A Postman's lament

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The Independent 14 October 2009
A Postman's lament at all this belligerence, bullying and cajoling - we are being provoked.
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This is the Roy Mayall article, but there are a couple of supportive letters in todays Independent:

The truth about being a postman

I'm a postman from West London. When I started seven years ago, I had one manager and 38 postmen to cover this postcode. We now have 27 postmen and two managers. For the past two years and up until a month ago, I had three managers.

All of these managers and all of those above them will get a bonus, starting at around 10 per cent of their salary. This bonus is based not on quality or performance, but merely on budget. They are virtually guaranteed this bonus as we have lost a further two jobs. Obviously ordinary postmen are not party to this scheme.

We have a disparate workforce with ages starting from 18 all the way to 64. Our older postmen cannot sustain the same walking pace as the younger members, and some cannot now complete their longer routes within their paid hours. No allowance is made for the varying speeds and no attempt is made to make the quicker ones help the slower ones. But these older postmen bring other strengths to the job including, in my experience, a much greater concern for quality of service, and a deep local knowledge.

There is an argument to be had about mail volumes but it is indisputable that we have had around 1,000 addresses added to this postcode since the last wave of job cuts. These all need delivering to, whether they have one or 10 letters.
Clearly there is much to this strike, but I would just like the public to get an idea of how we're run.

RICHARD BLACK
London W7


I found "A Postman's lament" (14 October) very pertinent. last week one of the Royal Mail's rival companies tried and failed to deliver a parcel to me.

The reason? The delivery person assumed which house was mine, in spite of it having the wrong number and actually being on a different road. Finding no one in, the delivery person left a card and took my parcel to yet another house.

This is the downside to companies other than the Royal Mail making deliveries. because they don't deliver regularly, they don't know the layout of the streets, and they're in too much of a rush to find out. And if they can't deliver your mail they take it to an office miles away instead of the Royal Mail's local office, which is usually reasonably nearby.

SUSAN TAYLOR
Leeds


As a postie myself, I would like to to thank you very much for publishing "A Postman's Lament". I would, however, disagree with a couple of minor points.

Firstly I am only allowed to take out a bag weighing 11kg and not the 13-16kg as suggested, and therefore I take out more bags than your writer. Secondly, a finish time of 3pm is something of which we can only dream; close to 4pm is nearer the mark.

Regarding the number of letters in the grey boxes; Royal Mail claim 150 per box is average, so this morning I did my own count. One of my boxes conained 231, another 298 - almost double the number estimated by Royal Mail. It is no wonder that posties have not noticed the supposed drop in the volumes of mail.

Finally, we work five days out of six so on the days when someone is off, that round is shared out between the remaining staff with no overtime or extra payment.

I have done some hard jobs in my time, but I can honestly say this is the toughest one I have ever done - both phsically and mentally.

JANE WELLS
Tollesbury, Essex