Life under Capitalism

Three key paragraphs out of James Meek’s excellent LRBarticle on post office privetisation in the Netherlands and the UK:

Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she works for, Selektmail, drops off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. She sorts and delivers the fresh crates but the winter backlog is tough to clear. She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of her own archival heaps of newspapers and magazines. Should these two streams of paper merge they would not be easily separated. The postwoman hasn’t given up. She had a similar problem with the other private mail company she works for, Sandd, a few years back. ‘When I began at Sandd in 2006 I delivered about 14 boxes of mail every time,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t cope and at Christmas 2006 I had about 90 of these boxes in the house. By New Year’s Day we had 97. There were even boxes in the toilet.’ The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out.

[…]

Every week Dutch households and businesses are visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies. There are the ‘orange’ postmen of the privatised Dutch mail company, trading as TNT Post but about to change their name to PostNL; the ‘blue’ postmen of Sandd, a private Dutch firm; the ‘yellow’ postmen of Selekt, owned by Deutsche Post/DHL; and the ‘half-orange’ postmen of Netwerk VSP, set up by TNT to compete cannibalistically against itself by using casual labour that is cheaper than its own (unionised) workforce. TNT delivers six days a week, Sandd and Selekt two, and VSP one. From the point of view of an ardent free-marketeer, this sounds like healthy competition. Curiously, however, none of the competitors is prospering. TNT is being forced by the hedge funds and other transnational shareholders who control its destiny to split up, even as it tries to beautify its bottom line by replacing reasonably paid jobs with badly paid ones. Deutsche Post is pulling out of the Netherlands and selling Selekt to Sandd – a company that has never made a profit.

[…]

Van Hulten, who is 81, is still an activist, an idealist. The privatisation of the mail depresses him; the latest privatisation, of Holland’s local transport networks, makes him angry: the three bus companies supposedly competing in Lelystad, he said, are all owned by the same French firm. ‘Today’s Wednesday, yeah?’ he said. ‘On Wednesday, we have at least six people coming to the door, all bringing some mail. First was the local paper. Then the other local paper. Then the postman comes. Three more will come later. I think that’s the basic defect of post office privatisation. What used to be done by one man is now done by six. They’re all underpaid, and the delivery hasn’t improved. It used to come in the morning, and now I’m still waiting.’

Privatisation and competition in the mail market has literally had no positive effect whatsoever in the Netherlands. For the workers it has meant increasing casualisation, the increasing shedding of good jobs and the replacement by piecemail work that does not pay a living wage. For customers, both sending and recieving, it has meant a much less reliable postal service with post arriving later than we’re used to and less often than we were used to. For the companies themselves, it hasn’t even meant profits, almost as if companies like Sandd or Selectmail were founded just to force through this process of casualisation. Only the Dutch Post/KPN/TNT/TNT Post has been able to profit, making more money with less workers than using these profits to buy out other companies rather than do anything useful with it, in an orgy of supposed creative destruction. That sort of thing keeps the board of directors and their consultants in ready money, sometimes even the shareholders, but it kills everybody else. To add insult to injury TNT last year threatened its workers with mass redundancies unless they agreed to an (iirc) 15 percent pay cut. They lost that fight, but the trend is clear.

A run of the mill story of capitalist betrayal, but in TNT’s case it hurts me more because I used to work for the fsckers, back when being a postal worker still meant something, even if like me you only did it on Saturdays to get me through college, or rather fuel my comix habit. That was when even a parttime job with the post office paid well and people who came with nothing but a willingness to work hard and no adversion to starting early could get into a job that offered good pay and safety for years if not decades, without having to worry about having a proper career. I spent my Saturdays with men and women who had done their rounds for ten, twenty, thirty years and still liked the work, even though the first grumblings at the changes the socalled free market demanded had appeared. These days, who would want to be a postman if it means hard and increasingly harder, dumb, unappreciated work delivering unwanted junk mail slightly cheaper for big multinationals and be paid below minimum wage?

Market reform at the post office has destroyed or is destroying one of the proudest bastions of the working class, has destroyed a whole system of jobs open to anyone, not just to people with the right university papers and a business driven attitude. This is not a coincidence.