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Authors: James Meek
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unequivocal: ‘Now is
not
the time to reduce the universal service. Reducing the number of deliveries each week … would be in no one’s best interests.’ Hooper Two was less sure. There was no case for cutting the service, it said, until the Royal Mail was fully modernised. But then, cutting it ‘might be justified’. In both reports, Hooper expended much ink and anguish over the highly technical rules that force Royal Mail to deliver the bulk mail its competitors sort at a certain price: a price, Royal Mail says, that obliges it to deliver at a loss.
Hooper is right in that Royal Mail is in a fight for survival with new media, the world of words not written on paper, weightless electronic words. As with music and newspapers, so with letters. It is in a fight with competitors who get guaranteed access to its reservoir of postmen as if they were a water or gas supply. But it is also the subject of a third kind of competition, between two utterly different sets of customers with incompatible needs. A few hundred giant firms and organisations that want to send bursts of millions of letters and catalogues every few days are competing for the same set of postal workers with millions of people who want to send a few Christmas cards and once in a while something that needs a signature. In this competition thepower lies with the few, whose priority is cheapness, rather than the many, whose priority is regularity and universality; cheapness wins, and it is the postal workers who suffer.
There’s a strange blip between the two Hooper reports. Hooper One is full of laudatory references to the old Dutch and German postal monopolies, TNT and Deutsche Post DHL, which privatised, then modernised, then became free-market champions. There’s a chart showing Royal Mail bottom of the class in Europe in terms of profit in 2007, with TNT and Deutsche Post leading the pack, raking in the euros. Two years later, Hooper Two was strangely quiet about the German and Dutch mail stars. No wonder: the equivalent chart for 2009 shows that TNT and Deutsche Post averaged profit margins of only 3.25 per cent, less than Royal Mail.
The bitter postal rumble between the Netherlands and Germany in the late noughties may have had nothing to do with these figures, but it looked like the symptom of something rotten. When I say bitter, I mean bitter. TNT’s Almast Diedrich was courteous in the face of my impertinent questions about the company’s activities in Britain, but when I asked about one particular German attempt to block TNT’s expansion east, his mouth twisted into something almost like a snarl. ‘What Deutsche Post did was very clever,’ he said between his teeth, ‘and typically German.’ What the Germans did was not so different from what the Dutch did: they tried to protect their decently paid former state postmen from low-wage competition in their home country, while setting up networks of low-wage private postmen to undermine the former state post in the country next door. At one point, Diedrich said, TNT managers called the offices of the German postal union, noted their principled stance in defence of well-paid Deutsche Post mailmen in Germany, and asked when they were going to take a similar stand in defence of appallingly paid Deutsche Post mailmen in Holland.
‘It’s very interesting that the Germans compete with the Dutch in Holland not on product, not on the number of days theydeliver: they compete solely on wages,’ the CWU’s Baldwin said. ‘And in Germany, the Dutch compete with the Germans solely on wages. And both of them cry like stuck pigs about the other.’
Why, I asked Baldwin, did multinational companies find it so easy to move across European borders, but unions seemed only capable of acting nationally? Why hadn’t the postal unions across Europe mounted multinational protests against the casualisation of the post?
‘It’s partly because everything happened piece by piece,’ he said. ‘Every country
not
the time to reduce the universal service. Reducing the number of deliveries each week … would be in no one’s best interests.’ Hooper Two was less sure. There was no case for cutting the service, it said, until the Royal Mail was fully modernised. But then, cutting it ‘might be justified’. In both reports, Hooper expended much ink and anguish over the highly technical rules that force Royal Mail to deliver the bulk mail its competitors sort at a certain price: a price, Royal Mail says, that obliges it to deliver at a loss.
Hooper is right in that Royal Mail is in a fight for survival with new media, the world of words not written on paper, weightless electronic words. As with music and newspapers, so with letters. It is in a fight with competitors who get guaranteed access to its reservoir of postmen as if they were a water or gas supply. But it is also the subject of a third kind of competition, between two utterly different sets of customers with incompatible needs. A few hundred giant firms and organisations that want to send bursts of millions of letters and catalogues every few days are competing for the same set of postal workers with millions of people who want to send a few Christmas cards and once in a while something that needs a signature. In this competition thepower lies with the few, whose priority is cheapness, rather than the many, whose priority is regularity and universality; cheapness wins, and it is the postal workers who suffer.
There’s a strange blip between the two Hooper reports. Hooper One is full of laudatory references to the old Dutch and German postal monopolies, TNT and Deutsche Post DHL, which privatised, then modernised, then became free-market champions. There’s a chart showing Royal Mail bottom of the class in Europe in terms of profit in 2007, with TNT and Deutsche Post leading the pack, raking in the euros. Two years later, Hooper Two was strangely quiet about the German and Dutch mail stars. No wonder: the equivalent chart for 2009 shows that TNT and Deutsche Post averaged profit margins of only 3.25 per cent, less than Royal Mail.
The bitter postal rumble between the Netherlands and Germany in the late noughties may have had nothing to do with these figures, but it looked like the symptom of something rotten. When I say bitter, I mean bitter. TNT’s Almast Diedrich was courteous in the face of my impertinent questions about the company’s activities in Britain, but when I asked about one particular German attempt to block TNT’s expansion east, his mouth twisted into something almost like a snarl. ‘What Deutsche Post did was very clever,’ he said between his teeth, ‘and typically German.’ What the Germans did was not so different from what the Dutch did: they tried to protect their decently paid former state postmen from low-wage competition in their home country, while setting up networks of low-wage private postmen to undermine the former state post in the country next door. At one point, Diedrich said, TNT managers called the offices of the German postal union, noted their principled stance in defence of well-paid Deutsche Post mailmen in Germany, and asked when they were going to take a similar stand in defence of appallingly paid Deutsche Post mailmen in Holland.
‘It’s very interesting that the Germans compete with the Dutch in Holland not on product, not on the number of days theydeliver: they compete solely on wages,’ the CWU’s Baldwin said. ‘And in Germany, the Dutch compete with the Germans solely on wages. And both of them cry like stuck pigs about the other.’
Why, I asked Baldwin, did multinational companies find it so easy to move across European borders, but unions seemed only capable of acting nationally? Why hadn’t the postal unions across Europe mounted multinational protests against the casualisation of the post?
‘It’s partly because everything happened piece by piece,’ he said. ‘Every country
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