New Worker Banner

The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Postman Pat in the Class Struggle

by New Worker correspondent

One recent Tuesday afternoon, as this correspondent was polishing off his weekly penny-worth, the postman called with four items. One was a high-class intellectual weekly that until recently tended to arrive on Friday or Saturday mornings, another was a letter postmarked a week earlier from 10 miles away. There were also two adverts that cancelled each other out: one from a chip shop, the other an invitation to join Weight Watchers. This is not a trivial point; the Royal Mail has been kept alive for years on just such junk mail.

This was the first time he had called since the previous Wednesday. From this case study we can conclude that the recent claim by the main postal union, the Communication Workers Union (CWU), that the Royal Mail stands “on the brink of collapse” is correct. Regulator Ofcom agrees and has frozen a planned rise in second-class stamps because of unacceptable delivery performance. Over the last three years Ofcom has fined Royal Mail over £37 million for missing delivery targets.

Royal Mail was founded by Henry VIII in 1516 when the post of Master of the Posts was established. Its service was opened to the public, for a hefty price, by Charles I in 1635. The penny post, by which the cheapened costs were borne by the sender, came into being in 1840. It was privatised by the Tory-Lib-Dem Coalition in 2011. It is presently owned by a Czech billionaire, Daniel Křetínský, who paid £3.6 billion for it. Presently it has about 130,000 employees, of whom 80,000 are delivery staff.

One of the tasks of the postal services is to intercept the cor respondence of left-wing movements. When this happened to the NCP founding General Secretary he wrote to the Post Office complaining about the resultant delays, adding that he would expect them to continue intercepting mail of our opponents after the revolution, but that they would have to do so more efficiently. After that the mail mysteriously arrived more promptly.

To return to the present: CWU General Secretary Dave Ward has demanded, and won, “a summit between stakeholders and the government to address the ticking time bomb that is Royal Mail”. He added that: “Royal Mail has been in structural decline for well over a decade, and the continuous failure to deliver quality of service is killing the brand, demoralising the workforce, and letting down the communities that postal workers are proud to serve.”

This summit is taking place as the New Worker goes to press and comes after CWU took a decision to pause the further deployment of the new plans until Royal Mail adheres to the earlier agreement that made provision for formal reviews of how well the changes were being implemented, and where necessary improved. Instead, it accuses Royal Mail of charging on regardless. Part-time workers are particularly badly affected, with many being left in limbo as details of their future hours is uncertain. New entrants’ national hourly rate is £13.06, just above the £12.71 minimum wage, and leaves them unpaid for meal breaks and the delivery supplement for commercial flyers.

The union is demanding Government action to save the postal service, restore public trust and build a viable network for future years. In particular it must prevent operators from undercutting standards by using gig-economy employment models. It wants to reunite the privatised Royal Mail and the Post Office to create a stronger national network delivering postal, banking, government and community services. With the widespread closure of bank branches this could make the Post Office a winner. It also wants improved regulation, fo cussing on quality of service, not price competition, and fears that the Universal Service Obligation (USO), which is the obligation to deliver to all UK properties at the same rate, is being whittled away. Finally, the union calls for “a new ownership and governance model for Royal Mail with democratic public oversight”.

At present, about 330 post men and women are leaving Royal Mail per week following the introduction of the new delivery system earlier this year. Second class mail is now delivered only every other weekday, first class mail and parcels are delivered every day, with workers in groups of three and an altered walking pattern of rounds.

Management say the new system is wonderful and is 90 per cent complete and that it is now delivering to “95 per cent of addresses every day across the UK, up from 88 per cent before the roll-out”, and it will be recruiting its usual 22,000 Christmas temporary workers.

While the numbers of letters has drastically fallen due to email delivering electricity bills and people sending holiday snaps by mobile phone rather than postcards, parcel deliveries are booming, with Amazon, UPS and DPD vans a more familiar sight than Postman Pat. These rivals to the Post Office have deplorable conditions of employment, with low wages, strict targets and zero-hours contracts being the norm. CWU is perfectly justified in fearing that the present owners want to do the same. Despite the rise in the parcel delivery industry, website Motor Today reports that Royal Mail have cut their van and lorry fleet at a time when rivals are increasing theirs.

It is not just the posties who are under attack. Earlier this month Royal Mail announced plans to cut up to 2,500 jobs by the end of 2027. These are mostly HQ and other management jobs. The other Royal Mail union, Unite’s Communication Managers Association (CMA), weighed in to say that: “The union believes years of inaction by the service, the government and Ofcom has created the conditions for the latest cuts. They have failed to address the serious problems facing Royal Mail, especially high competition from gig economy postal services.”

Unite CMA National Chair Gary Sassoon-Hales said: “These devastating job losses have been directly caused by years of in action. Unite will not stand for our members being penalised for a situation that is not of their making.”

Things are so bad that even the BBC has had to sit up and take notice. It’s Your Voice programme interviewed 30 postal staff up and down the country who were united in denouncing the present state of Royal Mail and are united in warning that things are about to get worse.

They report that parcels are still being prioritised with letters left behind. Time is wasted in dividing mail into first and sec ond class and that under the new rotas, workloads have increased.

Eight workers who tracked their average step counts report that since the switchover all their steps increased by a quarter or even a third, often up to around 25,000 steps a day. The recommended number for adults aged 18–59 is 7,000–10,000 daily for optimal heart and metabolic health, double that does not make you twice as fit but wears you down.

One postman who resigned after serving a Bedfordshire village said he couldn’t face another “symbolic” Christmas season. He not unreasonably pointed out that: “People put things in the post for them to be delivered, not for them to be delayed because Royal Mail hasn’t got the systems in place and enough people to get them delivered…it’s impossible to have four peoples’ work done by three people.”