I have heard and read a lot lately about how Post Office staff are annoyed that their PAYE, UIF and medical aid payments have been siphoned off. I regret to say that I have little sympathy for them. They had a monopoly on which many small but profitable operations like mine relied heavily. When they went on an extended strike they not only crippled the Post Office, their employer, as a business but stuck many of their clients out of business, like my 36-year-old publication The SA Turf Directory. Now they wonder how it all happened. The pain lingers on. Every week I open my mailbox to find items returned from that strike in 2016 “undelivered”.
Throughout my 48 years in business, I have seen clients close down their factories and businesses as a result of unions pushing too hard – there is always a knock-on and job losses that they don’t consider. It’s clear that the fat cats that run these unions know nothing about business, let alone how to start one, but they know a lot about how to put people out of business.
So that strike pushed all of us into the digital era, unwillingly. The people that we employed to set up each edition for print, the printers, the labour we used for packing, postal people who handled each envelope were all gone, never to return.
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