It looks as if the Post Office is gearing up for another dispute. If I have interpreted the signs properly, this will mean maximum disruption over Christmas.

In the past I have been as ready as anyone to blame the militancy of the workers for precipitating these disputes but I have recently become aware that the militancy of Post Office workers is not something that they are born with. Their militancy is the last resort of a workforce desperate to maintain the service they were employed to provide for the public in the face of increasingly destructive interference from management.

I came across an article last month which said that "Postal workers are opposed to the ways in which management is introducing changes to work practices." This makes it sound as if there is some kind of philosophical debate going on between management and the workforce. In fact the opposite is true. The conditions that are creating the current dispute are exactly the same as those that created the last three disputes and the Post Office management have learned nothing from any of them.

In the Post Office the people who know how to deliver the service, like most businesses, are the people who do the work -- the drivers, the sorters and the postmen. Successive generations of managers arrive at the Post Office and make their mark by making changes to the management systems that were put in place by the previous management. Except that it is not those management systems that control the way that mail is delivered.

After each dispute, caused by management trying to implement unworkable systems without reference to the workforce, the unworkable systems are amended by the workforce who gradually find ways of working around them so that they can continue to make deliveries despite what they see as the best efforts of management to stop them.

This dispute is no different. There is a new chief executive who in common with every previous chief executive of the Post Office, believes that he is the only person in the world who knows how to run a Post Office.

His first act was to order the dismantling of all the local arrangements that had grown up to reduce the damage caused by the last chief executives ideas for change. Now amid the ensuing chaos he is trying to introduce yet more changes and is still refusing to speak with the only people who are still trying to maintain the Post Offices ability to deliver the mail.

The workforce are not resisting his changes because they have an issue with changing to produce a more efficient service. They are resisting because they have an issue with the managers whose only contribution to the running of the Post Office in living memory is to make it more and more difficult for the people who get the mail from the post box to our doors to continue to do so.

The workers are in dispute because they want to continue providing the service that they joined the Post Office to provide.

The cause of this dispute is exactly the same as the last three. The workforce are trying to prevent management from destroying their ability to continue to deliver letters but management, because they are so convinced of their own divinity, will not listen to the very practical and proven advice of the workforce. They storm ahead oblivious of the carnage they are creating.

The Post Office management are like one of their own articulated trucks gone out of control.
The actions of the workforce are like those of the police who, having tried every other way to stop the destruction caused by the out of control truck, are finally forced to blow out its tires to limit the damage that it will cause.

As ever the workforce have the solution and as ever the problems are still being caused because management are not capable of listening to the workforce.

They are too busy blaming the militant workforce for their destructive actions to realise that it is their own refusal to listen that is causing their militancy.

I expect this biannual cycle of destructive dispute to continue until the Post Office are prepared to invest in management who will listen to the workforce, or until there is no more Post Office left to manage.