We can’t deliver a first-class service
I AM a postie who routinely walks 30,000-plus steps a day, carrying six to eight bags of up to 11kg plus larger parcels. There is a daily struggle over prioritising the delivery of letters or — more lucrative, but time-consuming — parcels.
At every depot morale and manpower are declining. If each item, including door-to-door leaflets, has equal priority, a postie is unable to deliver everything on their round in their allocated four-hour walk. Neither a long-serving, efficient postie nor a parachuted in agency worker brimming with enthusiasm could do this.
The increasingly normal practice is to deliver half of the letters per day plus all of the parcels. Instructions from the top mean are that tracked items have to be prioritised.
We were briefly told to no longer prioritise parcels, but ‘do our best’, while delivering all the letters.
But we’ve now been told this approach has ‘hurt the business too much’ and we are back to priority delivering tracked items.
Most posties really like their job — or used to! But we are upset that we are leaving important mail behind at the depot every day. Customers are complaining on the doorstep.
We used to take satisfaction in delivering all the mail and parcels, but we are not inexhaustible robots and have to follow the latest company policy within our paid hours. Pre-Covid, we would be reprimanded, rightly, by depot managers for any items left behind, particularly first-class, as they were all important to someone. Now managers are simply relieved to get as much covered as they can on any given day. Many depots, at least across the South, are believed to have double-digit vacancies, but hours are still being cut off-site to reduce costs. The physically demanding workload has been cut into bigger slices for the fewer remaining staff with customer service inevitably affected. It is the deterioration in our working practices, not pay rates, that is the most commonly heard concern among my fellow posties.
There are claims that the number of letters being posted is declining, but this is not the experience of those who put them through your letterbox. It takes the same time for your postie to deliver just one piece of mail to you as several letters.
Our valued customers who have generated increasing parcel numbers, MP committees, Ofcom, workload managers and everyone else who values their daily postal deliveries need to push for more boots at the doorstep, not just more hands feeding parcels into automated sorting centres. Otherwise we’ll see yet more run-down, disillusioned posties resigning and not being replaced.
This demoralising battle over letter delivery commitments vs money-making parcels won’t be won, no matter what the bosses think.