Roy Mayall

It’s been a bad few weeks at our delivery office. First of all Vince Cable announced that the Royal Mail was going to be privatised. Then, at one of our weekly ‘Work Time Listening and Learning’ meetings, the line manager announced that our delivery office is going to close. We are going to have to move to the main sorting office in the next town, seven or eight miles away. He couldn’t say when this was going to happen. All he could say was that ‘plans are underway’.

It appears that the Royal Mail is to be sold off. According to theDaily Mail, it will be transformed into a ‘John Lewis-style trust’ by the autumn. John Lewis is a chain of department stores whose employees are also partners. The employees own shares, but these are held in trust, so cannot be sold off when the employee leaves the company. John Lewis employees earn a dividend in addition to their wages and are allowed some say in the running of the company. The idea is that a similar scheme will give postal workers an incentive to help improve the Royal Mail’s performance. Except that the government has said that its intention is to ensure the Royal Mail 'benefits from private sector capital and disciplines’. The private sector will only inject capital on the expectation of returns. So it won’t be a ‘John Lewis-style partnership’. Part of it will be part-owned by postal workers, but staff will be subject to ‘private sector discipline’, meaning attempts to cut costs in order to maximise profit.

The Royal Mail’s Annual Report was published on 3 June, containing details of its executive pay for the previous year. According to the figures, Adam Crozier, the retiring chief executive, received more than £2.4m in the year 2009-10. With bonuses and pensions that figure rises to £3.5 million. Ian Duncan, the group finance director, took home a total of £1.4m, while Mark Higson, the managing director of Royal Mail Letters, received a total of £1.7m. Adam Crozier is the highest paid public sector worker in the country and his income puts the paltry figures earned by top Whitehall mandarins to shame.

I earn £8.98 an hour. I work a 20-hour week. I’d like to work more but there are no full-time jobs available. My basic pay is £177.28 a week, before deductions. That’s about £9200 a year. That means that I would have to work for nearly 380 years to earn as much as Adam Crozier earned last year.

There’s a Tannoy system in our office. It’s very rarely used. Most people just shout when they want to get our attention. The people with the loudest voices tend to gravitate towards the jobs where the most shouting is required. Pretty well the only person who uses the Tannoy is the manager. He doesn’t have a very loud voice and doesn’t play a significant role in the daily life of the office. Usually he is hiding behind his computer in his little office, keeping out of everyone’s way. So when the speakers crackle, and an uncomfortable voice starts to mumble into the microphone, we always know it’s the manager, about to announce something out of the ordinary. ‘Hello everybody. Can everyone hear me out there?’

Reading some of the news reports about the national agreement signed between the CWU and the Royal Mail last week, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’d secured the deal of the century. Under the headline ‘Pay rise and bonuses for striking postmen’, the Daily Express said: ‘Royal Mail postal workers who caused havoc with a series of strikes before Christmas are to get a pay rise, shorter hours and bonuses of up to £2500.’ Or try this headline from thisismoney.co.uk (owned by the Daily Mail): ‘Royal Mail strikers get more for less work.’

These reports read as if they’re based not on the actual agreement, but on the press releases handed out by the CWU and the Royal Mail.