The EU’s role in the British postal strike

Lenny tackles the fear, uncertainty and doubts being spread about the postal workers strike:

These myths – about union intransigence, about the economic necessity of job losses, about the superior efficiency of private competitors, etc. – are being deployed for the purposes of turning a low-cost public service provider into a marketplace of competing providers in accordance with the extraordinarily resilient neoliberal orthodoxy. This brings with it the usual problems – soaring costs, as companies seek to make a profit, duplication of capacity as they fight for market share, and poorer service as low paid, casualised and de-unionised workers are less committed to the job, and less likely to have the time and training necessary to develop their skills. Royal Mail, for all its faults, is one of the last bargains in town. Less than forty pence for a first class letter to anywhere in the UK is nothing. What else would you spend that money on? You couldn’t even buy a pint of milk or a Mars bar with that money. Additionally, as much as businesses might whine when there is a strike on, capital makes a big efficiency gain with Royal Mail, especially if they use the metered mail service which gives them a further discount. Admittedly, the Royal Mail is not as cheap as America’s socialised mail service, where a first class letter can cost as little as $0.44 (£0.27). But we can’t all be as communistic as the yanks.

And the reason why we can’t be is the European Union. The decision to end the post office’s monopoly and (part-)privatise the mail service is not something New Labour thought up on its own –though they’re obviously not against the idea– it’s been an EU directive to “liberalise” the postal markets for years. And because it is an EU directive, individual countries can’t opt out, but are “forced” to carry through these sort of unpopular or even harmful reforms. This is the role the EU was created for, the bogeyman that can force through decisions governments want, but know would be electoral suicide to pursue themselves.

And even with the European parliament there’s little to no democratic oversight about these decisions and little attention paid to them or the EU’s role in determining Europe wide economic policies, even by people and organisations who should know better. We tend to focus on our national governments and parliaments rather than on Brussels, but much of what they supposedly decide has been decided for them.

Without the EU New Labour would probably still have wanted to privatise mail deliveries, but it would’ve been much more difficult to make it seem unavoidable.

UPDATE: it seems the above has been misinterpreted as me blaming everything on the EU. But of course it’s not the case of evil eurocrats forcing privatisation of the post office on New Labour. Quite the opposite. Neoliberal governments like New Labour have used the EU as a tool, creating EU regulation and treaty obligations to be used to force their own desires through. The opening up of the postal market is one example of this, another one was the “deregulation” of public transport, which here in the Netherlands almost meant the Amsterdam city owned public transport company had to be privatised. Luckily in that case internal resistance was string enough loopholes were found to prevent this.

The EU in its current incarnation is a tool of capitalism, used by neoliberal governments to overcome opposition in their own countries. EU laws, regulation and treaties lay the framework within which the part-privatisation of the post office can be made inevitable, and often it is too late once these issues surface on a national level. One of the few unions to understand this have been the dock workers fighting against deregulation on an European scale, pressuring both their national governments as well as Brussels.