THE PEOPLE’S POST

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: september 2015 :: RMTnews 12 When Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign published its policy document on the railways recently much of this struck a chord with CWU members, particularly with the title – ‘a People’s Railway’ – echoing the CWU’s own campaign, the People’s Post, which was launched in July. There are a number of parallels between the issues we are campaigning on and those which the RMT has been pushing and it is no surprise that in the current climate the idea of services belonging to people (or, to be more accurate, being returned to them) is gaining traction. Fundamentally, we believe that the success of public services, and industries like rail and post, should be judged with two simple tests: whether they are being run with the public interest at heart (and are delivering on this) and whether they provide decent jobs and reasonable standards of employment for those who work in them. The reason that we are seeing campaigns like ours calling for people to be central to services again, is that privatisation and liberalisation are putting a dogmatic belief in markets before these two core values. After a long history of public service (Royal Mail claims roots back to Henry VIII) the postal industry has seen a decade long experiment with competition. Privatisation – neatly summed up as ‘selling tenners for a fiver’ – which saw a great redistribution of public wealth from the many to the few, is the latest part of this. The letters market was opened to competition from 2003-2006. While this coincided with unprecedented and dramatic changes (with the Internet and email coming in) successive regulators have still been determined to actively promote competition. One way in which they have done so was to oblige Royal Mail to deliver letters for rival operators at a loss. By 2010 this meant Royal Mail – publicly owned and providing a public service – was being forced to subsidise competitors to the tune of £160m a year. Another way has been to turn a blind eye to the cherry-picking of profitable mail. This type of competition has had predictable effects. On service standards, we have seen a steady erosion for the public and small businesses, who then bore the brunt of price increases to keep Royal Mail afloat. All the while competitors catered exclusively to the largest bulk mailers. And on employment standards we have seen a race- to-the-bottom. In Royal Mail tens of thousands of jobs have been lost and postmen and women are being expected to work harder and for longer. Alongside this the competitors who have come in – with preferential treatment from regulators – have taken advantage of lax employment laws to employ staff on zero hour, minimum wage, temporary contracts. What is striking today is that the regulator Ofcom is now trying to push this further. Last year it publicly criticised the CWU’s last pay agreement with Royal Mail – which, as one of our responses to privatisation, prevents the company from outsourcing, employing agency staff, or using other insecure employment models – as a barrier to efficiency and at a Select Committee it called on Royal Mail to adopt more “flexible” employment practices. Like the railways, the experience in the postal industry is emblematic of what the country has become. With our campaign, we are saying it is time public services were returned to the people. THE PEOPLE’S POST Communications Workers Union general secretary Dave Ward says postal services and the railway network both belong in the public sector