[Stuart]

I still believe the strikers are shooting themselves in the foot.

OK, if they believe Mandelsson (or anyone else in the government) is engineering the strike, why give the government what they believe it wants? Assuming the government is doing this (officially or unofficially), they will have a reason they want to do this. That reason may well be that they want to fully privatise or sell the post office. Any new management is going to work hard to keep the unions out if they think they are going to cause trouble.

Also, the customers will eventually move on to other forms of distribution, which will lose the PO money, and will therefore lead to redundancies. It don't doubt that at least some of those threatened with redundancy will be union members. If those customers turn out to be large companies (like, say, Amazon, Dabs or BT) then those losses will be significant and cause a significant number of redundancies.

As for the complaints about increased levels of work. Well, I am not entirely sympathetic there. My department is currently dealing with a record number of queries (an order of magnitude greater than what is normal) and with less than half the staff we actually need, and they have cut ALL overtime, And, yes, I do work in the public sector and count myself lucky I have a job.