Letter: Don’t call postmen and women lazy
Thursday 10th February 2011, 6:00AM GMT.
Letter: I feel I must reply to Denise Lee’s letter in the Star dated February 1.
I applaud her husband and all others who tried and succeeded during the recent poor weather, but as a Royal Mail employee I take exception to the “unlike the post office” comment.
We tried our best every day, through several inches of snow at times, to deliver everyone’s mail and I must stress that this was not just one or two delivery points but between 400 to 600 on average. The decision on the non-delivery days were made purely for safety reasons.
I hope this “pacifies” anybody who thinks we took the “lazy” option.
PR Gaut
Trench
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Royal Mail *are* lazy when they volunteer themselves for days off (near Christmas) due to the weather when the streets they have to walk are clear, and other services such as couriers, home shopping and paper round people still manage to function without giving up without even trying.
When you approach staff, as I did, their manager was quite happy to cause a scene and blame health and safety but in the same breath thought it acceptable for customers to risk injury on the road (some coming 2-3 miles) to collect their mail (and risk being clamped on the nearby carpark, seeing as their ‘customer car park’ only has room for 1 vehicle).
And we won’t mention the ‘lost’ items which seem to be on the increase lately…
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We are “supposed” to hate the Royal Mail. The more we hate it, the more fuel we give the Government to flog it off to City bankers. But maybe that is what people want?
The postal service is bearing up well, in spite of the Government’s willful sabotage through underfunding. The eventual buyer of Royal Mail will get a far leaner, streamlined machine, with the inflammatory act of laying off half the workforce already done by HMG (with the cost of the redundancies billed to the taxpayer).
If you think the postal service is poor now, just wait until privatisation, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
The Universal Service Obligation will be abolished as a sweetener to the buyer, ushering in a host of new charges.
Many of these charges the Government has already mooted in order to prepare us for the worst. The Government has broached the following..
* additional charges for morning deliveries
* additional charges for doorstep delivery of parcels, otherwise they must be collected from the sorting office.
* additional costs for delivery to rural areas (i.e. much of Shropshire)
We should be supporting our posties at this difficult time. And, no, I’m not connected to Royal Mail, except as a customer!
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I and thousands of others managed to get to work during the very bad weather, so why couldn’t Royal Mail??
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Probably because you dont walk around the streets with snow and ice carrying a 16kg bag on their back. Posties did get to work they worked indoors….
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I don’t agree that our postal workers are lazy, apart from one day during the snow before Christmas, we had a delivery everyday, only about an hour later than normal. The postmen and women did a sterling effort to get the post through.
An for those who think privatisation is the way forward only need to look at the Dutch Postal Services which are now run by TNT to see what could happen hear. In the Netherlands 90% of Post Offices closed after TNT took over, it has open siad it can’t guarantee to deliver post on time especially on Saturdays or Mondays. There is only 1 collection per day from postboxes. Its not uncommon for someone elses post to be delivered to you home, parcels go missing regularly and now TNT want to replace postal workers who work over 25 hours a week with part-time workers and franchisees. They also want to cut deliveries to 3 a week and charge more for outlying rural areas. Is this what we want to replace Royal Mail with?
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when it’s sold off to a DHL, TNT or whoever then wait to see the postmen will only have to work half a week as post to homes in towns will be cut to 3 days per week to cut costs.
in Newport we had no problems with post in the snow, maybe we have a better working postal service.
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Might help if they could read addresses as well. Last Saturday they delivered 3 letters to my house. Two of them were for next door, and the other was for two doors away. Then this Wednesday the postie rang the doorbell and presented me with a parcel, which I then had to hand back as it was for an address in the next street. Perhaps they want us to deliver our own mail?
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