NOT SCARED ABOUT PRIVATISATION WELL YOU SHOULD BE

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Copied and Pasted from Facebook (its an old story, but certainly worth repeating)

HERE IS SOMETHING I DOWN LOADED ABOUT DUTCH POST

Somewhere in the Netherlands, a postwoman is in trouble. When I visited her, bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life had left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail had built up that it was getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she was working for, Selektmail, dropped off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. She was sorting and delivering the fresh crates but the winter backlog was tough to clear. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hallway.

The postwoman had a similar problem with the other private mail company she works for, Sandd, a few years back. "When I began at Sandd in 2006, I delivered about 14 boxes of mail every time," she said. "I couldn't cope and at Christmas 2006 I had about 90 of these boxes in the house. By New Year's Day we had 97. There were even boxes in the toilet." The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hadn't done her job well, yet so few people complained about missed deliveries that she hadn't been found out.
Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the internet age, private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that's only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries.

I agreed not to name the Dutch postwoman or to give away any detail that would identify her, but a few days after my visit, Sandd rumbled that all was not well, discovered the mail mountain and dispensed with her services. Even if she hadn't been sitting on months of undelivered mail, Sandd or Selekt could have sacked her in a heartbeat. She worked, she told me, about 30 hours a week for the two companies, earning about €5 an hour, although the legal minimum wage in the Netherlands is between €8 and €9 an hour. She had no contract. She got no sick pay, no pension and no health insurance. One of the companies gave her a dribble of holiday pay. Selekt gave her a jacket and a sweatshirt but she got no other clothing or footwear and had to pay to maintain her own bike. The companies are able to offer such miserable conditions because of loopholes in Dutch employment law. The postwoman was paid a few cents for each item of mail she delivered. The private mail firms control their delivery people's daily postbag to make sure they never earn more than €580 a month, the level at which the firms would be obliged to give them a fixed contract.

Somehow Selekt never noticed it was getting fewer empty crates back than it sent full crates out. When I followed the postwoman to the kitchen, I saw, like some recurring nightmare, 20 more crates filled with letters.

Selekt's crates are yellow and stamped with the black hunting horn logo of Deutsche Post, the former German state mail monopoly that, like its Dutch counterpart, was privatised long ago. For years the two have been locked in a struggle for business on the streets of the Netherlands, part of a fratricidal postal war across northern Europe from which Royal Mail – soon, if the government gets its way, to be privatised like its Dutch and German peers – is not immune.

Privatising old state post companies doesn't necessarily make it easier for rivals to compete with them. Privatisation isn't the same as liberalisation. But in the Netherlands, privatisation and liberalisation combined have altered the post in a way far beyond anything Britain has seen.

Each week, Dutch households and businesses are visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies. There are the "orange" postmen of the privatised Dutch mail company, trading as TNT Post but about to change its name to PostNL; the "blue" postmen of Sandd, a private Dutch firm; the "yellow" postmen of Selekt, owned by Deutsche Post/DHL; and the "half-orange" postmen of Netwerk VSP, set up by TNT to compete cannibalistically against itself by using casual labour that is cheaper than its own (unionised) workforce. TNT delivers six days a week, Sandd and Selekt two, and VSP one. From the point of view of an ardent free-marketeer, this sounds like healthy competition. Curiously, however, none of the competitors is prospering.

TNT is being forced by the hedge funds and other transnational shareholders who control its destiny to split up, even as it tries to beautify its bottom line by replacing reasonably paid jobs with badly paid ones. Deutsche Post is pulling out of the Netherlands and selling Selekt to Sandd – a company that has never made a profit. Sandd, set up by a group of ex-TNT managers, pioneered the distinctive Dutch style of private mail delivery. "Sandd" stands for "Sort and deliver". In Britain, as in many other countries with big postal networks, private companies can now collect and sort mail, but delivery, the so-called "final mile" of a letter's journey, is still effectively a Royal Mail monopoly. Mail is delivered from distribution centres to local delivery offices, where salaried Royal Mail postal workers sort it into individual rounds and deliver it by van, bike and on foot. Under the Sandd system, crates of mail are delivered to casual workers' houses. These workers sort the mail, on whatever flat surface they can find, then deliver it on set days at a time of their choosing. Besides slashing the mail companies' overheads, the system has the advantage, from the management's point of view, that there is little danger of the postmen and postwomen meeting each other to swap grievances or talk about joining a union.
Another private postman, Joris Leijten, who quit Sandd in January, told me he used to sort mail on his bed. In a cafe among the grand villas of Bussum, near Hilversum, he handed me the flyer that Sandd put through his door after he resigned, advertising his job: a picture of four smiling white people in Sandd blue, striding down the road with light sheaves of paper, grinning. "Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time," it read. "Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners." He showed me a day's work from just after Christmas: three rounds, sorting and delivering 323 pieces of mail, weighing a total of 81.4kg, to 279 addresses. Sandd claimed this should take six hours; Leijten said it took eight. For this he was paid a little over €27 – not much more than €3 an hour.

While I was in the Netherlands, the Dutch parliament's pressure on the low-wage postal companies finally forced them to make concessions: 80% of all postal workers in companies like Sandd must be on proper contracts, meaning they gain a degree of social protection, but this will not happen until the end of September 2013.

In the Netherlands, as in Britain, the postal market has been liberalised in the name of the consumer. Competition, it is said, will benefit everybody. But competition, as Leijten noted, only really exists for large organisations. Private citizens can't post letters in Sandd or Selekt mailboxes. There aren't any. Ordinary Dutch people still have to pay 46 cents to send a TNT letter. The Dutch government, meanwhile, has negotiated a deal with Sandd to deliver some of its mail at 11 cents a pop. "For ordinary people, there's no choice, there's only TNT," Leijten said. "The postal system is sick."

'The Dutch model is one we've spoken of and would like to do in the future'

On the eve of my journey to the Netherlands, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail's chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. It's a giant mail processing plant, built in 1999, that sucks in and shoots out every letter, packet and small parcel posted from or sent to every address in 600 square miles of England, from the M25 down to the south coast. They sort 2.5m items a day.

Michael Fehilly, Gatwick's manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He's second-generation Irish. "My dad tells me I'm a plastic Paddy, not a real one," he said. He grew up on a council estate in Peckham and joined the Post Office as an apprentice postman in 1987, aged 17. He hated the early starts and was ready to quit after a few months. Instead, they made him a trainee manager. Twenty-four years later he is a company star.

[daveyeff]

C**TS

[beria]

Loonacy!

[bexhil palace]

Can we not get this into the public domain?
It would open a few eyes, thats for sure.

[fishtank]

Can we not get this into the public domain?

Already is.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/james-meek ... ing-office" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;