We’re seeing strikes in almost every sector, obviously including Royal Mail, but deliveries are still getting through. The next scheduled strike is on Thursday and Friday, the 8th and 9th of September. If you order on either of these two days (or indeed after midday on Wednesday) then your order will be collected from us by Royal Mail on Monday 12th September.
Collectively workers have power, but as individuals they have none. As a response to decades of under-investment in workers and equipment, Britain’s workers are going on strike. Their demands are simple: pay must match the cost of living.
As a married couple who run their own business, Shannon and I won’t be going on strike. But we do support the strikers. If wages keep going down at the same time that costs keep going up, whilst at the very same time the elites increase their hoard, in some cases by several hundred percent. The number of UK billionaires now totals 177, all of whom are privileged beyond usefulness. Why would we support the strikes? Because we have control of our own destiny (within the limits of our meagre human forms, anyway). And we think everyone else should too.
We think workers should be powerful in their businesses, and rewarded in proportion to the success of those businesses. The money lenders and middlemen, including politicians, bankers and all those privileged voices we so often hear in the media. Those people should be worried right now, because they have pushed the narrative so badly it is almost normal for us to contemplate an increasing infant mortality rate, as though it were as inescapable as a British winter. For previous generations of capitalists, this would have been too far.
The pundits and pushers have created a dialogue whereby Jamie Oliver can normalise cooking designed to require as little heat as possible, because energy prices are being gouged by profiteers.
Since the 1980’s it has become more normal for all these commentators – those with a direct financial interest in developing a narrative that permits and makes normal new cruelties, and creates new victims – to introduce those cruelties with a financial logic that seemed impenetrable. Not so long ago we wanted everyone to level up. Now we are pretty quiet about every ticket office in the land closing, leaving almost every wheelchair user unable to catch a train ever again.
It’s a case of rent rises, but never landlords putting rents up. It’s always the rising cost of living, rather than an increasing profit burden being placed upon workers. The workers will always be presented as ’demanding’, rather than, in truth, providing.
But it’s this financial logic that has allowed the narrative to deviate so far from humane values. The narrative that is responsible for the funnelling of money into fewer and fewer hands. The effect at this time is so extreme that as I sit here in 2022, September, just as the weather is turning colder, we contemplate a rise in absolute mortality in the United Kingdom.
And we do this because the shareholders must enjoy unrestricted profit.
Any system that allows this to happen must be brought to order, and we are grateful to the strikers for helping to make the changes we need in wider society, as well as respecting the changes they need to make in their own workplaces. Never cross a picket line, and if a strike inconveniences you; blame the bosses who have failed.