It is not London's posties who are failing to deliver

[POSTMAN]

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Lord Mandelson has let it be known he is "beyond anger" (one imagines his condition with a thrill) about the striking postal workers.

Royal Mail's managing director says their attitude "beggars belief".

The chief executive, Adam Crozier, says industrial action is an "appalling and unjustified attack on customers". Huff, puff.

Would it be the stupidest thing in the world to wonder whether - rather than hoping to commit mass suicide by destroying the company that employs them, or making war on customers for the fun of it - the thousands of postal workers going out on strike have a legitimate grievance?

Is it worth considering that, in the hopes of salvaging its broken business model, the management of the Royal Mail are demanding that its least-well-paid workers do more work for the same money, and that these workers are entitled to object?

There's no doubt the company is up the spout. The Royal Mail last year made an operating profit of £321million.

But more than a million quid of that went into Adam Crozier's pocket, and the company still has a hole in its pension fund expected to rise to £8 billion next year.

Most of the profit came from delivering junk mail.

According to an interesting article by an actual postman in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, postmen are paid 1.67p per item of junk mail they deliver - a figure that has not changed in 10 years.

They are not entitled to claim overtime if their burden of junk mail pushes their shift over length and they are not entitled to refuse to deliver it.

The Royal Mail's management claims that the volume of mail has gone down by 10 per cent. Our postie, on the other hand, attributes this figure to management arbitrarily changing the basis on which they estimate the volume of mail.

They used to assume each box in which mail arrives at the post office contained 208 letters. Now they have decided each box contains 150 letters. (A manual count organised by the union put the actual figure at 267. And our postie has a sore back.)

Sure, many people do now use email. But they still send Christmas cards. And the Post Office had 30 per cent more workers in the days before eBay, LoveFilm and Amazon.

There's every possibility, here, of mutually assured destruction. I think it's time the Royal Mail's management, whose responsibility it is that the company's up the spout in the first place, spent less time trying to turn the general public against its postmen and more time trying to come to a decent accommodation.

And perhaps tantrum-prone Lord Mandelson could be reeled back from "beyond anger" into a zone where he'll be useful to somebody.

[concerned]

wow....it seems Evening Standard are on side??