Read Online Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James Meek
Ads: Link
is suffering a loss of postal workers’ jobs, partly due to the financial crisis, partly due to e-substitution, partly due to increased automation. Almost all of these countries are managing their reductions by early retirement, voluntary redundancy, redeployment, so the actual impact on any given day just is not the same. To convince ordinary postal workers that they need to take part in a European strike to protect postal services across Europe would be incredibly difficult. Unless they’re hit in their own pocket, today, your average worker … doesn’t go to work to worry about the future of the postal services in twenty or thirty years’ time.’
While I was in the Netherlands, the Dutch parliament’s pressure on the low-wage postal companies, which had been building for years, finally forced them to make a deal. In the small hours of the morning they agreed with the unions that by the end of September 2013, 80 per cent of all postal workers in companies like Sandd must be on proper contracts, meaning they gain some degree of social protection. One of the companies was Netwerk VSP, TNT’s low-wage postal subsidiary. Almast Diedrich was the highest-ranking executive prepared to talk to me; the most senior bosses were preparing for the final stage of TNT’s break-up, which was stripping the former Dutch post office of the racier acquisitions it made when it was the darling of the markets. I met him in TNT’s headquarters on Prinses Beatrixlaan in the Hague, which with its aspirational office blocks, multi-lane highway and elevated tramway has a sort ofPacific Rim vibe. I asked him about the deal with the unions, and he fessed up. ‘Yes, we underpaid, if you want to call it that, in the same way that others did. From early on we said when others agree to come to a labour agreement we will follow. We would not take the lead.’
On the other side of the road, in the lobby of a luxury hotel, I met Egon Groen, one of the union leaders who put his signature to the deal with employers. It was late Friday afternoon and a group of young salarymen were ordering a round of what Joseph O’Neill called ‘the gold-and-white gadgets that are Dutch glasses of beer’. Groen stood out with his hoodie and his exhaustion.
‘The TNT strategy was “We want to be one of the big players, like FedEx or UPS,” and it failed, of course,’ he said. ‘If you have to split up it means it didn’t work. In the end the shareholders were not benefiting and nor were the employees. So there were just a few managers who had a nice adventure and it didn’t work out.’ The winners from Holland’s liberalisation of the postal market, he said, were the big organisations who bulk mailed. ‘The losers? Almost everybody else. TNT, the new postal companies, the workers, the government. They liberalised the market and they’ve had a headache for five years and it’s not over yet.’
TNT did experience a postal strike in 2010, after workers balked at union leaders’ negotiation of a 15 per cent pay cut. But Groen had no illusions about the way things were going for paper mail. ‘Postal volumes are going down much faster than expected. Substitution by email is going up much faster than expected. We had to fill in our tax forms by today so I guess everyone’s doing it on the Internet.’ Yet Groen is optimistic about the future for the luggers, the heavers, the hefters and the trudgers of society. ‘About a third of the workforce is going to retire in ten years. That will be a huge problem which will give people like the private postmen you met more chances. Employers won’t be able to be so choosy. We can’t import two million people from Ireland or anywhere else. The price of labour will go up.’
Most of Royal Mail was privatised in October 2013. The government kept 38 per cent to sell later and split 10 per cent equally, for free, between the company’s 150,000 employees. A few hundred idealists refused to take their allocation,
While I was in the Netherlands, the Dutch parliament’s pressure on the low-wage postal companies, which had been building for years, finally forced them to make a deal. In the small hours of the morning they agreed with the unions that by the end of September 2013, 80 per cent of all postal workers in companies like Sandd must be on proper contracts, meaning they gain some degree of social protection. One of the companies was Netwerk VSP, TNT’s low-wage postal subsidiary. Almast Diedrich was the highest-ranking executive prepared to talk to me; the most senior bosses were preparing for the final stage of TNT’s break-up, which was stripping the former Dutch post office of the racier acquisitions it made when it was the darling of the markets. I met him in TNT’s headquarters on Prinses Beatrixlaan in the Hague, which with its aspirational office blocks, multi-lane highway and elevated tramway has a sort ofPacific Rim vibe. I asked him about the deal with the unions, and he fessed up. ‘Yes, we underpaid, if you want to call it that, in the same way that others did. From early on we said when others agree to come to a labour agreement we will follow. We would not take the lead.’
On the other side of the road, in the lobby of a luxury hotel, I met Egon Groen, one of the union leaders who put his signature to the deal with employers. It was late Friday afternoon and a group of young salarymen were ordering a round of what Joseph O’Neill called ‘the gold-and-white gadgets that are Dutch glasses of beer’. Groen stood out with his hoodie and his exhaustion.
‘The TNT strategy was “We want to be one of the big players, like FedEx or UPS,” and it failed, of course,’ he said. ‘If you have to split up it means it didn’t work. In the end the shareholders were not benefiting and nor were the employees. So there were just a few managers who had a nice adventure and it didn’t work out.’ The winners from Holland’s liberalisation of the postal market, he said, were the big organisations who bulk mailed. ‘The losers? Almost everybody else. TNT, the new postal companies, the workers, the government. They liberalised the market and they’ve had a headache for five years and it’s not over yet.’
TNT did experience a postal strike in 2010, after workers balked at union leaders’ negotiation of a 15 per cent pay cut. But Groen had no illusions about the way things were going for paper mail. ‘Postal volumes are going down much faster than expected. Substitution by email is going up much faster than expected. We had to fill in our tax forms by today so I guess everyone’s doing it on the Internet.’ Yet Groen is optimistic about the future for the luggers, the heavers, the hefters and the trudgers of society. ‘About a third of the workforce is going to retire in ten years. That will be a huge problem which will give people like the private postmen you met more chances. Employers won’t be able to be so choosy. We can’t import two million people from Ireland or anywhere else. The price of labour will go up.’
Most of Royal Mail was privatised in October 2013. The government kept 38 per cent to sell later and split 10 per cent equally, for free, between the company’s 150,000 employees. A few hundred idealists refused to take their allocation,
Similar Books
