Royal Mail denies tracking Devon postmen on the job

The Royal Mail has denied that they are tracking postmen out on the job, after a Devon postman claimed he could not stand still for more than two minutes because he’d be penalised.

The anonymous postman allegedly claimed that a digital device he is required to use ‘sends tracking data back to the office’ and he can face having to explain the inactivity to his manager.

A woman on his round told DevonLive the postman has ‘had the compulsory tracker on him for about two years and is not supposed to tell anyone about it.’

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She claims he told her: “‘If we’re not careful, we’ll have a dystopian future.'” “And he was really quite upset about this.”

The woman spoke about the value of being able to chat with her postman. She said: “If we hadn’t got talking in the first place then I wouldn’t have been able to help him through a very difficult time that he went through personally.”

She added: “He’s the most affable, friendly postie you could wish for. He’s always positive, he’s always got a smile on his face. Really cute and lovely and everybody loves him and now he’s unable to talk to anybody.”

“I would say that there’s an erosion of our liberty generally. I don’t want to go into it too much but from facial recognition at Asda to cameras at traffic lights sooner or later every single thing we do will be monitored. I just think that’s not on because they don’t have permission to have my identification, thank you.”

It is not the first time such allegations against the Royal Mail have been made. The Telegraph reported that other workers had said the same thing as the Devon postman: But The Royal Mail insist PDAs are meant to help with directions and recording deliveries.

The Telegraph report sees other workers also report that workers are being summoned to managers’ offices to “explain any periods of inactivity”.

According to the Communications Workers Union (CWU) data has reportedly even been used by Simon Thompson, Royal Mail’s chief executive, to complain of “slow” walking speeds. MPs have also accused Mr Thompson of giving an “inaccurate testimony’ in January over tracking staff and faced requestioning by a committee in February.

On requestioning Mr Thompson admitted that tracking data had been used in 16 disciplinary cases, reported by Sky News, though this data was only available on release from a human resource professional and this data was not available in real-time. Despite this, The Guardian reported that Mr Thompson admitted digital tracking devices carried by postal workers were used to pressure them to work faster, and blamed rogue managers for using the information in breach of company policy.

The chair of the committee, Darren Jones, said that, after the first hearing, he had received almost 1,500 communications, with evidence that showed tracking information from postal digital assistants (PDA) carried by workers was “100% being used” to discipline and performance-manage staff, according to The Guardian. Thompson has argued that the devices are used to “balance the workload evenly across the whole of the team”

What did Royal Mail say?

Royal Mail has commented on the use of trackers on their postmen. A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “Our Postal Digital Assistants (PDAs) do not have real-time tracking capabilities on our people’s movements. We do not use our PDAs for real-time tracking of our people’s movements, or to communicate with them through their PDAs on their real-time performance.

“Customers increasingly expect estimated times for their deliveries and confirmation when an item has been delivered. Our PDAs allow Royal Mail to provide real-time delivery information to our customers by predicting the time that a postal route will take on any given day. This allows customers to plan ahead or redirect their parcel if they are not going to be in.”

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