Mark Field is MP for Cities of London and Westminster. As the CWU begins a two-day national postal strike, he considers what the future holds - if anything - for the Royal Mail.
Any organisation whose performance and reputation declines as precipitously as the Royal Mail’s in recent years cannot expect to survive. Battered by the rise of the internet, competition from leaner and more flexible rivals, a massive pensions shortfall and an increasingly truculent workforce, this once proud British institution’s final blow may well be self-inflicted.
To go out on a national strike at this time is suicidal and I cannot help but wonder whether in twenty years, we shall look back on this time with surreal disbelief as an apparently impeachable organisation was so swiftly snuffed out. From today’s perspective this may seem a fanciful prospect, but look back in recent history and you will find startling parallels with the sharp declines of other great British industries. The Royal Docks provide one such example. Having overcome the destruction wrought in World War Two, the docks were riding high as the 1960s dawned. Within two decades, by October 1981, they had all closed.
Containerisation, technological change and a switch in the way in which Britain traded following EEC membership led to a rapid decline in the docks’ use. Alongside this, however, emerged an ever more assertive workforce. In 1967, all casual dock working was stopped. Each worker was guaranteed a minimum weekly wage and could not be sacked except for misconduct. This created a fixed workforce of 23,000 that simply was unable to be fully utilised as mechanisation took over. Though working numbers had dropped to 8,800 by 1977, there were still too many men for the work and employers looked to cut numbers, introduce flexible hours and a shift system.
This led to bitter industrial disputes in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the trade unions deliberately obstructed the introduction of new technology. This only encouraged and accelerated the use of alternatives. So by 1978, the Port of London Authority found itself on the brink of insolvency and central government was forced to order restructuring to make the operation commercially viable. In the end public money haemorrhaged so rapidly that the London docking industry had all but died by the dawn of the new decade. Anyone familiar with the workings of the newspaper industry will know that that sad tale mimics the demise of the print workers, when the move of several leading newspapers to state-of-the-art premises in Wapping sealed their fate later in the 1980s.
Today the Royal Mail teeters over a similar precipice.
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