Slow burn at the Royal Mail

Gregor Gall introduces IRS' review of activity in UK postal services.

Since 1979, when a Monopolies and Mergers Commission report condemned postal workers' "restrictive practices", and over the long period of neo-liberal Conservative governments since, the agenda of radical change in work practices and the machinery of industrial relations has loomed large in the Royal Mail.

But as is well known, in practice the organisation has been like the proverbial oil tanker, taking miles to slow down before it could even think about turnround. All "change" proposals have been negotiated - formally or informally, nationally or locally - with the workforce and its union, and as a consequence they have been variously stopped, stalled or watered down. Why has this been the case and why have some critics called it the "last great unreformed industry"?

Central to understanding the industrial relations of the Royal Mail is the idiosyncratic and particular configuration of organisational and logistical characteristics to be found within it. This can be best explained by demonstrating the postal workers' capacity and capability to disrupt the postal service. The capacity to disrupt refers to the mail system at one and the same time being both fragile and rigid because of its internal integration and external integration with users, where deadlines for collection and delivery are tightly set. The capability refers to workers' collective organisation at the workplace level being able to utilise this fragility and rigidity by virtue of their strong union organisation and strong union consciousness. Putting the two together means that, according to the Sunday Times in 2001, the Royal Mail has been the most strike-prone organisation in the whole of Europe.

Despite strike action, basic pay levels remain in comparative terms stubbornly low and, thus, non-basic pay remuneration and so-called "Spanish" work practices are prized by the workforce as a form of compensation. When changes are proposed to the latter, sparks often fly, causing frequent bush fires and, sometimes, national conflagrations. Since the mid-1980s, the Royal Mail has been the single most strike-prone organisation-cum-industry in Britain. National and semi-national strikes occured in 1988, 1996, 2001 and 2003, with major regional strikes in 1994, 1995, 2000 and 2001.

Talk of the financial and organisational collapse or implosion of Royal Mail has always been rather fanciful. The organisation has an enduring resilience because of economic, social and political needs on the part of business and domestic customers and the state. Such talk has had much more to do with trying to create bogeymen to heighten bargaining leverage over the postal workers and their union. We need only recall how the world did not change, as Royal Mail thought it had, after the rejection of official national strike action in November 2003 because of the semi-national unofficial strike that arose out of disputes in London a few weeks later. The CWU sensed the pendulum had swung back to them and took advantage of this. This one example indicates not only the continuing sense of trench warfare but also the fluidity in Royal Mail's industrial relations.

Of course, there is another way of looking at this. Put the other way round, Royal Mail "lost" less than 1% of days worked in 2000-01, a period of heightened strike activity - and over 50% of offices have not experienced strike action since 1990 (with the exception of the 1996 national official strike). But this may merely serve to highlight again the tremendous impact and visibility of strike action in the postal service.

Looking ahead, what does the future hold? Despite the significance of deregulation and encroaching competition championed by a zealous Postcomm, the pace of change will not be quick and certain. Serial director Alan Leighton seems to have met his match. The basic configuration that forms the foundation of the postal workers' collective power is still present and their power is there to be exercised if they wish.

Dr Gregor Gall, reader in industrial relations, University of Stirling and author of The meaning of militancy? Postal workers and industrial relations (Ashgate, 2003).

See Difficult delivery: industrial relations in the postal service for more.