management blog

The Royal Mail and its unions are at loggerheads. Again.

I moved to the UK in 1997 and like a letter that never reaches its final destination, turmoil in the organisation is one of the business stories that has been a constant throughout the time I have lived in the country.

Every year, it seems to have lurched from crisis to crisis: successive bosses have said that the service needs to modernise or die; unions and workers battle them back in negotiations, claiming that ‘modernisation’ is a code word for gutting the organisation, cutting jobs and reducing salaries to disastrous levels; and the government, publicly at least, seems keen to stay out of it as much as they can (though I have to say, Lord Mandelson’s statement on the decision by the CWU to strike – “Candidly, I think it is suicidal” – did strike me as extraordinarily strident).

The Royal Mail is, of course, a big business but it is also a national brand and that affects how people watch it. There are some companies with which consumers feel they have more than a business relationship and they are often businesses that have become part of the national psyche. Every country has them – in the UK, you could throw in Marks and Spencer, which is one reason why its ‘Your M&S’ slogan was so clever, in France, pretty much any French company that is a target of foreign takeover (remember the furore when Mittal Steel launched its bid for Arcelor?).

I have trouble believing that the Royal Mail would ever actually die; it really does seem like one of those businesses that is too big to fail, and the government maintains a stake in it. What the organisation will look like in a few years is anyone’s guess. Answers on a postcard (or a comment).

UPDATE: Brian Groom, business and employment editor, has a video interview with Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union.