Red Postie

Tonight’s Dispatches documentary “Post Office Undercover” barely concealed its anti-union, pro-privatisation bias. Two journalists Joe and Karim went undercover as agency postal workers to expose the problems in Royal Mail.

The hidden camera showed again and again postal workers forced to deal with too few staff and unsustainable workloads. But put through the Dispatches camera’s special filter lens, this ended up interpreted as lazy workers and greedy unions. Nowhere was it asked why cuts were needed, if Royal Mail is already making a big profit.

Royal Mail managers were exposed for their laidback attitude to stealing, angry customers, and damaged mail, but the aim wasn’t to show a public service shredded by cutbacks and competition, but a dysfunctional company that can only be saved by privatisation.

The bias became blatant with the string of “experts” who were wheeled out to pronounce on how crap Royal Mail and the CWU are:

- Richard Hooper, handpicked by Peter Mandelson to run an “independent” commission and back Labour’s plans for privatisation (which he did, obliging chap that he is).

- A free market guru from the rightwing Adam Smith Institute who is against the one-price-goes anywhere USO.

- The slimy Post Switch website founder Jonathan DeCarteret who’s aim is to help “companies switch from Royal Mail to rival operators”.

Not a single union representative was formally interviewed (not counting working reps spied on by camera).

Yet what did the programme really show, to those without a privatizing agenda?

- Untrained agency staff out delivering for long hours, even till after dark (the agreed delivery span is 3.5 hours)

- Agency staff sent out without an experienced worker to show them round, leading to long hours or mail being brought back to office (Royal Mail policy is to have new starters who are put on new walks to be shown round without fail for the first six weeks).

- Agency staff were untrained, not seriously vetted or supervised, despite Royal Mail’s claims when they were training up a quality temporary staff (to scab on last year’s strike) and its zero tolerance to stealing. At one point agency staff are left to let in others without any ID being presented, then asked to write down their names fifteen minutes into a shift!

- Keys lost, mail returned by untrained agency staff, putting more work onto the normal staff, who then have to deliver the extra left over (and late) mail the next day without necessary equipment such as keys, working trolleys etc.

And that was just the first half of the programme! The second half was the real hatchet job on the workers and the union.

The managers accuse their workers of not telling the truth about how long it takes to work. “These guys are slowing down –They’re deliberately taking out less. They’re not working normally.”

It shows offices like Brixton where the previous four day week has been forcibly returned to five days, supposedly the manager says for “modernisation and efficiency.” Yet when asked whether staff claims are true, that eight hours is too little to deliver all their mail, he admits “on certain days it probably is.”

The workers are more to the point and angry about it: “These walks have doubled, that’s why we’ve been striking, its out of order”. A senior rep at Tooting office says “a lot of workers think its wrong. It’s the Managers fault, we’re only on an 8 hour day and can’t do it.”

The camera spies on managers and union reps in the canteen “haggling” over the amount of overtime that will be allowed to help shift the mountain of Christmas mail – what Dispatches doesn’t bother to say is that Royal Mail for the last three years has cut back on the amount of extra hours allotted to offices at Xmas, expecting workers to work flat out to cover the extra load while they keep up standards of delivery.

In the undercover footage the Reps say the workers won’t accept what Royal Mail is offering and want double the overtime proposed – too right! Ultimately they get 29 hours extra offered over Christmas but in return have to clear the office. Hardly unreasonable.

The reporter asks managers why they tolerate the union’s demands. One Brixton manager explains how managers have been forced to retreat in the face of postal workers determination and strength: “In some of the offices the management hasn’t got the power. It’s a struggle just to get them out on the street.”

Meanwhile a Tooting Manager tips the real gameplan behind returning to the four day work week: “Keep them happy for Christmas. We’ve got another fight next year.” Yet when they take away the four day work week again in January, managers are forced to backtrack when the workers threaten to strike. Workers were told on Saturday it would go to back to the five day week on Monday!

All of these incidents are painted in such a way as to make the workers look greedy and uncaring. One worker is shown to be unsympathetic to customers queuing (around the block) for parcels, but now Royal Mail is closing offices and hiking the price of redelivering packages to customer’s local post office. Who is really to blame for short fuses on both sides? Modernisation cuts and privatisation clearly lead to a worse service for the public and deeper exploitation of the workforce.

Karim slates postal workers for abandoning their walks in the January ice. A postal worker explains to him that the manager refused to let them out early so they would have the time to take care and deliver, instead piling the work, but this is uncommented on. The workers were right to protect themselves.

Karim patronizingly states that HE doesn’t have trouble delivering in the icy conditions. “There’s nothing wrong with this path at all” – where a thin strip of concrete is surrounded by ice as far as eye can see!

Of course Karim is only playing at being a postie for a few weeks. If he falls he will have a Channel 4 journalists job to go back too, not an injury that will make years of working life painful or a Rottweiler Royal Mail manager that might even see him or her lose their job.

It’s a shame Adam Crozier isn’t transferring to run Dispatches instead of poor old ITV staff, then these two journalists could experience the old Royal Mail management magic first hand! It might change their tune.