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 Thursday May 19, 2005 21:16 by Kevin Doyle - WSM (Cork)
 An Post and the Threat of Privatisation
"I hope things will come around and that at the end of the day we will manage to save An Post from privatisation. You don't want to think the opposite, because it is your job. But the truth is that all the signs, everything is pointing the other way around." Over the last year or so, the working conditions of staff in An Post have been the subject of cutbacks and attacks by its management and ultimately the government. This includes shutting the SDS Courier service, withholding pay-rises, and understaffing many sorting offices. The strategy is to undermine workers' morale and thereby to facilitate either privatisation or simply to weaken An Post in order to benefit private competitors. Kevin Doyle interviews a postal worker in Cork to find out the mood on the shop floor. - What is the situation in An Post now? Right now they are the focus of privatisation efforts in the public sector. They are not needed like ESB workers who can stop power, nor are they seen as essential like health workers. They are perceived as an easier target and are weaker. - Was the recent shutting down of SDS a part of this strategy? Yes, it had to do with the opening of the markets wider for the private mail companies that are already working in Ireland and making profit - like DHL, Federal Express etc. These companies only deal with parcels and packets and it's a profitable business. SDS provided the same service at low cost, which is what you expect of a public service, but now with SDS out of the way, it will be even better for the private operators. People need to realise how dangerous privatisation will be. Right now wherever you live in Ireland you get the service that anyone else gets... it's even. But privatisation will change that. The money is to be made in the high population density areas where post can be moved in bulk easily. So a lot of people and a lot of communities will lose out if privatisation happens. The service will become uneven and unequal. - How is the privatisation issue being pushed? An Post management is trying to convince the workforce that privatisation is the only way forward for the company. It is a EU directive, they claim, that cannot be ignored. It's a method of bullying. As part of this we see all the new investment in technology. But the new technology has not increased productivity. Similarly, they want to leave a lot of workers go, on the grounds that it would make An Post more efficient. Management claim they have no money to pay workers and yet the give themselves huge bonuses and salaries. - Speaking of investment, the Cork Mail Centre (CMC) is the big new operation with An Post, but it sounds like a harsh place to work. The situation is crazy. Everyone down there says one thing: too many chiefs and no Indians. That's what it is like there. A lot of supervisors and managers for just 200 people. That is where the inefficiently is. Supervisors watching, watching, watching. Which is even odd because the place is covered with cameras, monitoring everyone. - What is the situation with the union in An Post now? The union in An Post is very strong if you look at the numbers. It has a big membership. But for the average worker the opinion is not just that the union does very little for the members, it actually does nothing. There is a lot of mistrust. - How can the union be doing nothing in the present situation, what with the drive to privatisation? The union as I said is strong in An Post, but instead of taking strength in that fact, and putting the real issues on the table for the government and the management of An Post it is just staying quiet. And it is not because they have no perspective. The union leadership know how things are going and where they are going... An Post workers have been hit under the belt a number of times in the last few years, but the union instead of taking the opportunity to defend its members, it is just ignoring the situation. For example, some of the money due to workers under the last national agreement has not been paid yet. But instead of taking the opportunity not to agree to any talks on a new agreement with the government and the management until this money is paid, they accept the situation and make promises to the workers. So now we are in the ludicrous situation where we are being asked to agree to a new pay deal and we still haven't got what is our due from the last! It is a joke. - It sound crazy all right. What sort of input does the ordinary member of the union have into all of this? There is no real democracy in the union. We do have elections once a year but if issues arise in the interim, there is nobody to discuss them. The reps are not doing the jobs that they should. They don't seem to care. For example at the CMC a lot of issues have arisen with shift work, salaries, and the treatment by the management, but the union has been incapable to handling them. There is no decision making process. There is not the gathering of the workers in the short term for us all to be informed of what is going on and what is happening. Or to vote. It is authoritarian. It is and it is getting worse. Because you see the more you give to the management they more they will walk all over you. Little things make a difference, you see. - There was almost a national strike after the recent stand-off over SDS? The situation is a paradox. There were a lot of people in SDS working hard, 24/7, and they knew they benefited the company. It was well known. But the management just decided that this was the branch to be cut off, even though as I say it was the branch that bore fruit. So it was crazy and especially to those who worked in SDS and knew what the truth was. You just can't do that. People were angry about that but they were also afraid. The union also spun the line that to strike would make An Post even more susceptible to privatisation because a strike would hurt the company financially. So the situation really was not good. It was very disappointing. The union is not doing the job it should do. I think a lot of members don't realise the union leaders are playing games behind our back - their agenda is different. - Where do you see things going? I hope things will come around and that at the end of the day we will manage to save An Post from privatisation. You don't want to think the opposite, because it is your job. But the truth is that all the signs, everything is pointing the other way around; in other words that the government and the management will manage to get what they want - privatisation. The problems are manifold but the lack of solidarity between the union members and the general problem with the union as I spoke about earlier - these are central. If we are united there is no way management could get away with what they are planning to do. So the big challenge is to build solidarity and to make the union our union. First published online on indymedia.ie |
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Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 2 1No doubt, unions are all for solidarity when it comes to rallying around their own particular niche, but lets take society as a whole as being the ultimate solidarity.
Confronted with global warming, mine-workers would have taken some persuasion to give up their earth-sacking, the ultimate clincher being more lucre for themselves.
Aer Lingus unions sell out on behalf of their workers.
