10th August, 2007

Yesterday Sheffield Industrial Workers of the World held an information stall in support of striking posties outside the main central post office on Angel St. The postal strike had been officially called off earlier in the day in the reopening of talks between the CWU and Royal Mail bosses, but many workers are still ‘working to rule’ and taking unofficial wildcat actions.

The aim of the stall was to distribute the Dispatch ( http://libcom.org/library/dispatch-public-sector-pay-dispute-1-august-2007) strike bulletin to striking workers, but it became clear that if the 2:30 strike had gone ahead in Sheffield it wasn’t doing it publicly in the same place as last week. Wobblies came prepared and instead handed out general information about the strike to the busy intersection, as well as a few ice cold drinks from our ever popular, multi-faceted, tea urn.

Response was positive, couple of ‘they get paid too much anyway’ comments. Given that nothing much happened to report, lets just re-state the idiocy of these sentiments: Adam Crozier the chief executive of the Post Office gets £1,000,000 per year – and the posties are overpaid? He (was) demanding 40,000 job losses and 2000 closed Post Offices – and the POSTIES are overpaid? Posties are better paid than most workers because they have been willing and able to organise their collective power and take industrial action, inside and outside of their trade union. And that’s what it’s all about.

IWW