Anyone in the UK have an opinion on the postal strike?Follow

Hardly surprising. How often do you seem someone acting favourably to those on strike when it affects them negatively?

The UK economy is still largely in the same boat that the U.S. economy is in. large strikes now will do more harm for the postal workers than waiting and striking later would do, because they lose popular support. A strike next summer with a "we gave concessions until we were bled dry and now we need more money to survive" tactic would have been much more successful.

Do people in the UK use the postal service all that much?

It seems to me that I haven't used the USPS for a good couple years now thanks to UPS and FedEx.

Normally, I couldn't care less. But now I need to post some parcels to friends off in uni... I'm pissed off lol.

From what I have heard, they're contracted to work X amount of hours, however if they sort and deliver their mail they can sod off home early, one of the managers was on the radio saying that they want them to do their contracted hours.

I don't know--it doesn't necessarily reward people then for getting their work done quickly and efficiently as opposed to those who take the entire shift to finish their work. It is a job where it matters more that you do a set amount of work well and not that you work a specific number of hours. I'd want to get off early if I was better at my job than some other person.

And honey, work in the American service industry. See what happens when an entire industry's workers have little power. You guys are alot better off.



Edited, Oct 20th 2009 3:03pm by Annabella

Actually, I'm off today... so there!

Now, I realise I come across like like a Python scene "What have the Romans ever done for us?" but ... in recent times (post 1980), what have the (trade) Unions done for us? (UK or US)

prepares to paint a broad conservative brush

I admit to being a child of the Thatcher Years. I grew up in an age of capitalism, only seeing the destructive influence of traditional Unions.
I admit to holding a bias as a result of that but seriously .. I do not hold a single positive memory of any traditional Union in my lifetime. They have become engrained in my mind with rejection of modernism, protectionism, abuse of power and anti business. This action only solidifies that image in my mind. The missplaced arrogance of Billy Hayes annoying me intently. Not only is this strike hurting customers but in the long term, as customers leave Royal Mail it only hurts the very members Billy Hayes claims to be working for.

I'm a bit torn - I can see the sense in the employers wanting to get the best value for their money, and wanting the workers to work the hours they are getting paid for .

But, if for instance a postie does his rounds pretty quickly, how much extra work can they do ? I'm sure they could go back to the depot and do some stuff there, but its a pain in the backside journey each way I imagine . And I don't want people being forced to work the hours they are paid for to mean that posties deliberately drag out their round either .

Personally, I say if someone is managing to complete their rounds early on a regular basis, by all means give them some extra work to make it to the full hours, but also give them some recognition of doing their job well . If half of the posties are so good they are getting jods done early, give them more work and get rid of some of the poor performers .

It promotes people doing a half assed job to get their work done faster so they can get out early and still get paid for the same amount.

No, I don't believe so. Salaried workers are common. Most of my coworkers and myself are salaried. And we are required to stay 8am to 5pm, even if we have little to no work to do. The only exception being earned time off for overtime spend previously, in which case they will allow you to take time off without any problems. On a Friday I may poke around for an hour cleaning up some unimportant paperwork, waiting around in case something breaks.

Our work quality is not diminished by us being required to stay from 8am to 5pm. I signed a contract saying I would work 8am to 5pm, Monday thru Friday. Regardless of how much work I may have to do.


The real solution, if these people have that much free time that they want to fight over it, is to lay off a handful of people and spread the workload more evenly so everyone has something to do for their entire contracted work time.

I don't either. I was making a blind guess based on intuition, given the fact that I'm totally unqualified to make a judgment about macro level causal, economic, psychology concerning the effect on large numbers of people's mental states versus the length of the mandated work shift. I then compared it to your assertion in an attempt to show how absurd it was by means of my own comparable absurdity.