Postal Strike

For a few weeks, I just thought that my magazine subscriptions had expired in August instead of the later date I had expected. I wasn’t particularly expecting any other mail soon, and that which I do get arrives anywhere from ten days to three months after it is posted. Nobody here discusses mail or why it isn’t arriving (in addition to me, probably another dozen people share my office’s PO Box as their only mailing address, and I am pretty much the only person who ever gets any personal mail through it), so it took until I spoke to another volunteer to realize that in fact, there is a national postal strike going on.

I tried to find out more information through Google News, which has nothing more recent to report than stories from August, that the strike was starting, and one lone (one paragraph) story reporting that the courts had ordered the postal workers to go back to work last week, several weeks after the strike had technically ended.

Well, I went to the post office yesterday to buy stamps, and the strike is definitely not over. There were a couple of people working in the front, mainly doing money transfers and lottery tickets, but no one was working in the back and despite the twenty people waiting for service, the place was eerily quiet. I was never more than fifth in line but it took me more than thirty minutes to get out. People working the front would mysteriously disappear into the back for five or ten-minute intervals and then return. I’m going to assume this is because they had to get things for the people they were serving which were completely disorganized due to having nobody working there.

Strikes are pretty common in South Africa, for the very good reason that most people are paid very little money that goes to support a far larger number of people than a typical American worker’s would. Unemployment is ridiculously high and South Africa holds the distinction of being the country in the world with the highest level of inequality, as measured by the Gini index.

The strikes we are told to be particularly wary of are taxi strikes, which can sometimes become violent: in some ways, competing taxi associations are like the Mob. Giyani is a pretty chill little town, and we haven’t had any taxi-related warring, nor strikes for extended periods of time. Compared to that, a postal strike is pretty mild, though I fully expect to lose some large percentage of the mail sent to me over that period. Probably, though, it’s better not to eventually wind up with two months worth of unread Economists all in one day.