Using Cars On Deliveries

[TrueBlueTerrier]

An old post on Hellmail but a well written view by a postie so I thought worth copying and pasting.

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http://www.hellmail.co.uk/postalnews/te ... 1&zoneid=5

25 June 2008 by Concerned Postie - "Hellmail Talkback" - © Hellmail.co.uk

Some wee while ago, a few post(wo)men suggested to the boss that they could see no reason for the continued prohibition of private car use for delivering mail. Once, it had been almost heresy to think it.

Managers then said they would allow it. The Union advised us not to do it- we’d have more work thrust upon us, and we’d lose hours and duties from the office.

But, we did it anyway, we started using our cars to take out our deliveries. We had an agreement that said we would be able to keep the extra time we might make, but we must take care of the costs of using our own cars ourselves- running costs, maintenace, insurance, the usual.

Quid pro quo. Everybody happy.

Now, it soon came to pass that more was expected of us. Managers saw we had an extra 10 minutes here, a spare 20 minutes there, and we got lumbered with more work, and, in time, hours and duties were taken out just as the Union warned.

Part of the reason for the strike last year was the aggressive and ungrateful attitude displayed by management; the constant onslaught of change after change after change (and no real tangible benefit for either the business, our customers, or the workforce), and being told we were not flexible, we were overpaid by 25% , under worked by 40%, and it was us, the postmen and women, who needed to change to make the business more efficient, more productive, more profitable.

Well, many of us are still using our cars.

There are some who no longer see the point.

The incentive has gone, they’ve been given more work to do, they don‘t make any time anymore, and it all costs so much more to do it as well… So, they go out with a Royal Mail driver in a Royal Mail van, at Royal Mail’s expense. If they can find a driver.

The drivers hours and duties were taken away, you see, when management thought there was no need for them anymore.

And they wait, and they wait, and they wait some more for a driver to show up to take them to their first delivery point, and they wait again when they need their next bag, and the third, and the fourth…and they don’t get nearly so much work done in the same time as they used to. Because they don’t have the flexibility their cars would allow them, and they are dependent on someone else “feeding” them their work.

Well, all the time these problems are happening, managers have a cunning plan. To spend umpty-thousands of pounds on new and glamorous satellite-based global positioning technology which can measure to the metre the distances which we trudge each and every day to get the mail out. All that technology, costing all that money, which only managers can use to calculate the distances, at managers wages, which is a lot more than they pay me, I can tell you. All that money.

Well, this plan involves using averages to work out how much time is actually required to walk that distance which that delivery officer covers during the course of that delivery. And factored in is the time it takes to get that delivery officer to the first delivery point using a Royal Mail driver in a Royal Mail van; though we will still be allowed to use our cars if we want to.

And, by his own admission, our Delivery Office Manager confirms all this planning won’t actually change much because of the various anomalies deliveries throw up each day.

We had a much simpler, much cheaper alternative to these plans, and we could have saved them the umpty-thousands of pounds it has all cost.

“Why don’t you ask us?”, we said.

But no, management is not flexible enough, unlike us, to take in an alternative suggestion- and so has spent all that money, and all that time, doing a job that only managers can do, at managers’ wages (which are a lot more than mine, let me remind you).

And another little wheeze recently implemented, though dreamt of for years in Royal Mail managers’ private moments, is “summer savings”.

This is to reduce the amount of staff hours in the summertime budget because mail “falls off” over this period. We have all been made to accept more work, to do extra prep or delivery, and so shrink the numbers of staff required. Well, not a bad idea. Only the execution is a different tetsubin of herrings.

We have seen days of overtime spent, at time+one third, and spare bodies mooching round at the same time with nothing much to do.

It would have been as cheap to let things lie.

Dear reader, I am wondering how it is that such inflexibility, such incompetence, such unnecessary waste, such unnecessary bad attitude and ill-feeling goes unnoticed by those who should know better how to run an organisation even on a local level, not just National, such as Royal Mail is.

Adam Crozier is presiding over a farcical situation in a farcical environment. If it wasn’t truly so appallingly sad, I’d be killing myself laughing, because you really could not make it up.

The Royal Mail Board must resign, and now, because there is no management here, there is merely decline. Decline in Royal Mail, and decline in The Post Office.

We need someone with us, not against us, who will persuade the government of it’s failure to uphold a standard within the mail industry which the country has historically enjoyed, but is now slipping like some doomed ship, holed and listing, taking on more and more weight of water without support, and sinking, sinking, sinking.

Concerned Postie

© Hellmail.co.uk (25 June 2008)

[brothermagrew]

Aye a good and interesting observational read to the discerning eye this postie should have won the Booker Prize.