Friday 16 October 2009

CWU, Royal Mail and Policy Exchange

I was at this meeting last night when the news that the Royal Mail's entirely unsurprising document of evil had become public came through (and well done the Mirror, btw).*

Now, the SW this week has 5 good reasons you should support the strike anyway, but apart from that, the speakers and posties who were there had plenty of tales to tell: full-timers being replaced with part-timers or just not at all; bullying management; complete lack of interest from the bosses in adhering to the code that they agreed to after the last round of industrial action; bosses scabbing above and beyond their own union's advice...

So anyway I used the mighty iPlayer to catch up on the Newsnight breaking of the story. Just a couple of things:
  • Did they really just show the Battle of Orgreave footage backwards AGAIN?
  • All things considered, Labour MP not as despicable as she could've been. Hard to tell if that's just because her constituency's got a sorting office and the fact that there's also clips of the Prince of Darkness making her look better by default, of course. Having said that, flannelling over what the word 'shareholder' might mean in a wholly government-owned business was a bit pathetic.
  • LET BILLY HAYES SPEAK, you twat. You didn't interrupt the bloke from Policy Exchange, did you? Which brings me neatly on to...
  • Policy Exchange android Neil O'Brien is a cunt. And is either astoundingly ignorant or brazenly disingenuous at that. Actually, if you'd bothered to speak to the CWU you'd have found out that the CWU want 'modernisation'. What they want is to be a part of the process of updating the service so that it can be brought forward as a public service, not some privatised husk. Repeat after me: competition will only undermine a public service if policy makers let it. The free market is not natural, it is ideological. Now fuck off.

Sorry, but I really am quite angry about this. Support the strikes next week, in any way you can. Remember, as SW put it: a victory for them is a victory for all of us.

*Sample text:

A new relationship with our people is non-negotiable and will happen anyway, with or without union agreement.


Nice.

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