Rarely can there have been an industrial dispute where everybody loses, whoever wins. The public loses if a series of rolling strikes badly disrupt Christmas post deliveries. The Government as sole owner of Royal Mail will take political flak for allowing the dispute to slide into a national strike. Royal Mail loses if lengthy disruptions increase the fall in UK mail volumes, already at 10% a year, when every 1% of lost mail volumes costs it £70 million in lost revenue. Postal workers and the CWU lose if the pension fund deficit, now estimated to be some £9bn, is not met and continues to drain off £800 millions every year in cash which could otherwise be spent in modernising plant and improving working conditions. The problem now as both sides square up for a confrontation is that the traditional (and historically often highly successful) route to resolving deeply rooted and entangled disputes like this one – via ACAS – has now been deliberately blocked, and all sides have now settled for the worst, with damage limitation to their own position by putting the worst gloss on the motives and intentions of the other parties.

Royal Mail says it is doing its best to modernise in a highly competitive environment, but claims that the CWU writes to its branches that the policy is to actively oppose change on the ground. The union accepts the need for new arrangements, but objects to a Royal Mail macho management style which it sees as bullying and harassing of postal workers (on which it wants an independent inquiry) and demands that the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement should be adhered to, namely that “change will be introduced by agreement”. The Government wants a more cost-effective and competitive postal service, but Mandelson refuses to press Royal Mail to go to ACAS (which the union has agreed to do) and is suspected by the CWU leadership and many members of the PLP of secretly wishing to privatise and casualise the industry. Meanwhile the public are left in the middle with a postal service in turmoil and a real fear of a big loss of post offices which are loved and valued for their wider social community role.
If, as now seems likely, the blood-letting starts, the trial of strength will depend on several factors: the legality of Royal Mail taking on an army of agency workers for strike-breaking (which is illegal, but Royal Mail will argue that it’s for temporary pre-Christmas work), the capacity of the union to picket these alternative pre-sorting offices across the country, and the ability of TNT and other private operators to fill the gap in deliveries left by the strike, among others. The question is, how much flaunting of industrial muscle has to be gone through before it is accepted that a no-win dispute of this kind can only be settled by concentrating relentlessly, with help of independent conciliators, on exactly how needed new procedures can be introduced with at least minimal agreement.

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