An Post Unions for years blocked the (NB:) choice of old-age pension from being paid directly into bank accounts, ostensibly because the poor dearies needed their social outlet on a Friday afternoon...ha!, like a hole in the head. It was even suggested that the elderly would be mugged while withdrawing from ATMs - as if they weren't ever mugged while escaping a general post office.
Better still that us bedraggled had to stand in line for up to an hour or more to satisfy the job description of the teller (as obliging as they usually werre). Solidarity me arse, when most, especially in rural areas, found it quite difficult to arrive at the collecting point in the first place.
Laser cards take care of the ATM problem for rural areas (minus McCreavy's tax on same).
Social resources must be justified in social terms.
In any distance over five miles, I'm all for communications via technology, me (and i don't mean fuel-guzzling vehicles). Any shorter and the phone is still an option.
They are more authentic than the British red ones.
The post box was invented in 1854 by Anthony Trollope who is remembered for having spent most of his time dictating novels of interminable length to his secretary and niece Florence Bland.
In the early days though he wrote alone and works such as "Can You Forgive Her?" , "Ayala's Angel" , "Phineas Finn" , "Dr Wortle's School" , "The Eustace Diamonds" , "Lady Anna" , "Phineas Redux" , "Rachel Ray" , "The Prime Minister)" ,Ballycoran" didn't pay the rent, and after living in gruesome poverty in London for many years and failing to get a comission to an Austrian cavalry regiment, he became a junior clerk in the London Postal Office, and was transferred in 1841 to Banagher, Ireland, as a deputy postal surveyor.
It was here that he set to write "The Belton Estate" , "The Duke's Children" and of course one of those few novels of the mid nineteenth century by an englishman to address the problems of Ireland: "The Macdermots of Ballycoran".
Trollope was a very good postal surveyor, and his superiors sent him all over the shop. (The shop being the Victorian Empire).
After promotion in the Post Office and transfer to Mallow in 1845, Trollope was sent in the spring of 1851 to the west of England on a postal mission. Here in July 1852, he began The Warden (1855), in which he first really cut his teeth as the delineator of clerical life in cathedral towns. He was in Belfast for a year from the autumn of 1853, then in Donnybrook, near Dublin. Further postal missions, to Egypt, Scotland, and the West Indies, followed in 1858-59, and in December of the latter year he settled at Waltham Cross, some twelve miles from London, as surveyor general in the Post Office at £800 a year.
WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS WHAT HAPPENED IN DONNYBROOK.-
Why yes, for it was there in the then satelite town of Dublin where now the twin institutions of Hibernian power UCD and RTE shape the future that Anthony Trollope invented the post box.
It was a simple hexagonal box cast from pig iron (too heavy to carry away) with a vertical slot which allowed the letter writer drop their missive or epistle inwards till which point a servant of the postal service would (using a key designed specially for the purpose) open the box and deliver said letter.
All of Ireland and all of the shop were delighted. And the green postboxes (yes they were painted green) were copied throughout the Empire.
Soon there were improved designs, by 1856 a Dublin foundry (W. Turner) had cast a pretty fluted box with a horizontal letter slot, and by 1857 most post box makers followed suit. But not always with success. Smith and Hawkes of Birmingham, who due to design faults returned a batch of post boxes which measured 8 foot in height, only six of these were ever made, and the same company provided thirty boxes free the following year.
In 1859, the design of the postal box was standardised by parliamentary order. And the colour was standardised as green. From 1859 to 1874 improvements in the postal box were limited to the inclusion of a wire basket inside, and little tray on the outside to let the postal user know when postie would be coming about.
In 1874, more than a decade after Trollope had resigned his post as surveyor general, the Westminster Parliament ordered that all post boxes be painted red. By which stage Trollope was touring all over the shop Australia (1871) Ceylon and Australia (1875), to South Africa (1877), and to Iceland (1878).
in 1922 SaorStát Eirinn (the Irish Free State) took over responsibility for the network of post boxes in 26 counties of Ireland. They varied in shape, some circular, some hexagonal, and in aperture: by that stage most were horizontal, but the original vertical "mouth" still persisted, perhaps due heavy cost of transporting 8 foot postboxes from Birmingham.
The transfer of control of the Post Office between the British and Provisional Governments was controlled by the (UK) Postal Office Act, 1922, and the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act and the Irish Free State (Consequential Provisions) Act. These provided for the Post Office to be transferred to the Provisional Government at midnight on 31st March 1922, the end of the financial year. Much of the documentation relating to Irish postal history was stored in the Custom House, the home of the Irish Civil Service, and was lost in the fire in the Four Courts complex in June 1922. The interim arrangements for the Irish Post Office included provisions that the British Post Office would supply postage stamps in sheet form to the Irish Post Office, to be overprinted, until such time as the Irish could produce their own. Postage due labels would also be supplied.
For a period of about 10 weeks, covering the signing of the Treaty on 6.12.1921, the formal transfer of authority on 16.1.1922, and the issue of overprinted stamps on 17th February 1922) British stamps had to be used for prepayment of postage in the absence of anything else to use.
AND THE POST BOXES returned to their original colour - GREEN
In the years after, there were attempts made to remove the insignia VR, GR and ER which had from 1874 been cast on all postboxes, the letters standing for the monarchs. Of the 2000 odd postboxes administered by the Free State postal service, Less than a 100 recieved insignia "SE" for saorstát eirinn under the terms as minister for posts and telegraphs of James J. Walsh (June 2, 1924 - October 12, 1927) and his succesor, Ernest Blythe (October 12, 1927 - March 9, 1932)
both of the Cumann na nGaedhael party.