“It’s better than walking the streets”:
Keeping spirits up in a Royal Mail Delivery Office
I am a delivery postman in a
Working for Royal Mail can still be an enjoyable and worthwhile job.
Last year in a single daily delivery duty, Woolavington
1, the council estate, 559 ‘calls’, I gingerly moved to safety two frogs
fucking on a doorstep, heard three skylarks singing over different streets, and
heard a ‘weep weep!’ cry over my head and looked two hundred feet up to see a
raven chasing off a buzzard……..and people, overwhelmingly working-class
Somerset, are friendly and fine, except when the clichés come popping out:
‘You’re late today postman!’
‘You can take it back if it’s a bill!’
‘All junk mail I expect, you know where that’s going!’
‘Where’s my lottery cheque?’
During my two Woolavington ‘walks’, I can see
Cheddar Gorge and the Mendips, the Blackdowns, Brent
Knoll, Ham Hill, Glastonbury Tor, Brean Down, Steep
Holm, Cardiff and Aberthaw
Power Station across the Bristol Channel. Beautiful! But I walk or cycle
between ten and seventeen miles a day, and when I get home I crash straight out
and sleep for three hours.
This is because the job is getting harder and the mail has massively
increased and shows little sign of abating. Personal mail is still falling but
E-bay internet personal packets have gone up nearly 20% in the last year, and
business ‘Direct Mail’, both letters and A4 ‘flats’, must be four times what it
was ten years ago. Unaddressed ‘Door to Door’
leaflets, three a week for every house, complete the bag-fills: maybe seven or
eight bags now compared to three or four. Tuesdays and Saturdays used to be
light days: not now, not ever. As from the end of our 2007 national dispute, we
have to start later, so we finish too late to enjoy anything else. Some days I
start at
All of us are in the Communication Workers Union bar one, who was
expelled back along for BNP activities. There are three managers in Bridgwater
Delivery Office and one ‘acting’ manager, who is still a CWU member. When
Bridgwater struck officially for three days in June 2007, before the national
strikes, only two CWU members crossed the local picket line. Our reputation has
been a well-organised union office. .
We get £8.40 pence an hour now. Not bad for unskilled, but are postal
workers unskilled? There are sorters, fifty-five or sixty years of age or more,
at the Bristol Mail Centre who can name County and Postcodes for every town and
most large villages in the whole of
The basic pay rise, and the five day week, have
come at a price: Saturday time is now normal, Bank Holiday entitlements have
been cut, overtime at
What the future may hold troubles us these days. Ten years of dodgy
‘productivity’ schemes, cutting night shifts and full-time jobs; tougher sick
and discipline regimes, cause good union members to hope for that redundancy
cheque. This is not just a story of poor national union leadership. Far too
many start an hour early everyday, unpaid; use their cars on delivery,
uninsured for theft; work through part or all of a main 40-minute meal break;
risk their job by leaving their unlocked pouch, trolley or van to deliver a
road in one go.
In strong union offices, these changes come slower and morale drops
less quickly: a clear majority are still up for a scrap, locally or nationally,
when the CWU gives a lead. Burslem, for example, has
obviously been an inspiration to Royal Mail workplaces throughout
Staffordshire, and now nationally. In the other offices, with a weak union rep
or no rep at all, managers do what they like, sack whom they see fit, and
workers do what they are told, treated like the old Secondary Modern
‘C’-streamers.
Full-time and part-time
Five years ago Bridgwater had no part-timers: now there are nine, and
these were all previously 40-hour duties. In June 2007 there was a local
three-day strike against the latest plans to downgrade full-time duties to
28-hour ones. The result was a draw, one full-time job went part-time; the
other two were re-allocated to two full-time ‘modern apprentices’. Part-time
delivery duties can make sense where there are new housing developments, for
‘socially/friendly’ start and finish times; or, in my case, as ‘day-off’ cover in
a small village office. But continuously cutting back to
28-hour posts just means that there are fewer Inward Primary sorters, so
everyone gets out even later, while the delivery is still really a full-time
one. And in a weak office, the new part-timer might come under pressure
to finish the delivery without claiming overtime, in order to please the
manager and get that permanent contract or pass that trial period.
Rotations and Fixed Duties
5 years ago an office the size of Bridgwater,
then 140-strong, would only close on a Saturday night. Twelve night turns,
eight late/day turns, a few 4-day weeks, rural deliveries, town deliveries;
most of these on rotation, to share out the earnings and the variety of work.
In 2008 few delivery offices anywhere have night turns, and fixed duties are
the norm. This leads to ‘individual’ feeling where a CWU member feels they
‘own’ their duty, and jealously guard it. With rotating duties and duty
‘sections’, he or she doesn’t own anything apart from what can be achieved through
union control and workmate solidarity. Offices that keep rotations are doing
well.
Workmate solidarity has nothing whatsoever to do with managers’ plans
to insert ‘Teamworking’ into our lives, the ‘Creeps
Charter’ that we stopped in the 1996 strike. Now the plan is dormant. However,
the flexible-working part of last years’ dispute deal COULD bring in teamworking in times of maximum summer leave and abnormal
sickness. The teamworking paradigm of six posties regularly doing an extra walk FOR NOTHING would
have serious consequences for our health, and the jobs of ‘Leave Reserves’. The
‘team’ delivering that extra walk from a bus will have a youngest member, and
oldest member, a fastest member, a slowest member, and a member that cares
little for safety rules and agreements. Solidarity?
Work-Time Learning entered our lives as ‘Customer First’ 15 years ago.
For half an hour on a Tuesday morning at
Vans, trolleys, bikes and boots
The cessation of the daily second delivery some years ago meant longer
single deliveries, the maximum allowed by agreement with the CWU is 3.5 hours.
