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Royal Mail in the Free Market Casino
It’s not a free market, it’s a rigged market, says Roy Mayall
The Hooper Report
Peter Mandelson: planning the partial sell-off of the Royal Mail.
When Peter Mandelson came on TV in May last year proposing the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, he was very clear. Volumes are down, he said. People don’t send letters any more, they send texts and emails instead. The Royal Mail is under threat from the incursion of new technology into the communications business. It is all down to the market and to market choice.
The company he had in mind as the new potential co-owner of the Royal Mail was TNT, which had once been the Dutch national mail company.
TNT, of course, is one of any number of private mail companies vying for a place in the British postal market.
The impression we were being given was of an old-fashioned and beleaguered Royal Mail struggling with its more efficient rivals in an open market place.
The document that Peter Mandelson was basing his statements on was the Hooper Report.
The report makes a number of recommendations which are worth reviewing as they are still the basis of government policy. The Royal Mail has to modernise, but fast, it says. The CWU and Royal Mail need to get their act together and start being more cooperative. The government should take on responsibility for the pensions deficit in order to allow the company to concentrate on the modernisation process. A new regulatory regime is required to put the postal business in line with the rest of the communications market. And finally – and crucially – there should be a “strategic partnership” between Royal Mail “and one or more private sector companies with demonstrable experience of transforming a major business, ideally a major network business.”
These were precisely Peter Mandelson’s conclusions, although his plans for the part-privatisation were shelved – according to him – because of the weak condition of the market prevailing at the time. We might also add that there was an almighty outcry from the public, and from his own backbenchers, not to say, from Royal Mail staff and the CWU.
Plans for the sell-off remain in place, however, awaiting a change in “market conditions.”
What market?
Billy Hayes on the UK postal regulatory system: “It is uniquely bad,” he says.
All of this talk of “the market” makes you wonder.
What market?
Because when you take a close look at it, the market doesn’t exist. There is no market. It turns out to be little more than a propaganda tool used by the privatisation lobby to beat the Royal Mail over the head with.
In fact, the Royal Mail is in a very healthy state in terms of the profits it generates. Not only did it make £255 million in the first nine months of 2008 – a profit of over £1 million a day – but it also, through downstream access, generates massive profits for TNT and the other private mail companies too.
This is the issue that the Hooper Report fails to address: downstream access, the process by which private mail companies can crowbar themselves into the Royal Mail network, profiting from the system while undermining it. The Royal Mail is being regulated in order to allow the private companies to make a profit from it.
This isn’t a “free market”. It’s a rigged market.
What’s worse, according to Billy Hayes, general secretary of the CWU, the Royal Mail actually subsidises the private mail companies at the rate of about 2p per letter. So not only do they take the profitable trade away, leaving the Royal Mail with the expensive and hard to run universal service obligation, but the Royal Mail actually pays them to do this.
“I must make it clear, that the system used in the UK is not used in any other country,” Billy Hayes said, in a recent article. “It is uniquely bad.”
So what is going on here? The government can’t pretend that it is not aware of this. The members of Postcomm, the regulatory body which sets the prices, are all appointed by government, and I can’t imagine that Peter Mandelson, control freak that he is, does not insist upon being kept fully informed.
Not only that, but if you check out the Postcomm website you’ll see that members of the commission all have interests in private mail companies; either that or they are in the deregulation business. In other words, the people who the government appointed to look after the regulatory system are also the people who are rigging the market, for their own benefit.
It’s like the Royal Mail is being forced to enter the “Free Market Casino” against its will, only to discover that the roulette wheels are loaded, and that the dealers are all card-sharks.
None of this is mentioned in the Hooper Report, which also goes on to avoid a number of other issues. In particular, while it highlights the pensions deficit, estimated to reach £10 billion this year, what it doesn’t do is to tell us the cause of the deficit in the decades long pensions holiday which the company took, with full government approval, draining the coffers while allowing the workforce to pour our own hard-earned money into what was effectively a bottomless pit.
Finally the report makes what amounts to a threat. “Our recommendations are a package,” it says. “Each element of the package is needed if the universal service is to be sustained: modernisation achieved through partnership, tackling the pension deficit, and changing the regulatory regime.”
Or, to put it another way, the Hooper Report is a long drawn out ransom note with our pensions as hostage.
