Free Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek Page B

level of postal service as the densely packed cities, would leave it vulnerable to ‘cherry-picking’. In this scenario a rival would undercut it by recruiting private postmen to do the relatively cheap, easy job of delivering urban mail, leaving Royal Mail withering away, forced to Postman Pat it at unsustainable expense around the glens and dales of rural Britain. Apart from the now long-lost advantage of being an incumbent monopoly, Royal Mail does have important protections againstthis happening. One is that it is, for the time being, exempt from VAT, while its competitors aren’t. Another is that it has some leeway to adjust the prices it charges competitors to use its services. Finally, Ofcom is obliged, by law, to step in if necessary to protect the universal service.
    Crucially, however, it is
not
obliged to step in to protect Royal Mail. If cherry-picking rival post companies – which, for the time being, means the Dutch – threaten Royal Mail, one way Ofcom has said it might respond is by taking chunks of countryside away from Royal Mail and giving them to TNT. After 2021, Ofcom has the option of putting the entire USO out to tender, in search of the cheapest bidder. And the cheapest bidder is what TNT is positioning itself to be. Royal Mail postmen and women are on an average base wage of £11.64 an hour in London. According to CWU figures and anecdotal reports, the starting base wage for TNT postmen in London is £7.10 an hour, 39 per cent less than Royal Mail, and 20 per cent below the living wage. In Manchester, TNT is believed to be paying £6.50 an hour, 37 per cent less than Royal Mail. TNT postal workers are on zero hours contracts – in other words, there’s no guaranteed minimum number of hours per week – and in terms of pensions, holiday pay and sick pay, they’re worse off (and cheaper to the company) than their Royal Mail counterparts. According to the deal Dutch postal operators hammered out in 2011, TNT wouldn’t be able to pay postmen so little if it were at home. It may be to TNT’s advantage – politically, as well as in business terms – that its competition with Royal Mail is paralleled by inter-union competition. Instead of the CWU, TNT has done a recognition deal with Community, the union of betting shop staff, steel workers, carpet weavers, footwear makers and football managers. ‘Having campaigned for years to have TNT essentially closed, the CWU have now woken up to the fact that it’s not going to happen,’ Paul Talbot of Community told me.
    The Royal Mail may yet triumph, commercially, as a privatised company. It may be eroded and eventually displaced by TNT,or another big private mail firm. TNT could one day buy Royal Mail, or vice versa, or the two could simply merge. Whatever happens, the most intense competitive pressure will be on Royal Mail to squeeze the wages of the postmen who remain, turning low-paid workers into exploited workers. Without a political and ethical breakthrough of the kind that was eventually forced on Holland’s post companies – ‘we underpaid’ – the story of the Royal Mail becomes a paradigm of how technological progress, privatisation and a willingness by the majority to accept minority poverty goes to recreate a past phenomenon, the pool of desperate, hungry labour, mobbing the depot gates, fighting each other for paid hours.
    * Still called TNT in Britain, although now a subsidiary of PostNL.
    † As noted with Goldfinch, postmen and women aren’t expected to carry the entire weight at one time – bags are staged at drop-off points along the route.

2. Signal Failure
Privatised railways
    On a mild, wet February morning, a work gang of ten men moved around a stretch of railway line near the village of Goostrey, between Crewe and Manchester airport. Against the extreme green of fields and the whipped grey of rainclouds their synthetic orange work suits shone out violently, like figures in a psychedelic episode. It was hard work. Using