There is a postal strike, did you notice?
As a former carrier of Her Majesty’s mail, I am behind the strike.
The working hours and pay are the cause of the problems, and I have the solution. That solution is to put it back the way it was. Simple.
Nowadays it seems the postman/woman is doing a day job, when the best thing about the job was finishing a day’s work by lunchtime. They also want to get rid of ‘ghost overtime*’, weekend fliers** and ‘job and finish***’. All things that made the job so attractive to begin with.
*You are paid until half past twelve, regardless of when you finish so the onus is on you to get the job done as quickly as possible. If you finish at ten thirty on a quiet day and are asked if you want to take some extra mail out to cover an absent colleague, you can negotiate in hours. You may get two hours to take out a bag, if they are desperate. The two hours are paid FROM half twelve, not half ten, so your time sheet says you finished at half two.
**On a Saturday you do not have to take out mail sort three, which is mail (usually advertising bumf) which has a letter M in place of a stamp. This waits until Monday, so as you do not have to sort it and take it out, you can speed up an already quiet round and be finished by half nine. Do not forget you are paid until half twelve.
*** Self explanatory, go home as soon as you finish, and be paid until half twelve.
In addition to this, you can offer to go in on your day off and do a round. You can automatically claim full day’s hours (six and a half) just for going through the door. So doing day off overtime on a quiet day, Tuesday or Saturday, makes good sense. I once did two rounds on my day off, my own and an extra and claimed a total of thirteen hours. So while my time sheet said seven o’clock in the evening, I finished at about two o’clock.
I started working for the Royal Mail when it was in a transition period, having just abolished the second delivery. The working hours when I started were six until half twelve for a part time round, and five until one for full time. We turned up at six to sort all our mail into order, (how many of you thought postal workers just turned up and picked up a bag all ready for delivery?) We then left the office at eight o’clock to deliver. The problem with this change was that the customer was used to getting their mail before the school run, so having to wait until lunchtime was a culture shock. If your house was at the beginning of a round this was not too much of a problem. However, at the same time, two rounds were put together to make a bigger round. This caused problems with postmen refusing within their rights to work after their time, so would ‘drop’ a bag or two, requiring them to be taken out by someone else on overtime.
There are several categories of post:
Live Mail: Essentially anything with a stamp on. Letters, postcards, greetings cards and so on. This is priority mail, first class letters are delivered the next day from wherever they are posted. Second class, the day after.
Franked: Usually bank statements and such, with a printed stamp usually just depicting a number 1 or 2. These were mechanically sorted to each round, but not in order so they still had to be hand sorted. Mechanically sorted mail is known as ‘mech’.
Flats: A4 sized, and a mixture of stamped, franked, mail sort and holiday brochures etc.
My proposal, which I have suggested to Royal Mail (I have offered twice now, to take over the running of Royal Mail free for a year) is to prioritise the categories into timed deliveries.
Under my rule, the postmen would turn up for work at five. The night sorters would have done their job as normal and live mail and mech would be ready to go. Any mail in the frames ready at five will be sorted into order by the early postmen. They could then leave as soon as ready, so they should be finished before eight leaving happy customers.
The second post would be all the other stuff, still being sorted in the office. The junk mail would go out as a third delivery by a part time postie.
I still believe in the postal service, and think there is something nice about writing and receiving a letter. I still have all my letters from my family when I left home, and I write to Emily and she writes to me. Nobody fondly looks at old emails; you can’t keep them in a shoebox under your bed to show your kids can you?
I would encourage the sending of birthday, Christmas and other types of greetings cards, and postcards from holiday.
The postal strike has not really affected me, as the only fun stuff I get nowadays is a load of promo CDs, and they can come any time of day as far as I am bothered. But small businesses who send invoices through the post, and receiver cheques in the mail are suffering. So if Royal Mail take me up on my offer, it will all be sorted out very soon and the customer and the postman will be happy.
