daily Mirror. Yes, and not for the better, said Christopher Hope in The Daily Telegraph. There are no guarantees that private firms will continue the “one price delivers anywhere model”. “Quite so,” agreed Ashley, “if Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson are looking for an issue to show they still understand Labour voters’ instincts… this is it”.