Give us privatisation, it says, or your pension gets it.
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- Petition to: give Royal Mail monopoly status once more. | Number10.gov.uk
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Roy Mayall is a pseudonym for a postal worker who has been in the job for about five years and works in a delivery office somewhere in the south-east of England. He writes a blog at roymayall.wordpress.com
Loopholes
I was talking to my union rep about the attendance procedure. If the management can misuse the procedure to the detriment of postal workers, that means there are loopholes in it, which means it’s a bad agreement.
From the LRB.
Read more here.
A Review of Dear Granny Smith by Alan Woodward
Forwarded from Alan Woodward of Haringey Support Group:
This timely book, conveniently published in envelope size, gives the inside story from a postal worker about what’s happening to a major public service and the reasons why posties have been taking one day strikes over the last 5 months of 2009. Its outline of working conditions is quite unusual and is a thorough account of the present Government and Royal Mail’s offensive against ordinary workers. The title uses the posties own term for the public and pulls no punches, being written in workshop language and presents a totally devastating critique of the management’s inflammatory commercial approach. Because small bookshops may experience trouble obtaining it, I have given internet details.
The author uses a pen name but has apparently been a working postman for some years. Whoever wrote the eleven chapters, it is an imaginative well constructed book and at £4-99, it is an absolute bargain. As the blurb says, postal workers have a pet name for their customers. It’s “Granny Smith”, a name that calls to mind every old lady who lives alone and for whom the mail service is a lifeline.
The title is taken from yet another management meeting to announce to the staff some further details of the proposed ‘modernisation’ changes: Someone piped up in the middle of it. “What about Granny Smith?” he said. He’s an old-fashioned sort of postman, the kind who cares about these things.
”Granny Smith is not important,” was the reply. “Granny Smith doesn’t matter any more.”
Roy Mayall gives reasons for the industrial action including a consideration for all the Granny Smiths, and the book is likely to swing the public behind the postal workers once and for all. Its exposure of corporate dominance is as relevant as it is timely in an election year. The book is written in a conversational style, with some workplace humour that sometimes approaches being crude and the postie is blunt in his message about reversing the adoption of commercial values. All this subversion was edited out by the BBC when the book was serialised on Radio4 as Book of the Week in December 2009 but will ring a bell with anyone who went to the picket line during the dispute. With its rotas, barbeques and careful monitoring of persons allegedly going into work, the strike, like the book, was well organised and successful .
The two main themes of the text are the degradation of working conditions and the market inspired transition from an efficient public service into a shambolic and inefficient business enterprise. The first theme would be familiar to anyone concerned with the condition of the working class — it has been their constant companion for the best part of two centuries. The author describes in some detail, and with some bitter humour, how well established workplace practices have been just replaced with crack brained schemes, designed it seems with just proving that the current management are in charge. Or so they like to think . Roy Mayall tells how the impracticality of the new technology based ‘modernisation’, has ground to a halt in all its essential features – address reading machines, replacing bikes with cumbersome electric trolleys, Starbursts or bulk delivery teams and suchlike. ‘Mech-ed’ – mail – machine sorted – from a target of over 80% , has now dropped to 50% and that just the official figures!
What has not failed is the re-organisation of work, the consistent bullying, the abolition of even the smallest amount of free time, the extremely authoritarian Attendance Procedures that force even quite ill people into work on threat of dismissal, and such like. You may say there’s nothing new about all that . Everyone knows that there is no ‘democracy’ in our totalitarian workplaces and that an ancient political commentator remarked that the only true wealth is time – the point is that all these processes are cunningly hidden by the alliance of the politicals, management and most of the media. Once again victim blaming is announced – ” the posties are being ‘obstructive’”.
Now old timers may recall the promises of 30 years ago that new technology would liberate society . People would work for only a few hours , machines would do the heavy toil and our most onerous task would be decided what to do with our leisure. In reality Roy Mayall describes taking out six bags of mail each day instead of one, the huge increase of junk advertising mail despite the lying assurances that mail levels are falling, constant and aggressive management ‘interviews’, [interrogation more like] , and the leisure room turned into a management lecture centre for open propaganda sessions, or corporate drivel as he calls it . All this is done in the interests of ‘renewed capitalism’ by Thatcher, Blair and Brown , — can you tell them apart ? Small wonder the political confusion as the leaders of the Communication Workers Union try to boost Labour while the members revolt into confusion. And we haven’t even mentioned the Final Agreement. This brings us to the second theme, switching over from public to private ownership.
