Going Postal

The current strike at Royal Mail has met with a poor reaction in some quarters among my friends and acquaintances due in part to the portrayal of the union as intransigent and irresponsible and over playing of the impact of the two day strike in the media.

We have short memories. The labour movement has fought for many years to obtain the freedom and rights which many of us have come to take for granted. Government ministers, starting with Thatcher and ably carried on by the arch conservative Bliar (not a misspelling) have rolled back many of these rights encouraged by their backers in big business. This assault on workers rights over the last thirty years has emasculated the unions and their members and has seen their protection from autocratic and profit-at-any-cost managers greatly eroded. Thankfully but coincidentally, left-leaning and socialist political parties in some of the more liberal societies in the EU have slowed this tide and advanced some individual protections which have been hard fought for and are now enshrined in legislation.

Thatcher’s intent was to create a large pool of cheap untrained labour to satisfy the needs of her industrial backers – a return to Victorian Britain. The workhouse is just around the corner – last month Gordon Brown advocated a situation where:

Teenage single mothers will be “placed in a network of supervised homes,” shared homes where they will be taught parenting skills and given other skills.

Almost neutered unions are fighting for their members’ livelihoods and trying to protect work practices agreed with the managers that are now trying to divi up the Royal Mail for privatisation. Assailed on all sides, they are struggling for membership and support from the public. Can anyone remember the “benefits” of privatising BT, British Gas or any of the other projects other than the short term share issues (bribes!) that we were bought over with? We’ve had the piss taken out of us ever since with prices!

We now have many overpaid faceless fatcats living high on the hog, while hundreds of thousands of workers face redundancy followed by McJobs until retirement on a laughable state pension. The gap between rich and poor is now 20% larger than it was in the 1980s. Thanks Maggie!

Remember that, when Sally Starbuck is serving your next skinny Mocha. She’ll need to rush off to her other job just to make ends meet.

The best opportunity to see what is happening all around us is to look west. There, in the US, the free market reigns supreme. Read Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or almost anything by Michael Moore to see that the all powerful profit ethic is destroying US society. It’s happening here, it’s happening now – we just can’t see it because of all the celebrity mush fed to us daily that passes for “news”.

Broad strokes, I’m afraid, but this is real and it’s happening now and no one seems to care very much.