Trolleys, some electric, have increased in town centres, while the latest bikes
have two side panniers that are supposed to be used solely for wet-weather gear
and a helmet. Panniers that as managers probably realised,
are often stuffed with mail to enable a ‘runner’ to make fewer journeys back to
the office or the public red-box pouch-drop. Bob Gibson ,
Delivery Offices’ CWU National Officer, and Dave Joyce our Health and Safety
Officer, have negotiated an excellent agreement which drastically curtails
maximum shoulder pouch weights for walkers. The more pouches you carry, the
less the weight limit. But how do you
get your workmates to abide by these rules, when they are put under pressure,
OR when they put themselves under pressure?
Sometimes, a weary soul forgets to check his or her pouches before
returning to the office, forgets that a stray letter, put there for later
delivery to the correct part of the walk, and gets caught by a managers’
official ‘pouch check’. The result can be ‘Wilful Delay of the Mail’, and
dismissal, if the disciplinary regime is tough; or negligence, if the regime is
reasonable, and then a two-year warning follows. Very few are up to regular
‘half-a-walk’ overtime now, because 1.they are already knackered; 2. it is already
New Machinery
In the Bristol Mail Centre, there are huge rotating drum machines to
sort packets and thick letters from machinable
letters; IMP/Integrated Mail Processing machines to sort the mail-inward (for
delivery), or outward (for dispatch)- into detailed postcode bundles and trays;
A4 Flat-letter sorting machines; conveyor belts and an automated trolley
system. However, there is a new machine currently on trial that, if our union
leaders don’t soon come to their senses and really FIGHT for a 35-hour gross
week, can mean 20,000 jobs going in our already depleted delivery offices.
This is the Walk Sequencing Machine, which can lay out in a tray part
of a delivery ‘walk’ so that all we have to do is take each letter and throw it
into every adjacent address slot on the Walk Frame one after the other. Time
saved per delivery duty that is 100% walk-sequenced? Maybe an
hour or an hour and a half per duty? This issue played no formal part in
last years dispute, or its conclusions. It doesn’t look good, does it?
Talking, Shouting and Swearing: tightening up on discipline
New zealous managers tend to forget any Entry Course mention of the
CWU, and forget as a result that there are rules, agreements, and guidelines,
of which managers and CWU reps should be joint custodians. Many concern health
and safety. When the pressure is on, and an office is short-staffed, a blind
eye can be turned to a massively overweight pouch, because the manager knows he
or she will hurry back to clear another walk on overtime; or rural deliveries
are told they don’t have to wait for the last missort
run, even though that means first class mail will fail.
Many believe that mangers threaten trialists
with the sack unless they get faster or book less overtime. Or insist that
pre-booked hospital appointment is taken as annual leave, when this should be
PAID leave. Or a close relative’s funeral is to be attended as unpaid leave
when it should be paid. Or, on a day when the CWU Rep is away, a sick absence
interview might take place when a final warning is given, even though the
absences were due to an accident at work, and so shouldn’t be counted.
Delivery Offices are very sociable workplaces: the only noises in
Bridgwater are human. For the last 30 years I have expressed myself more
completely to my fellow postal workers than in any other social sphere. The
laughs we’ve had! Bridgwater used to be an office where I’ve seen a dozen of us
doubled up and incapable for minutes on end: rarely would a manger stop this,
they would just shake their heads.
Things are different now. Managers fear that
sociable banter is dangerous: friends of mine on the Inward Primary Sorting frames
have been told off for swearing to each other; talking ‘too loudly’; talking
and turning around to look at the person he was talking too; and even for
talking at all! And telling your best friend to ‘fuck of’ in a loud but
friendly manner shouldn’t be a disciplinary offence. Keeping our right to have
a ‘Crack’ is as important a battle as pay or pensions.
This is the age-old fight, to retain one’s soul on the job, which Marx
described as already being lost in those 19th century Satanic Mills.
In the modern-day Postal Factories like Bridgwater Delivery Office, we havn’t lost our souls, or our happiness at work, or our
love of a good picket-line. But a few more years like the last few, without a
clear-cut WIN in a national strike that our fighting-qualities deserve, might
change all that for ever. I don’t want that to happen, because we have inspired
so many sadder trades unionists over the last twenty
years to refuse to surrender: I think I’ve been through twelve different
strikes, all won or drawn!
I could talk about the creeping privatisations and joint ventures; the
‘Downstream Access’ deals with firms like TNT and Business Post; the loss,
sorry I mean surrender, of Sunday Collections, our support for the Labour
Government; European Free Market policies. But I won’t now.
We fight for a dream or we lose
Royal Mail’s most militant workers need to get in touch and organise! But for what? Well, short term, to make sure we WIN our
inevitable national strike over pensions, but, long-term, it can’t just be to
hang on and hope. If you’ve read this far, you’re one of a crowd of militants
who COULD join together and recreate and strengthen those old UPW Guild
Socialist ideals of a Post Office run by the workforce. A Post Office with
elected and recallable managers and economists; of a Post Office public service
run by the public for the public, free for the unemployed, pensioners, job
seekers, and perhaps lovers; a Post Office fully-funded by the government
according to the directives of trades unions and the public community. Needless
to say, not a government that throws billions of pounds of our money at banks,
nuclear weapons research and wars.
No! This isn’t actually a dream at all: it’s a kind of common-sense. In
Royal Mail in Bristol and Somerset, it can be deduced from the knowledge,
skills and militancy of the current non-managerial workforce, deduced also from
a successful alliance with communities that could begin, even in 2008, to
re-build a little of our new society within the shell of the old.
Dave Chapple,
Local CWU Rep, Woolavington
Local CWU Rep, Bridgwater, 1989-2003
Branch Chair,