A chance meeting this half-term holiday with a local mother who works for the Royal Mail provided me with the following information about the current industrial action by postal workers.

A significant factor in the dispute is the bullying and harassment of older employees and those with health problems such as arthritis, derived from years of work for the Royal Mail. This group of workers is literally hounded to do more work despite the fact that overall manpower has been reduced by over 28%. Ageism and the distain for occupational health tend to be ignored by the media pundits.

Another grievance is that the executives of Royal Mail are awarding themselves huge bonuses comparable to those taken by bankers while maintaining that the Royal Mail is not financially viable and cannot afford pay so many full-time, security-vetted, experienced and trained postal workers who are also trained in health and safety procedures. These same workers also have a great deal of useful local knowledge that cannot be improved upon with automation and new technology. 

The Royal Mail is busy centralising and concentrating its functions. More and more local sorting offices are being closed and the functions are centralised on distant, alienating industrial estates. The point about this is that postmen then have to be driven to their rounds and the time taken to do this is subtracted from their time allocation for deliveries. This decline in local, urban sorting offices flies in the face of sound environmental and social policies, and erodes the working conditions of individual postal workers.

A further grievance is that the essential nature of a public service is in jeopardy, but that seems to be the underlying motive of the modernising executives and managers.

NH

               

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Critical Fragments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.