It’s time to deliver a first class service. LEADER – As wildcat strikes by postal workers spread across Britain.

By SIMON HINDE
IF YOUR post doesn’t turn up this week, chances are that you are a victim of a series of wildcat strikes that are crippling the mail system.

Thousands of sorting-office workers up and down the country have halted deliveries and collections in protest, they say, at the proposed introduction of “flexible” working procedures – though, who knows, the beautiful weather may have something to do with it.
But even if there were no strikes, you might still be waiting for your mail. A million letters go missing every week, while almost two million first-class letters fail to arrive on time the next day. Every day, 4,000 parcels – one in six of those sent – are delivered late.
So things are bad enough when postal workers are actually doing their jobs. Now we have wildcat strikes and the whole system is grinding to a halt.
Wildcat strikes. The very phrase might have been taken from the dustiest shelf in a museum of industrial relations. It is redolent of the chaos that dogged industry in the Seventies, a decade in which the Post Office seems mired, in more ways than one.
The Post Office is a public-sector body, a monopoly (though this may change before long, as we shall see). It is the country’s second-biggest employer after the NHS, with 180,000 staff.
Its industrial relations record beggars belief. Astonishingly, the Post Office is responsible for half of all the strikes in Britain – last year 62,000 days were lost to industrial action. Nothing seems too trivial to provoke a downing of tools, though lurking behind much of the unrest is the fear of privatisation and competition. Unions have made some efforts to discipline their wayward members but without much success. It is as if Post Office workers have taken their slogan from an envelope – do not bend.
Post Office management is equally rigid and unsuited to the challenges of running a modern business. Standards deteriorate every year, managers cloak themselves in endless layers of bureaucracy and inefficiency is accepted as the norm. Confronted with official figures revealing its failure to meet performance standards, management seeks to blame Railtrack, even though only a fifth of the post goes by rail. In the face of industrial action, it screws up its courage, wrings its hands nervously and declares the strikes “disappointing”.
Despite the continuing chaotic service that it provides to the public, its only two actions of significance in recent memory have been to rename itself Consignia in a pointless and costly act of self-important vanity and to beg to be allowed to put a penny on the price of first- and secondclass stamps.
Most organisations (the railways are an exception) try not to increase prices when they are providing a lousy service to the public, in case their customers take their business elsewhere. As a monopoly, the Post Office does not have to worry about such matters.
This state of affairs may not last much longer. The Post Office has recently come under a new licensing regime designed to encourage competition from the private sector. In charge of the licence is an organisation called the Postal Services Commission and its chief executive, Martin Stanley, has a clearer view of the responsibilities of the Post Office and the expectations of its customers than do that organisation’s managers and staff.
Last week, Mr Stanley made a speech that was remarkable for its frankness and accuracy. Customers, he said, want a postal service “that will take care of them, that will not lose their mail, that will not go on strike. . . whose staff will not steal giro books and passports and that will not misdeliver one million items a week”.
He warned that more than 120,000 Post Office jobs will be lost to private-sector competition unless the organisation adopts modern attitudes and working methods.
Mr Stanley has made it clear that he plans to weaken the Post Office monopoly by introducing direct competition for the work conducted by big sorting offices and by allowing private companies to provide services to individual large customers, such as government departments and big banks. These organisations are fed up with being held to ransom by incompetent management and a militant workforce – they would jump at the chance of an alternative.
TO CALM fears that the private sector will be allowed to dismember the postal service, Mr Stanley has also said that he will defend the “universal service obligation” that ensures that post is delivered to all Britain’s 27million addresses at a single price.
The current unnecessary strikes are just the latest demonstration of how bad, weak management, outdated working practices and intolerant militancy have dragged the postal service down for years.
Post Office workers and managers should listen to Mr Stanley and mend their ways if they want their organisation – and their jobs – to survive.