Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else Read Online Free PDF Page B

years earlier – 12.57 per cent.
    Beset by high VAT and an array of private taxes their parents didn’t have to cope with, the low-paid are being squeezed by their employers, too. The story of the Royal Mail, leading up to its privatisation in 2013, is sometimes portrayed as if it were a textbook case of one new technology (the Internet) destroying an old-fashioned state monopoly while an obstructive trades union blocks the other new technology that might have saved it (newsorting equipment). In fact, as I show in the opening chapter, the Royal Mail is the last in a sequence of trans-European privatisations that is likely to end with the work of a traditional British postman, on the face of it an honourable enough job that ought to draw decent pay, being recategorised as a minimum wage, breadline or pocket money occupation. To see how, I travelled across the North Sea.
    * In the aftermath of the oil price rises of the 1970s, the countries of the Gulf, awash with cash, lent it to banks in north America and Europe, which, in turn, lent it to countries in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean for ambitious infrastructure projects. Later these poorer countries found they couldn’t pay back the loans, and turned to the IMF and World Bank for help.

1. In the Sorting Office
Privatised mail
    Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman was in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life had left her months behind on her deliveries. She rented a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail had built up in the hallway that it was getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she worked for, Selektmail, dropped off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. She sorted and delivered the fresh crates but the winter backlog was tough to clear. She thought her employers were getting suspicious. I counted sixty-two full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited. 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 had crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer reared up out of her own archival heaps of newspapers and magazines. Were those two streams of paper to merge they would not have been easily separated. The postwoman hadn’t given up. She’d had a similar problem with the other private mail company she worked for, Sandd, a few years earlier. ‘When I began at Sandd in 2006 I delivered about fourteen boxes of mail every time,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t cope and at Christmas 2006 I had about ninety of these boxes in the house. By New Year’sDay we had ninety-seven. There were even boxes in the toilet.’ The postwoman was paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hadn’t done her job well, yet so few people had complained about missed deliveries that she hadn’t been found out.
    Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the Internet age private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that’s only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries.
    I agreed not to name the Dutch postwoman or to give away any detail that would identify her. Even if she hadn’t been sitting on months of undelivered mail Sandd or Selekt could have sacked her in a heartbeat. She worked, she reckons, about thirty hours a week for the two companies, earning about five euros an hour, although the legal minimum wage in the Netherlands is between eight and nine euros an hour. She had no contract. She got no sick pay, no pension and no health insurance. One of the companies gave her a dribble of holiday pay.