ARTICLE ON Royal Mail. "A Fetish of competition..."

[rachelnett]

Article on Royal mail dispute at rcpbml.org.uk/wdie-07/d07-071.htm. goes into Royal mails motives, and what the workers can an must do for the progress of making a modern communication service, where they are in control.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

cor that took a bit of tracking down

http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/forum/vi ... ight=#2510

The Fetish of Competition and Having Contempt for Anyone and Everyone

It was announced on Friday, October 12, that terms for settling the postal services dispute had been reached between the Communication Workers Union and the Royal Mail, with Brendan Barber of the TUC chairing the talks. The terms, which have not yet been disclosed, are to go before the union’s executive on Monday.

This followed a High Court injunction in favour of Royal Mail to restrain the CWU from calling out its members in Mail Centres and Delivery Offices on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. A rolling plan of 24-hour strikes had been planned, with workers striking at mail sorting offices and airports on October 15, deliveries and collection hubs on October 16, and Royal Mail drivers on October 17. Strikes were also planned at manual data entry centres and the Heathrow world distribution centre on October 18. Royal Mail had used the industrial relations laws, which place legal restrictions on the ability of the workers to organise to defend their interests, to argue that the union had failed to state with sufficient accuracy the number of workers likely to be affected on the first two days. A demonstration against these laws and to demand a Trade Union Freedom Bill is to take place this Thursday, October 18.

The dispute has demonstrated the prejudice and contempt for the public good that putting in command the fetish of competition in the marketplace carries with it. The fetish of competition becomes the be all and end all, benefiting not the economy as a whole and the people’s needs, but competing centres of capital. It has meant for Royal Mail riding roughshod over the rights and interests of the postal service workers in pursuit of the "flexibility" in working practices necessary to compete in the postal market. This is what is termed "modernisation".

Furthermore, the concern claimed by Royal Mail that it should serve its customers is also a fraud. The very idea of putting competition first and last, attacks the whole concept of a universal postal service, that will be of service to all and will deliver to all, irrespective of cost. Resources since 2006 have been increasingly put into competing with some 17 other companies in the profitable business mail sector, and still Royal Mail complains that it has lost 40% of the corporate sector to rivals. This is the meaning of Adam Crozier, Royal Mail chief executive, when he insists that "flexibility is the main issue at stake". The concerns of the workers and the value of the work that they carry out count as nothing in the face of the driving force of "competition". The workers are considered merely incidental to grabbing a share of the market vis a vis Royal Mail’s competitors, and the consideration of serving the economy and the public good comes nowhere. In this capital-centred outlook, the demand of the workers that they should not be treated as slaves is regarded as the greatest stumbling block to being competitive, and as an outmoded insistence on what are insultingly called "Spanish practices". The workers are treated not as human beings worthy of respect and who are the most important resource, but as adjuncts to technology and fixed capital, whose conscious participation is regarded as an overriding nuisance to be overcome or bought off.

In this scenario, the media also plays its role in promoting the anti-worker, anti-conscious ethos which is supposed to govern the way society is run. This is why, according to the Royal Mail management, it is regarded as a "stakeholder" and why they thank the media for their support. The workers on the other hand are not regarded as "stakeholders". The media, hand in glove with the business managers and the government, promote that competitiveness or the lack of it is key to everything, and that workers must suffer every indignity to increase their flexibility, productivity and in every other way prostrate themselves before the needs of capital to enrich itself. They promote the image of workers as a kind of race apart whose only aim in fighting for their interests is to cause chaos and is motivated by selfishness. In this way, the human factor/social consciousness is viciously attacked, the aim of serving the public good negated, the role of workers in building a national economy ignored, and everything is done to hide the fact that the workers are an integral part of society and are also taking a stand in favour of the fate of that society. That everyone should be able to plan their lives, take control of their future, unite as one in a common aim for the public good and the individual and collective good is buried under the propaganda that the postal workers in order to be public spirited must unite behind Royal Mail’s business plan, should work together with the CEOs and government and follow the line of "mature and responsible industrial relations".

