Just the Two of Us

Crushed By The Wheels of Industry (Music Video), Heaven 17, 1982

Last December I hardly wrote anything because the crushing Christmas post meant that I was going to bed early to get up for work early to work till late. It's October and that's already the state of affairs. Only resourceful use of scheduled posts has kept me from being completely silent this month. How is it that one of the better months of the year is resulting in massive overtime payouts, uncompleted walks and undelivered packets? It's not Christmas, it's not snowing... it's "modernisation"!

Not a year goes by without something being altered at Royal Mail. In this case, the entire concept of an individual walking with a shoulder bag along the streets, replenished by half a dozen or so secure pouch drops, for 3/3½ hours was too inefficient. In it's place we have two people in a van stuffed full of everything for the area, walking in loops from the van with either a lightened shoulder bag or light weight trolley, for four and a quarter hours. In theory, and according to the people who run Royal Mail who haven't a clue about reality at the coalface, this is achievable and a more efficient way of working. What this actually means, and bear in mind it's not even December, is a decline in Quality of Service, if not outright service failures. When it does work on the light days of the week (Monday and especially Tuesday) it doesn't feel like it - you come away physically exhausted as if it was the middle of December when the old duties certainly extend toward four hours. The seasonal pressure was tolerated because it only lasted three weeks and long walks were completed out of a sense of duty to residents. As average traffic days now have people on the streets well into the afternoon, morale is crashing through the floor from exhaustion and there is no willingness to continue into overtime. The general consensus is that with many more Delivery Offices having undergone revisions this year, Christmas 2011 will be a national disaster whatever happens. If it snows again, operational failures will be blamed on the weather and the farce will continue. If the streets are clear, Park & Loop will be quickly revealed as Poop & Scoop. Either way, everyone loses... Except the executives. Bonuses all round!

For me, this operational change has taken away my walk after eighteen months. I would have held 'Shoreholm' in the re-sign due to the unpleasant combination of stairs and it being a heavy walk, but the new working methods require one half of a paired van-share duty to be passenger whilst the other is driver, automatically disqualifying me as a junior non-driver. Even if I had a licence and wanted to drive, I'm still so far down the seniority list that even a bad duty is out of reach. It's perverse - I spent longer on a walk I hadn't signed for (Gaudy Ranch), than the one I did sign for (Shoreholm). Luckily, I've been placed on a vacant walk until after Christmas when there's yet another re-sign. It's just another walk full of names I'll have to memorise only to have it taken away again. "A walk is a privilege, not a right" as management says, but then none of them have done the job in years, if at all. I still feel the service sliding every time I pass my old duty and see four bags have been left behind for someone, anyone, to do on overtime - and there's a business paying for early delivery on one of those streets. That's a service failure.

On the upside, the indoor work rate is so impossible that part-time hours have de facto increased to sort your walk and it's forced summer lapsing to finally end three years after September 2008. If I was to describe Park & Loop in terms of savings delivered, it would be as a failure in any month that isn't July. Doing the three legged race with your partner requires both to be robots with perfect synchronicity. Trying to find a parking space, stopping and starting, and writing out endless P739 cards for all the packets that are undeliverable (because delivery times are so late that no-one is in) wastes at least thirty minutes a day. Weight reduction is inconsistent and still on the shoulders and I know for a fact that looping from the pouch boxes can be done as per the looping frame on my current duty as well as on my old walk because I've done it - factoring in dead walking (walking past delivery points to begin another segment), it is still quicker to do the job solo on foot than fuck about with a combo van all day. The whole project is driven by a managerial obsession with combating the rampant myth of postmen finishing before they're even supposed to have started. To have us working non-stop in this job for more than three and half hours over and over again is unrealistic and even sadistic, as they turn around and blame the scheme's failures on employee laziness. To become an Admiral or a General or an Air Marshall, it's a basic requirement that you've actually seen combat at some point before you can pontificate about the battle. I think the argument against death marching was succinctly put on Royal Mail Chat:

Perhaps RM are going to have to accept that delivery is effectively piecework. "Here is this chunk of delivery - we will pay you 4hrs pay to complete it. If you complete it in 3hrs that is your good luck".
 - Motherhubbard, RMC forum

We know what it's like on the street and can tell you what is and what isn't possible. If you think, like the Daily Mail, that anyone can do the job, don't turn round like the Daily Mail and complain when you find non-English speaking agency workers have put your letters in a door on the wrong street at half six in the evening. Sing along: Privatised by February!

[1040;45]