I had just finished reading the wonderful second volume of Alan Johnson’s autobiography, Please Mr Postman, when an advert popped up on the computer for a company called Doddle.
Doddle joins Yodel and Whistl, other delivery companies with babyish names, which are competing in the overcrowded and exploitative market that comprises the ‘opening up to competition’ of the mail market over the last nine years.
Their compatriot, City Link- a dull name if a ropey enterprise- famously dropped out of the mail market on Christmas Eve, leaving around 2,ooo employees jobless and way behind the financiers backing the company in the queue for monies owed.
The contrast with ALan Johnson’s experience could not be more marked. Johnson joined the GPO, as Royal Mail was in the 1970s, as a postman in Barnes and then in Slough. He was trained. He was securely employed. He was part of a public service.(He spent two weeks -TWO WEEKS!- at Bletchley Park learning about security when he became a Postman Higher Grade, enabled to handle sensitive mail). Along the way he raised a family, became a figure in the union, understood how his country worked, became an MP. Then Home Secretary. None of this can be separated from the fact that he was part of an institution which in turn nurtured the broader British society.
Let us turn now to Nick Wells, the CEO of Whistl( as was TNT). He told a Commons select committee in November that half his staff were on zero hours contracts. The basic pay was the minimum wage , for those on a wage. All employees are entitled to holiday pay. But this does not apply to the self employed, of whom the new postal delivery and communications industry has 31,000 people.
The excellent Communication Workers Union says that there are widespread problems with low pay in the sector -in particular, bogus self-employment. A lot of parcel delivery people are employed on a packet/piece rate – around 45p for each delivery made – rather than a contract with hourly pay. A lot of City Link workers were employed on that basis. Amazon, DPD and other couriers use this structure also. If a parcel can’t be delivered, the driver(who is renting her own van) isn’t paid until it is delivered. Which would explain those parcels that allegedly turn up in gardens and behind fences.
This is all very different to the case in Royal Mail where the vast majority of workers are full time, on permanent contracts and paid salaries far in excess of the NMW. Equal pay is applied to agency workers after a 12 week period as per the equal treatment legislation – something which is very difficult in other companies because of job descriptions and the sheer number of rubbish contracts.
The service people receive is categorically not better than that provided by Royal Mail in its heyday- that is before it was forced by Government to cut its sorting offices, cut its collection points, cut its staff and hand over some of its services to competitors like the above. The people who now deliver to more and more homes in the cities- these new companies are definitely not interested in the Universal Delivery model – are appallingly paid, hardly trained, working in jobs which have no career structure to speak of.
So in what way is the open market, which we were forced to have by a combination of zealous British Governments and a corporate set of European directives, better for the customer than the publicly owned delivery service which was the Royal Mail? The service in general is more random and unreliable, jobs are worse, the collection points are fewer, the public good is non existent.
As I said, delivering what, exactly?