The nation's best striker?

I ordered rail tickets for our upcoming match at Yeovil earlier in the week and had a dilemma over what delivery option to go for. You know, the free "standard" second class delivery, the chargeable first class or the very chargeable premium courier version. My dilemma was that all options came vis Royal Mail whose workforce have been taking sporadic industrial action for some time now and who are threatening the start of whole days of national walk-outs.

In the end I opted for standard delivery as we still have weeks to the game and I worked on the assumption that I could always collect at the station on the day if they got lost in a Royal Mail warehouse in the meantime. I have made several other on-line purchases this week and have had to check who the deliveries come from, just to be sure I know I am not in the hands of Royal Mail if it's Parcelforce who have the work. Being a largely stereotypical bloke, I also rely on the internet for increasingly more of my shopping and with Christmas looming, a national postal strike could force me back to the shops.

Royal Mail is a subject dear to my heart as I have been responsible for switching my work's large volumes from one supplier to another in recent years. The issue with Royal Mail is that for post, they control the last mile in the delivery chain, the Posties, as that part of the service has not yet been opened to competition. So, you can switch your mail to TNT Post or others but you will be similarly affected by a Royal Mail strike.

Packet and Parcel delivery, however, is different for anything over a 1kg in weight or thereabouts because it's the domain of the courier company and here there has long been competition for Royal Mail's Parcelforce. Trouble is, when a strike looms, you can't easily switch any volumes to other couriers because they have capacity limits and simply can't handle all the additional traffic that would like to use them.

The sad fact is, a solid national strike by Royal Mail employees is probably one of the last Unions who can really wield a big stick and whose action has a disproportionate affect on Britain plc and Joe Bloggs. Timing is everything and in the midst of this recession and with Christmas looming, they look to me to have got their timing just about perfect.

The Unions case is, of course, very defensive of an industry desperate for modernisation which will hammer jobs and working conditions. As usual they are exaggerrating elements of their case which only detracts from the stronger points in my mind. I should say now that I have little sympathy for Royal Mail's management which has failed in many ways to modernise just like their service. It's still one largely dominated by former shop-floor workers who once they cross the line believe their primary role is to confront and harass workers because that is their only experience of management.

Of course the sad thing is that the Government sits above it all wringing it's hands. The only way forward is full privatisation. It might not be good for the Consumer in far flung places in terms of cost, but eventually it would lead to innovation and better services although the days of paying significantly less than a pound for next-day delivery of an envelope to the other end of the country would be long gone.

In the meantime, my money would be on the Union. They look to have the upper hand and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Gordon Brown feels he has to intervene to prevent a damaging national strike prior to a General Election he looks destined to lose as it is, let alone on the back of a calamitous postal strike.