Once eaten, selling off Royal Mail would soon become a bitter pill for workers. Let us learn from our Dutch postal workers that are employed by TNT. The boss of TNT's European Mail Network business said on June 9th, 2010 that he planned to cut 11,000 postal jobs and introduce a 3 times a week delivery service. Collections and deliveries would be outsourced and he attacked the Universal Service Obligation (to deliver to every home) as, "a kind of Jurassic Park and we should get rid of it."
According to Dutch media, all TNT postal workers working over 25 hours a week would lose their job (15,000 were employed full time at the start of 2010). Even those who worked more than 15 hours per week were at risk, according to Dutch News.
In a poll on the Dutch website, only 4.6% of voters felt the service had improved since competition was introduced. A quarter of voters felt that more letters and parcels had gone missing since competition.
Royal Mail workers have been told for a number of years we have been modernising the business along the Dutch model, with working practices transforming over the past decade as competition was introduced to the UK. Now that MP's are poised to sell off Royal Mail, workers need to wake up to the reality that THOUSANDS of jobs will go, working conditions will be totally revised and work patterns torn up. The CWU is now moving in the right direction but may have left it too late, as the government take advantage of a weary workforce.
As a public service, the post can be run for the masses and not the millionaires - we need to defend working conditions and reject the move towards casual labour on minimum wages. The Royal Mail sell off will signal the end for daily deliveries, reduce collections and condemn thousands of workers to the dole queue.
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