Rebellion by the Rules

In the 301 years since Charles II organized the Post Office. Britain's blue uniformed postmen have made their appointed rounds despite highwaymen, Hitler's bombs, and a maze of pettifogging postal regulations that run into several thousand pages of fine type. Last week, by the trick of working strictly according to the rule book, British postal workers who want higher pay came close to strangling the Royal Mail in red tape.

Instead of double-or triple-parking mail trucks at railroad terminals, drivers waited obediently for curbside parking space--and missed the trains. Postmen were careful to take only the regulation 35-lb. load on their rounds. According to the rules, mail must be delivered only through the recipient's mailbox or handed to him personally; normally, if there is no mailbox, the postmen simply poke letters through a window or, if the recipient is out, hand them to a neighbor. Now all mail that could not be left in a mailbox or delivered personally went straight back.

Disguised Strike. Letters and packages that were "incorrectly" addressed, in most cases because they failed to specify postal zones, were returned to senders or dumped at the dead-letter office. Britons who tried to phone instead of writing were equally frustrated; the post office operates the telephone system, and its switchboard operators conscientiously handled only one call at a time, staying with it until the number answered "as per regs," instead of handling five or six simultaneously.

The disguised strike was organized by the Union of Post Office workers (170,000 members) in protest against the government's anti-inflationary ban on wage raises for public employees. Post office employees earn 3.5% less than industrial workers (a mailman averages $30 weekly), but Postmaster General Reginald Bevins flatly refused an increase, offered only to study the subject. To make up for the slowdown, he ordered postal employees to work overtime, but it was like trying to melt a glacier. At Mount Pleasant. London's main sorting office, the backlog rose to 5,000,000 letters. Railway stations were swamped: in one shed alone at Euston. 100,000 mailbags waited four days to be picked up. The post office announced that it could not handle parcel post (except for hospitals and military units).

Without Good Will. Industries and mail-order stores organized their own makeshift postal services. Unhappiest vic tims by far were a Yorkshire laborer, Len Darnton, and Surrey Garage Hand Gabby Senecal, who both mailed in winning football pool coupons but failed to collect $27.000 and $75,000 because their entries were not delivered in time.

Emboldened by the postal workers' success, 39 other unions (total membership: 3,000,000) voted at week's end to stage a one-day walkout against the government's "pay pause." But the post office employees, in keeping with the dignified traditions of Britain's civil service, insisted to the last that their strategy did not constitute a slow:down strike. "What we are doing," explained a union official, "is merely withdrawing our good will."

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