It's Soapbox Time Again

Between the union, Royal Mail management and the government I think this company is going to be pretty fucked pretty quickly.

The union is to blame as despite bleating that they are happy to help modernise Royal Mail, as soon as any jobs or the cushy working conditions the posties have are threatened, they strike. Every time there's a strike, the negative publicity drives more customers away from us. The net result being that there's less income from sending mail and therefore less money to be spunked onto the posties and so more strikes. As one of my customers said to a postman yesterday (regarding the new batch of strikes that are springing up around the country):

"You're all a bunch of communist bastards that should be shot."

Quite.

Royal Mail management play a huge role in the decline of this business. Partly thanks to the union, they haven't effectively modernised the mail sorting or delivering for years. I had a tour of one of the larger mail centres recently and most of the machines there look like they were from the 70's. Most of the mail is actually sorted by hand. You can't tell me that this is a good use of resources. There are plenty of other reasons why management are shite. They just can't work out how to save money either. They made a postie redundant at a local sorting office recently in order to re-arrange the rounds and make do with one less postie.

Sounds good?

Nope. That particular postie was nine months away from retirement. The redundancy package he got was nearly two years wages. So, had they waited for the postie to retire they wouldn't have had to pay out the redundancy package therefore saving about fifteen months of wages. This sort of shit goes on all of he time too, it's by no means an isolated incident of fuckwittedness.

Finally the government have done a load to flush Royal Mail down the crapper too. For years, the Royal Mail pension fund was profitable. Someone decided that he needed to raid that in order to spunk it all up the wall (hint, he's running the country). So, now Royal Mail is faced with a multi billion pension fund deficit. Meanwhile Mr Brown just shrugs his shoulders and says "meh."

Deregulation of the mail industry is taking it's toll too. In order to open up the mails market to competition (something that the EU told us all to do but most European nations seem to be ignoring, funny that) Royal Mail was ordered to deliver mail from other companies. Companies that are able to cherry-pick the most profitable mail routes and customers and aren't burdened by the universal service obligation that Royal Mail is. To add insult to injury, the price that Royal Mail charges these companies is set by the postal regulator and that price is set slightly lower than the cost of delivery. Nice one!

Then we come to Lord Mandleson. Despite his assurances that the Post Office network will be given more government work to do, we're actually getting less and less. The TV licence went to someone else a few years ago. Car taxes are being so heavily promoted tat you can do them online, you can barely make out the text that says you can do them at most Post Offices. Pensions and benefits used to account for a huge swathe of our income. Not no more. In the drive to get people to have them paid into their bank accounts, loads of people were not given the option of a Post Office Card Account. Even now, some job centres are refusing to issue the paperwork to open these accounts as they believe that they're being phased out next year.

Nope, it's not being phased out, it's just changing. We all knew this nearly a year ago. So why has this message not been passed onto the appropriate agencies?

Well, take your pick, conspiracy or incompetence. Both are just as likely.

The annoying thing is that Royal Mail and Post Office ltd are great assets to this country and run properly have a massive positive effect and can generate huge income. Sadly no one can be bothered or is competent enough to do anything other than manage the decline of this company.

Rant over. Normal service will be resumed soon when I write about how much customers are stupid and that they irritate me.