Labour provides some balance at the Rutgers conference on postal economics
At a special session for Labour at the recent Rutgers sponsored conference taking place in Portugal on Postal and Delivery Economics, three union presenters tried to add some balance to the proceedings by giving the view of labour on liberalisation and deregulation in the postal industry.
Billy Hayes from the CWU, UK, presented a paper that showed what has happened to the UK mail market and in particular to the problems Royal Mail now have in remaining a viable provider of the Universal Postal Service since the UK postal market had been liberalised. Billy told the conference that in the current review of Royal Mail it had been shown that liberalisation had been of no benefit to small and medium sized business and ordinary consumers, it had only been to the advantage of large companies.
Geoff Bickerton of the Canadian union, CUPW, told the conference that the majority of stakeholders in Canada and the United Sates did not favour a deregulation of the postal service which was being promoted by big business and the potential competitors. He said that the response to his research had been that stakeholders were saying, “if it isn’t broken don’t try and fix it!” Jim Sauber and John Baldwin in their paper argued that the failure to resolve the issue of historical pension liabilities was putting an unjustified burden onto the operating costs of the postal operators. They said that previous failures to properly fund pension pans now meant that postal operators now had huge liabilities that threatened the reform of the postal market and the ongoing viability of the universal service.
