I’m listening to the radio and countless callers moaning about the current UK wide postal strike and am slightly amazed at how many businesses still rely on both payment by cheque and the sending of paper invoices the same way. I am surprised that so many companies do not bank and invoice electronically. Me, I’d set up bank transfers, on line payments and invoice via fax and email for the week but I guess I’m already used to
that. People hate change.
Typically the public seems to have very little time for the postal workers plight (lots of talk akin to ‘life’s tough, get over it’) and sadly it would look like this strike action could all be part of a very drawn out suicide note (I tend to feel that there’s been a concerted effort to undermine the Royal Mail and gear up for semi privatisation over the past 10 years or more). It’s amazing how many people seem upset by the fact that postal workers are trying to assert their rights when the callers feel thy have no rights in their own working situations (whose fault is that?). I’m unsure if that’s a form of jealousy or yet again people feeling that postal workers somehow ‘have it easy’.
Britain has become a very strange place with societal bonds and empathy seemingly stretching only as far as our own immediate environment and situation.
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4 Comments
October 10, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Amen to that, I am frankly incredulous that whilst Postal Workers are striking in an attempt to secure a fair pay deal and maintain the service to the public, the public in turn accuse the Postal Workers of being greedy, money grabbing slackers that are out of date for even thinking that they might stand up for themselves.
Societal bonds and empathy seem to stretch as far as our own convenience will allow.
October 11, 2007 at 10:36 am
Hello Scottcarless, thanks for your comment. The sense that ‘we’re all in it together’ seems lost now. The politics of envy has given way to the apathy of ‘I’ve got too many of my own problems to care about anybody else’, together with branding almost everybody else as somehow getting away with an easier life. It’s not really a good basis for a cohesive society (I know, what a dreamer).
October 11, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Dreaming is no crime, we need dreamers if we’re to overturn the mass of cynical selfishness that pervades current society.
We’re stuck somewhat by our conditioning and the overiding doctrine is ‘business as usual’, we work our little mittens off come rain, shine, bereavement, divorce and war and it is seen as heroic and ‘British’ to do so, we don’t ever ask why that is.
Strip away the layers of conditioned belief and you start coming to unpalatable and unsettling truths about why we do what we do and why we accept the injustice of capitalism.
I know I’m sound like a raving Marxist but thats just part of the problem, if you start banging on about fairness and equality you’re labelled a left wing lunatic and largely ignored unless you become a threat.
You’re spot on with the surmise that people are too busy talking about how tough their own lives are compared to others, it seems to be some weird downwardly spiralling game of keep up with the Joneses, or a little like that Northerners sketch by the Monty Python crew.
Anyway, thanks for the article its great to see somebody who isn’t launching into an invective against the Postal Workers.
Cheers
Scott
October 11, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Thanks scottcarless. It is a shame that talking about fairness and equality brands people are ‘raving Marxists’ like the old ‘loony left’ tag the press seemed fond of years ago (if it’s ‘loony’ to care about these things then I’m a raving loony too). You’re right it does feel like a take on the ‘4 Yorkshireman sketch’ as we all somehow proudly proclaim that ‘our working conditions are more intolerable than yours but you never hear us complain about it’.
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