‘Can Do’ Replaces ‘Muddle Through’ as British Beat Mail Strike

It has been several years since the British public has endured the disruptions of a paralyzing labor walkout, but anyone who thought the respite might have eroded their ability to cope with adversity now knows otherwise.

So far the country has handled an unexpected postal strike, now in its 11th day, with a stiff upper lip. An older, muddle-through attitude has also been overshadowed by an entrepreneurial hustle more reflective of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s decade in office.

“With great difficulty, we’ve been coping,” noted Sydney Moss, whose Panic Link intercity mail service has been overwhelmed by demand. “Not may people have grumbled.”

Certainly the sealed, bright-red boxes of the Royal Mail, the 100 million letters languishing in sorting offices and the 100,000 striking postal workers have caused some disruptions--enough to prompt the U.S. Postal Service, acting on a request from London, to halt sending mail to Britain until the backlog is eliminated.

A consumer protection organization, the Mail Users’ Assn., estimates that the strike is costing British industry the equivalent of $40 million a day.

And the strike has raised some unusual problems: While farmers in the western part of the country worry about the uncertain fate of grubs and crickets shipped to feed exotic animals, a Cardiff pet shop owner seemed to be more concerned for the person who opens the box of 36 tarantulas he is expecting.

“They will not be feeling in a very good mood,” the shopkeeper, Tom Chapman, told a local news agency, the Press Assn. “They may be getting very hungry.”

But to a remarkable extent, the disruption has been minimized.

The government has hired private companies to deliver Social Security and unemployment checks; banks have offered instant loans to small businesses that rely on the mail for payments to keep going, and public utilities and credit card companies have advised customers to pay their bills directly through their local banks, a practice traditionally underutilized.

When the strike threatened to undermine fund-raising efforts on behalf of Sunday’s global SportAid charity run, Midland Bank offered to distribute entry numbers and collect the 1-pound ($1.60) entry fee through its 2,000 domestic branches.

No Respite From Some Bills

For many, the bills will keep coming despite the strike. The London Electricity Board announced that its meter readers will deliver bills personally.

Couriers, freight forwarders and other transportation-related companies have rigged their own delivery systems and undertaken a frantic search for people to staff them. One London courier service is guaranteeing wages of $550 a week to anyone with a motorcycle, a street map and a desire to work hard.

DHL, the international freight-forwarding company, has advertised that it will take any piece of foreign mail under 100 grams, stamp it and deliver it to another European postal system for $1.70.

“I’ve got 20 calls backed up on this switchboard,” a harried DHL operator replied when asked if the service was popular.

Indeed, in some areas the strike seems actually to have improved matters. The Times of London’s prestigious “Letters to the Editor” column, for example, is more up to date than usual because many of its contributions are coming in on electronic facsimile equipment.

Leon Pilpet, who edits the column, said that volume is down to about 500 letters a week from about 1,400 but that use of facsimile equipment appears to have filtered out mostly letters of marginal quality.

“So far the ‘fax’ has proved perfectly adequate, and in some ways better,” he said.

One electronic letter received by the paper suggested renaming the column “Fax to the Editor.”

The postal strike began Aug. 31 as a token, one-day stoppage to protest a postal service decision to pay bonuses only to new employees in London and the southeastern part of the country, where the cost of living is higher and available labor is scarce.

Some Progress in Talks but No Settlement

But the union demanded bonuses for all or none, and the one-day walkout became a full-blown strike when the postal service brought in non-union temporary workers to assist in clearing the backlog from the one-day stoppage. On Friday there were hints of progress in negotiations but no sign of an immediate settlement.

Meanwhile, all but one of the country’s 82 sorting offices were idle Friday, reducing deliveries to a fraction of the usual volume, which is close to 50 million pieces a day.

In addition to tapping a new entrepreneurial spirit, the inconvenience caused by the strike has rekindled the sense of camaraderie that adversity seems to bring out in reserved Britons. When Social Security officers in a town in Devon realized that the strike would prevent a local veteran of World War I from getting the telegram that Queen Elizabeth II customarily sends to citizens celebrating their 100th birthdays, they got together and sang “Happy Birthday” to him over the telephone.