Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Royal Mail Fiasco
Since March of this year the Royal Mail accountably made their revenues, profits and margins publically available to view online. Press immediately attacked the profit loss of the company (£3m) and most recently there’s been news of an annual subsidy of £150m from the government to safe-guard closures of 11,500 post offices; rightly so?
This starts with a friend of a friend; it’s not what you know, luckily….
The person, who I probably shouldn’t name, starts his round and collects from the local post office to deliver on foot. But before all that he has to take a trip in a taxi to get there. Fair enough if it’s not walking-distance. But it’s not. In fact the postie in question has to travel to Norfolk from Woodbridge, Suffolk to start his round! A good hour and a half there and back already puts RM in the red as the fare there and back, regardless of pay to the postie whilst in the taxi too, is much greater than the money earned during the round - £80 each way. Subsequently, this could be a ploy to head off the pension deficits by employing external labour instead of taking on more staff in the short term. Thoughts?
Additionally, because post offices are becoming more short-staffed and recent changes to the way the offices are run it means that postmen/women have to start later in the day (less time for rounds) and the so called ‘innovations’ (such as improved frames to speed up initial post sorting) are apparently resulting in increasing problems. Problems such as larger rounds, logic being that one can do more of a round if there is time saved on sorting.
There are also talks of handheld computer trials on rounds. Surely money wasted and blatant abuse of government subsidies when money could be better spent, according to my contact, on waterproofing bags. It’s a big problem as employees are just asked to use plastic bags within plastic bags which just fill up with water.
When I asked what the Royal Mail thought of this in relation to the employee’s round feedback was quick and concise but not so much in the way of relevant… When I wrote to them I included the source to where I found my information about their financial year, I then discussed it and asked simply why they were so drastic. I got a reply ‘perhaps you should look at this press release….’, it was only the same one I had used in the email I sent to the press office in the first place! They threw it straight back at me! - “This is regurgitation, and positive propagandish regurgitation at that”.
They sent another meant for the Independent Review of the UK Postal Services Sector. This simply outlined goals and achievements in a ‘we’re sorry for messing up’ kind of way. I won’t quote directly, as i probably shouldn’t, but an objective was to secure ‘a stable financial future for Royal Mail.’ Easier said than done.
I am currently looking to corroborate these findings with local postmen/women and other managerial postal workers to see what they have to say; ‘is it the same in your area? Do you feel that these schemes are pointless? Would you like more input; how could your job could be made easier?’ I mean, if they were to have more of a say, like my postie here, surely money wasted is money wasted, it’s surely going to pre-empt more strikes?
Get it together Royal Mail. I see privatisation just around the bend, ‘you know, where that post office once was….’