Don't wait a minute, Mr Postman

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ec/13/post

* George Abbott
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 December 2008 14.00 GMT



The news that postal workers are being made to "walk faster" and complete unrealistic delivery rounds came as no surprise to me. I worked as a postman over the summer and found myself struggling to complete my round before the estimated finish time of 12pm. I kept on hearing, "You're new, you'll get used to it" and "Everyone struggles at first; it's normal." But after six weeks on the job, I still found myself regularly finishing at 1, 2 or even 3pm.

My round consisted of five bags of mail and roughly 300 houses. It was supposed to take from 5.30am until 12pm – 6.5 hours to include sorting the mail, a break of 20 minutes, biking to the start of the round and the actual delivery. Saturdays, the busiest day of the week, would find me still delivering up until 4 in the afternoon. It just didn't seem physically possible to finish in time, even though I was assured it was by the previous postman on my round … but he was a personal trainer in his spare time!

Fortunately, my managers were good, and theoretically, when I did take too long, I could claim overtime pay. But the culture was such that I didn't feel I could claim overtime pretty much every day, so I did end up working a lot of hours unpaid.

To my mind, though, the real scandal is the weight of the mailbags. The post office has a health and safety rule of not more than 11kg, but were you to follow this rule, your round would require using drastically more mailbags. This would be extremely impractical as you would have constantly to double back on yourself to pick up new bags. The method for enforcing this rule is a system of weighing the bags and recording the weight on leaving the depot. But this is easily bypassed either by making up your weights after the weighing or, as I often did, by just leaving the form blank, "presumably" to be filled in by someone else later.

I wouldn't say my experience is typical of being a postal worker as, on the whole, the postmen I met were happy with their jobs and did seem able to finish their rounds in time. In my case, however, I did everything I could to finish my round in time and still struggled. The other difference is that I found the managers supportive and patient – in contrast to what is reported, according to the Communication Workers Union, about Royal Mail management in Thursday's news story.

[DGP1]

My round consisted of five bags of mail and roughly 300 houses.

That's only half a duty usually 8 bags and 600 houses and after Pegasus the numbers will go up.

[Darren Bent]

300 houses is nothing. I wonder what he will say if he do say 680 houses

[TrueBlueTerrier]

for members info here is a slide from RMs own presentation on Pegasus.

6.44.jpg

So we were lying when we said you wanted us to go at an average pace of 6.44 :cfo :lfo