Like most people in the UK, I am suffering from a lack of postal deliveries because of an official strike that ended today (with rolling strikes due to start next week) … I have several parcels stuck waiting for delivery and it is more than a little frustrating! I was more than a little surprised (and initially annoyed) when the early morning news announced at least one wildcat (unofficial) strike taking place.
Fortunately the media let slip a little detail about why the wildcat strikes started. It seems that the post office managers had changed the working hours without talking it over with the union first. Now perhaps many people reading this will think the managers had every right to change the working hours without negotiating with the work force … personally I disagree, but I am not going over that issue.
The postal workers returned to work at 5:15am (or a similar time … it has been a few hours now) probably in a bit of a militant mood (I’ve been on strike myself and it has that effect), but mostly also keen to get on with dealing with the large piles of unprocessed post. Only to be told by the managers that the hours had changed and they would not get paid for the work done before 6:00am.
Now in normal circumstances the workers would have been prepared for this change … they may not have been happy about it, but they would know and would probably casually mention it to each other on the way home the previous night. Anyone who forgot would probably just slap themselves on their forehead and think “how dumb am I?” (I’ve done something very similar myself).
But these are obviously not normal circumstances. Communications between workers and managers tend to break down during a strike, and the workers may not have been aware of the change or they could have thought that it would be quietly dropped, or simply forgotten about it. And anyone with any sense would see that quietly dropping the change in working hours for now would be diplomatic.
Again there are those who say that the managers had the “right” to change the working hours, and again that’s not the point. The point is that making workers who are keen to get stuck into that big pile of letters and parcels (and most probably were keen) either wait for nearly an hour or to work for free is not likely to encourage good worker-management relations. And in these particular circumstances is likely to provoke exactly what we have seen … wildcat strikes.
Whilst the wildcatters probably deserve a bit of condemnation for what they are doing, it would seem that gross stupidity on the part of the management also deserves some of the blame.