We have described above the new slavery, posties too tired to do anything but work and sleep. Every one knows the management strategy – ~ allow pension ‘holidays’ for management, but not workers, so that the pension fund is deeply in debt, ~ hound out the full timers , ~ bring in part timers and casuals, ~reduce the enterprise to the point of collapse to make a private take over seem like salvation; THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE as we may remember. The author gives chapter and verse about the public service ethos. How posties have a social role, just like the hospital cleaners who were abolished for disease spreading contractors, and, as part of the community, are useful contributors. Reporting domestic ill health, helping out pensioners, transmitting information, monitoring temporarily empty houses, acting as a counsellor and so on . Today ‘Granny Smith’ doesn’t matter, the needs of the corporate bodies take first, second and all places. Despite the record of these companies — and it was their failure that caused the modern pre-Thatcher society to be set up it should be remembered – the private sector dominates both industry and wider society.
Downstream Access
The complicated process of privatisation has been well publicised recently but what is less well known is the “creeping commercialisation “.
Take ‘downstream access’, which allows private companies to select out any part of the process which it thinks profitable and privatise it. This is already used by operators like TNT, but the use of this surrender to profit scheme has now appeared in the NHS. Clinicenta, despite some appalling performances is still allowed to cherry pick and make money from it’s choice. The union leadership seems passive in various unions and allows this insidious practice to continue. Once again its down to the rank and file.
Another feature is the use of language , a key factor as Orwell noted. Here “modernisation” means privatisation , more speed up, no job security, all casual labour, poverty wages. ” Flexibility” means obeying instructions however absurd. Management “discretion ” in fact means mandatory. “Public Service” means total subordination to corporate objectives . “Attendance ” means absenting yourself from medical attention, “Mail sort” means junk mail or around two thirds of the total, and so on. Royal Mail management have nothing to learn from 1984. The recent international financial crisis should, in an ideal world, have demolished the credentials of the free market. There is little evidence that this has happened, and even less that the political leaders have any intention of changing course. For them, no Alternative exists, so they press ahead with cosmetic reforms while keeping the pressure on the rest of us in the same old way. Mayall is quite clear about the consequences, in terms of blame for general issues , on the central role of the market. To an extent he also implicates the union for losing sight of the social aims of the labour movement in pursuit of the free market . While his affection for old Labour may be exaggerated — remember George Brown and Harold Wilson? –his basic sentiments ring quite true.
He ends with a tale where an old person in a future world that is totally commercial describes the Royal Mail set up as it used to be to an obviously incredible audience. The ‘McMail’ option he calls it . but as he also says, it’s not too late to save it, though prospects under Cameron , Brown and co do seem bleak. Generally the text has no overall political message, despite his reference to ‘the gods of wealth and economics’. He doesn’t waste ink either on the alternative promises of The Revolutionary Party any more than conventional politicians. His memories of old Labour are likely to be illusory but his demolition of the present institutions and their scurrilous roles is complete.
As he says “my tale is of loss and deceit, anger and despair, and the wanton destruction of an ancient and venerable organisation”. It seem likely that no one has told him of the libertarian philosophy, and in particular the idea of workers control of the workplace , then society. This idea is implicit in his critique of management and politicians – the workers can manage the place quite well on their own, but the political implications are missing. This is a deep seated problem and one which the conscious minority has been slow in tackling.
Finally, this is a unique publication. There were some examples of solidarity from other workers in the long dispute. Drivers and service workers refusing to cross picket lines and some workplace money collections, though the strike leaders gave this a low priority. What of the future? The 2007 strike was followed by the 2009 one, as management kept on with its predetermined free market strategy – modernisation at all costs. At present as management press on with their only delayed plans , we can expect more conflict and picket lines.
Labour intends continuing to worship the gods that have failed – be prepared for more early rising.
- Dear Granny Smith: A Letter from Your Postman: Amazon.co.uk: Roy Mayall: Books
Dear Granny Smith: A Letter from Your Postman: Amazon.co.uk: Roy Mayall: Books - Haringey Solidarity Group
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