This is a pernicious form of "social Darwinism", the survival of the leanest and fittest in the market place in cut-throat competition, and devil take the hindmost. In other words, it tries to put human beings on the level of animals, while in fact all of society’s resources are marshalled by an alliance of government and big business to favour the extraction of millions and billions of pounds by the financiers, privateers and the aristocracy of capital.

In this context, the workers are finding their pensions attacked, as well as their pay, conditions and quality of life. They are finding that the monopolies and the government are attacking the collective strength of the workers, who must be isolated, cajoled and threatened individually under the pretext that individual rights are paramount. Individually in fact the workers are expected to be at the beck and call of every whim of management, who go out of their way to be provocative, and respond to the full "functional flexibility" demanded of them, covering shifts, absences, other duties, coming in earlier or later at short notice, respond to the vagaries of the weather, work different hours on different days of the week. In short, the workers’ role as wage slaves is brought out to the full, and they are supposed to shape themselves around work, handing over their lives to the company. In addition, the neo-liberal agenda is one of ensuring that agency workers are the norm, and that all jobs are temporary and on contract.

The attitude of Royal Mail to industrial relations is very revealing. They have a strategic plan which they are determined to railroad through no matter what. Under the guise of "principles", Royal Mail is taking a stand, bullying the workers that "the offer is the offer, the money is the money and the words are the words", and are determined to put "business recovery" over any other consideration. Clearly the workers are right to take up this struggle in the face of the Royal Mail’s spurious moral highground that discussion with the unions is simply a nuisance and they have to get on with running the business, and that managers have to manage. Royal Mail is shaping its strategy and tactics very consciously with the participation of local managers, and at the very least the workers have to be equally conscious in discussing their own strategy and tactics. The objective situation demands it.

The working class and people are struggling against and cannot afford to be reconciled to the disharmony, chaos and enrichment of the few that the fetish of "competition" brings with it. Royal Mail and the government are trying to suggest that the workers are the problem and that the issue is changing the workers’ heads and altering their behaviour in order to come to terms and grow to love their new working environment and flexible ways of working.

However, the postal service does not belong to the owners of capital. It is our postal service, along with social services as a whole. Even more to the point, it is our economy, we decide. This is the slogan of the working class and people. The anti-social offensive and the neo-liberal programme of New Labour must be defeated, and a pro-social agenda presented and fought for. The workers and their union have been fighting this battle against the neo-liberal agenda, and will go on doing so. The workers’ stand is just, and we call on the working class to intensify their struggle to build the Workers’ Opposition and to elaborate their vision for a new society against this moribund one based on individual private gain and exploitation bereft of principle. It is our economy and we must decide!

[F0zziebear]

The article is flawed in the last paragraph.

The majority of the mail service is paid for by the big banks, utilities and other large conglomerates, including the government, who's mail spend has risen significantly in recent years, masking declines in almost all of the other sectors (this point is generally lost).

So if we are still demanding a postal service on the same level as say the fire brigade, NHS or police then it will cost the tax payer a significantly larger amount of money if you removed the revenues from the banks etc...

The author of the above article can't have it both ways. Either capitalism continues to pay for "a" postal service, which can be defined in different ways, or we decide to properly keep the service nationalised and refuse private sector revenue.

Now some of you may say don't be so silly, as people moan about mailsort and D2D, but it is these revenue streams which keeps the system going at all. The postal system ceased being a "domestic" communication service several years ago, and is now primarily an advertising or fulfillment stream.

Happy to discuss this with you if you disagree or would like further clarification

F0zz

[genesis]

And that is the truth,are you reading this other postal websites , what will your experts think about it? The experts whom you never name.

[F0zziebear]

Genesis,

I read the news, and rely on my own experience working in RM and the competition. To the best of my knwowledge there is no-one else out there at the moment who has my experience in the UK mail market. I don't work in the industry anymore as I realised it is a waste of time until real competition opens up.

As for relying on other experts, I think you have to question if they are indeed experts or need to say that as they are insecure. I generally find that these articles have such a slant that the author is unable to provide dispassionate objectivity. This article then goes onto some rant about socialism.

F0zz

[sprocket]

do you belive that postcom, and the policy of DSA will actually serve to open up the market to the degree that a competitor will invest in the infrastructure to provide a universal service? Is your grasp of the capatalist free market concept that slim!