Royal Mail's needs to be on a level playing field

Dr Madsen Pirie writes in the Daily Telegraph that the best way to handle the Royal Mail strike and poor performance is competition, except this is limited by the Royal Mail being VAT exempt.

Its competitors are not, so must face a 15% surcharge on their prices, making provision of anything other than high volume bulk mail difficult.

The answer is simple - extend the VAT exemption to all mail.

I wont hold my breath for the Tories to say this though.

Scab = person who wants job more than you

Idiot Savant is upset that the Royal Mail is hiring additional temporary staff to cover for the unionised labour that is going on strike in coming months. He says it is because of privatisation. He's wrong, the word is never mentioned. He puts modernisation in quotation marks, as if it isn't real. Yet it is - the Royal Mail is a dinosaur of the postal world, using automatic sorting less than its equivalents in France and Germany. NZ Post by contrast is seen as an example of best practice. Idiot Savant would always side with a militant union though, it's a tribal thing.

The left calls such people scabs - a vile term that helps justify doing violence to them and threatening their families, a not unknown tactic in some industrial disputes.

The truth is such people are workers, people who want to do the job the unionised workforce is less interested in doing. Let's be clear here, postal workers do not exactly have jobs involving deep levels of training or skills. It is easily substitutable. The choice is between those who want to work, and those who don't. Why should people who want jobs have any "solidarity" with those who have them but don't want to change to save their employer from ongoing losses of money and business?

Idiot Savant thinks because the temporary workers are being hired with full support of the Labour government it shows how "out of touch" Labour is. He's wrong. In fact it shows how desperate Labour is for Britain not to be brought to its knees at Christmas by a greedy union in the midst of a recession unwilling to let the Royal Mail being seriously restructured from practices that date back to the 1970s.

As the Royal Mail loses business to competitors (no doubt Idiot Savant hates the idea that other people might be employed in competing companies to deliver mail - a sacred duty of the state), this union action cripples it more, threatening more jobs, whilst Billy Hayes, the head of the Communication Workers' Union is on a six figure salary.

Nice to be supporting the proletariat isn't it?

Miners' Strike repeat?

You probably haven't heard of Billy Hayes. He heads the Communication Workers Union which is in charge of the rolling strike action at Royal Mail. He's digging his heels in saying "I'm stronger than Arthur Scargill" according to an interview in The Times.

He says this is because he does have a balloted mandate for the strike (unlike Scargill who opposed secret ballots so standover tactics could be used to intimidate miners who wanted to work), and while coal can be stockpiled and sourced elsewhere, mail delivery is more difficult to replicate.

However, it is not impossible. Royal Mail is financially on its knees, partly due to the recession, but mostly because it remains in the dark ages with technology and work practices, and competition in the postal market has seen the private sector take a good chunk of the business mail market. Meanwhile, online communications eats into the private individual market for letters.

My own experience of the Royal Mail has rarely been inspiring. The postman who wouldn't bother to ring the bell to deliver a parcel, but rather place a card in the box so you have to go to the central delivery office to pick it up - presumably because he was too lazy to carry parcels. How about the one who wouldn't enter the premises to go upstairs because "he wasn't insured" to climb stairs. Funnily enough neither am I, and there is a lift, but he was having none of it.

This sort of communist-bloc attitude to service is helping kill it off.

A union led by a man on a salary that is anything but working class.

The response, I suspect, is that Royal Mail's competitors will have even more of a bumper time. The main gap in the market is the more difficult service for the general public, not helped by the unnecessary layers of regulation for the "deregulated" postal market.

Anyone should simply be able to collect mail, establish post boxes and deliver as they see fit. Removing as many barriers as possible to this sort of competition would help drive a thriving postal sector, bring benefits to entrepreneurs, prospective employees and consumers, and give more reason to privatise the Royal Mail.

However, the likelihood this moribund Labour Government could offer any inspiration to take on the CWU is little beyond zero.