Blame ‘management bullshit’ for late post

News

In Tooting, bosses are lying about why mail is delayed—the reality is that bosses have forced through a new plan which has ruined postal services

People living in south west London at last have an answer as to why they are getting either delayed mail, or none at all.

Bosses earlier this month told the local Guardian group of newspapers it was all down to “high sick leave” and “resourcing challenges” among those who do the deliveries. Not to worry, they said, it will all be back to normal soon.

But a longstanding postal worker at Tooting delivery office told Socialist Worker that’s not true. “There’s no sickness problem here,” he said. “Every duty has at least one person on it, and some have two.

“The real problem is that senior management have rushed through a set of changes to our working practices by ‘executive action’. This is so they can use our office as a test case for the rest of the country.”

Executive action means the bosses override the CWU union to impose the changes.

“Royal Mail some time ago forced us to carry these PDA machines, postal digital assistants. That means the bosses can track us when we’re out on deliveries.

“They know when we’re out, when we’re moving or stationery, and when we’re back at office.”

The worker said, the information gleaned from this made the bosses think they could reorganise all the delivery routes in the SW17 postcode.

They wanted everyone to work harder and for longer—or, in their words, “more efficiently”. And, instead of equalising the workload across all the duties they went with money saving option.

Special managers, known as “planners”, said they could reduce Tooting’s 35 postal areas into just 26, thereby reducing the number of workers needed.

The union warned management that their plan was “undeliverable” but bull-headed bosses were in no mood to listen.

So, the nonsense plan was then implemented—badly—with the sorting frames used to organise mail deliveries being wrongly labelled and with illogical road splits.

In the real world, door numbers on a street do not always follow a strict order—they often jump numbers. So, the new system made postal workers walk back on themselves when on road and caused chaos.

“The mistakes meant we finished our sorting late. Then we got out the door late (to do deliveries). And then the walks, or delivery rounds, were so long that no one could complete them.”

The worker says that management called this “teething problems” but whole tiers of bosses have now been in the office to try and deal with the problems.

Sometime this is done by bullying. For example, managers recently called a postie into a manager’s office for saying he sorted only 8 parcels in 1 minute.

“Now they are trying to blame the delivery office manager for not pushing us postal workers hard enough,” said the worker.

Royal Mail workers across the country report similar problems with these so-called “revisions”. Bosses are desperate to get the firm to complete with the private sector—on its terms.

They are in the process of ripping up the Universal Service Obligation that once bound Royal Mail to a six-day delivery service for first and second class mail.

And, in their dash to complete, Royal Mail are destroying what remains of the service, and the people who work for it.