The Mirror has leaked a story of typical Royal Mail bullying. A woman worker has been bullied into work after being viciously bitten by an alsatian – her manager drove thirty miles to her house to force her, crying, to come in! Royal Mail’s response is familiar: “”We would never force people to come to work when they are not well.” Do they even bother to rewrite their press releases before they press send?

But the real scandal is that being tough on dog bites is the flagship policy of Royal Mail’s recent health and safety blitz, along with cycle helmets and slips and trips. This exposes how this is all just spin.

Why spin? Royal Mail has been desperate to show that despite its imposed cuts programme it is talking to the union over the last year and cares for its employees. This is to hide the reality that Royal Mail’s cuts and flexibility drive will massively harm our health. It is also covers the fact that they haven’t talked to our union about anything over the last year! Except lifting the 3.5 hour health and safety limit on deliveries, they are pretty keen on that.

So how has our health and safety worsened over the last two years since the 2007 Pay and Modernisation agreement?

The flexibility drive forces us to rush to complete our work, and then to deliver mail over the 3.5 hour delivery limit. This despite postal workers accounting for 10 per cent of all skeletal-muscular disorders in the UK, a rate far above the average. Flexibility will only increase such injuries.

The 2007 pension cuts will make us work till 65 and due to reduced pension benefits even work beyond that, collecting trolleys on Tesco parking lots. Add in the flexibility speed-ups, and it means working many of us into an early grave. Senior managers don’t care though, they got pension contribution hikes of 100% this year!

To hide their culpability for accidents due to this speed-up, Royal Mail managers have adopted a blame-the-worker culture. Any accident is deemed the worker’s fault regardless – whether we are slipping, tripping, falling down stairs, it is always because we are reading mail while walking or not paying attention. They weren’t there to witness the accident but after all they’re the boss so it must be true! This practice keeps RM’s stats down and helps speed full-time workers out of a job. If the worker is to blame, rather than Royal Mail, it is easier to force the employee back to work, whether they are ready or not, or onto the attendance procedure’s stages – stage one, two, three and you’re out of a job.

Royal Mail doesn’t want to talk about the health and safety implications of any of its current policies. But it does really really care (really) about dog bites and slips and trips! And cycle helmets, but then it plans to abolish postal bicycle deliveries anyway.

It’s pretty obvious that all this is small change, public relations spin, compared to the real sources of accidents and long term health risks for a postal worker, which are Royal Mail’s policies. Royal Mail’s bark is bad but their bite is worse.