sorry for the delay in posting

i apologise to people for the delay in posting since the last post. i have been very busy with things like training, reading writing and enough other things to distract me. as a matter of fact we've been on strike today at portishead delivery office. although the ballot result is due to be announced next week it is important to keep the pressure up on royal mail as the fact is that the two sides are now talking as a result of the industrial action but without the pressure from the union the talks will collapse without agreement. after getting up at 5 am to go and stand on a picket line for a couple of hours the few hardy souls that bothered to come down we went for a breakfast at a cafe.

striking is always a controversial subject and we posties have been given little public sympathy over our industrial action. here though is one story about about what happened to one of my work colleagues in a previous job down at portbury docks. the firm he was working for forced the union out of the work place. the managers then made so many cuts in hours that it left the work force unable to meet the targets laid down for them because the work load was so high. as a consequnce of this business went else where and within 3 years the firm went bus. unions are there to make work places more democratic and also to stop firms from shooting themselves in the foot like the current crop of royal mail managers are trying desperately hard to do as their plans for the business will only drive more business to the competition in the long run. we have lost no business as a result of the strikes it is all due to incompetent management, but the fact is we were losing contracts even before the first round of strikes two years ago. the union have never tried to stop modernisation of the business but the fact is that modernisation cannot come at the expense of peoples working conditions which is what royal mail is REALLY trying to force through. they (royal mail) say that it is the union trying to act like luddites but the machinery that the union is supposedly trying to block the use of is already in place and being used! so all in all the facts of this dispute are being wildly inaccurately presented by royal mail in a desperated bid to get people on their side and the tragedy of it is that many people are gullible enough to believe what they say and nothing that the union says saying with some justification that the unions have political agendas etc etc. the morale of postmen and women is lower now then it has ever been. scott roberts and many others have criticised us for going on strike saying things like 'don't they realise there's a recession on?'. recessions should not be an excuse for giving big firms the green light to do what they want because financial problems work both ways. ie these problems should be solved democratically and not just by rich people like cronzier and mark higson making more cuts and dumping all their shit on poorly paid workers who're already struggling financially before this recession even began, henceforth not by diktat. we've also been told many times that we should be count ourselves lucky that we have a job. well firstly there are many postmen and women who would gladly give up working for royal mail and swap it for redundancy. secondly there is a threat of redundancies in the very near future, although royal mail has gone to great pains to assure its staff thatno one has ever been made compulsorily redundant in this business, but they have made no assurances about the near future that convince me there will not be compulsory redundancies (a very cleverly worded statement) and the union has repeatedly tried to get them to make these assurances but they keep onn giving us the same crap about the past. in short my argument is that trade unions are about every member of the working classes standing together against the criminal behaviour of some of the people who try to run (or ruin) our lives and don't do a particularly good job of any thing apart from enriching themselves