There's nothing that quite brings together politicians, metropolitan media and corporate barons in a chorus of self-righteous rage and wishful thinking like the prospect of low-paid manual workers going on strike to defend their interests – and actually having an impact on their world into the bargain. That's exactly what's been happening in the run-up to today's walkout by nearly 50,000 Royal Mail sorting office staff and drivers and tomorrow's planned stoppage by 70,000-odd delivery and collection workers.
There's excitable talk of violence and riots. Postal workers are said to be engaged in an industrial suicide pact. The Sun believes it's "madness"; the Financial Times thinks they're turkeys voting for both Christmas and Thanksgiving. There is a string of silly comparisons with the 1984-5 miners' strike. One Times writer reckons the workforce is "completely bonkers". How could they even think of withdrawing their labour when the economy is still on its knees and the industry is besieged by private competitors and the lure of the internet?
Royal Mail's managing director, Mark Higson, describes the Communication Workers Union's decision to call the strikes as an "appalling and unjustified attack on customers". Lord Mandelson of Foy, who technically owns Royal Mail in his capacity as business secretary, declares himself "beyond anger" at the posties' folly.
Back in the real world, postal workers might have been thought foolish if they hadn't in fact voted to take industrial action. In recent months, Royal Mail's meat-headed management has accelerated attempts to impose job cuts and office closures, longer shifts and increases in the working week, heavier workloads, longer and faster delivery rounds, more casual and part-time working and effective cuts in pay – while reports of rampant bullying, harassment and sackings on paper-thin pretexts multiply.
Meanwhile, pension entitlements have been hit and wage rates frozen, at a time when the company posted profits of $321m and the chief executive Adam Crozier – formerly of Saatchi & Saatchi – pocketed £3m and £1.2m in pay and bonuses in successive years, compared with an £18,000 salary for the average postal worker. Any organised workforce faced with such attacks on its basic conditions of work would be bound to resist them.
But it's not as if the union has set its face against the new technology, changes in working practices or even reductions in staffing regarded as necessary for the postal service to survive and thrive. In fact, 63,000 jobs have gone in the past five years alone, and it has been the breakdown of an earlier "modernisation agreement" for negotiated change that has led to the current dispute.
The union is now offering a new three-year deal based on the principle of "consent and democracy in the workplace". But the clearest sign of who is behind the breakdown is the fact that while the CWU has been offering to go to the conciliation service Acas for talks without preconditions, the company – backed by the government – has refused to do so unless the stoppages are called off, while ostentatiously recruiting 30,000 casual workers to cut the ground from beneath its staff.
Against that background, it's hardly surprising that the postal workers' leader, Billy Hayes, concludes: "They're trying to break the power of the union and its influence in the workplace." If that's the case, there will be months of disruption and mayhem. This is an industry blighted by years of under-investment, threats of privatisation and a regulatory regime rigged in favour of private competitors. While it's true that the internet (along with the recession) is cutting letter volumes, it's also expanding the packages and parcels business as more people shop online.
Post is far from being in terminal decline. But by insisting on companies like TNT having privileged access to the Royal Mail network to cherry-pick its most profitable business, the government has hobbled its chance to grow and develop new services. Instead, from Sunday collections to second deliveries, old services have been cut back. Since Mandelson's plans to part-privatise the service were, as he put it, "jostled for space" by the opposition of Labour MPs earlier this year, the promised bailout of Royal Mail's pension fund deficit has also been put on hold, squeezing potential investment still further. The result has been relentless pressure on the workforce and today's walkout.
But the postal stoppages aren't the only distant echo of the "winter of discontent" public sector strikes that marked the dying days of the last Labour government in 1979 – and could be a taste of things to come, if David Cameron comes to power. Yesterday, hundreds of Leeds refuse collectors and street cleaners voted to continue a strike against pay cuts of more than £5,000 that has already lasted six weeks, with rubbish piling up in the city's streets.
By refusing to accept these assaults on their livelihoods, both Leeds binmen and postal workers across the country are resisting the race to the bottom that has been such an ugly hallmark of the past couple of decades. It's no good complaining about growing inequality or recognising, as Mandelson has done, that the employment relationship is a "fundamentally unequal one", while consistently opposing the use of industrial action to do something about it.
And it would be folly, even suicidal, for the government to pick a fight with public service workers before a general election, as the Callaghan administration did on a much larger scale 30 years ago. Alarmingly, Gordon Brown is reported as having been advised to bracket bankers and postal workers as "vested interests" that need to be taken on. Instead, ministers should be giving Royal Mail and the Post Office a new lease of life in the public sector with the privateers off their backs and managers able to bring their staff with them.
Yesterday postal union negotiators reported that they had been "edging towards an agreement" but had failed to make enough progress to call off the strikes. The test will come in the next few days: do Royal Mail managers, and the ministers behind them, want a deal to give a more progressive future for a popular public service – or a self-defeating, confected confrontation with one of the strongest workforces in the public sector? We'll know soon enough.