Cautionary tale on post privatisation

10 May 2011

Mail backlogs, pittance pay, no job security and a mail service unfit for purpose, and it's coming to an office near you! This is the warning from a lengthy feature into postal services published in the London Review of Books and the Guardian last week.

Acclaimed writer and journalist James Meek has dedicated months of research and over 5,000 words to his article, which starts with the story of a Dutch postwoman struggling to keep up with her deliveries for private mail companies Selektmail and Sandd. The companies drop dozens of boxes of mail to her home and, according to Meek, she is then "paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail." Despite clocking up a backlog of over 60 boxes of mail in her home, there haven't been enough complaints for her to lose her job. Stressed, underpaid - 5 Euros an hour instead of the minimum wage - and with no pension, sick pay or health insurance, no uniform or vehicle maintenance, she is hoarding thousands of items of mail. There could be hundreds of postal workers doing exactly the same across the Netherlands, making the post inefficient and mistrusted.

Meek interviews Gatwick mail centre manager Michael Fehilly and finds him in favour of moving to the 'Dutch model'. In his quest to understand how privatisation is changing postal services, Meek explores the effect on the Netherlands, tracks UK liberalisation back Labour in 2000, and dips into Richard Hooper's reports of 2008 and 2010. CWU Head of International Affairs, John Baldwin, helps Meek to understand the complexities of European markets and the contradictions between the attitudes of companies when they are the state monopoly at home and private competitor abroad.

With changes afoot in the UK postal market, the lessons of European postal privatisation are a timely warning for those who care about the mail service.

You can read the article in full on the London Review of Books website.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/james-meek/in-the-sorting-office

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