Royal Mail said in a statement: "The poster was removed and the local manager has apologised.

I bet the staff are so pissed off that s/he needs chain mail armour

I bet the staff are so pissed off that s/he needs chain mail armour

I wasn't sure if it was a mail or femail manager...

It certainly wasn't a first class mail!

Either way, perhaps they shouldn't be in that post any longer...

The manager was definitely stamped out

Apologised?!? I think they should be sent somewhere!

The staff will likely go postal on him

We may not have a NHS, but at least the US Mail is still a government service.

Nobody should be making profits on delivering the mail.

No profit means no incentive to tackle inefficiency and waste - for example see the NHS.

But the inefficiency and waste in the NHS is because the private companies parasatising it make money doing just that. Evidence is rarely on the side of private enterprise in public services. I say rarely just in case.

Not entirely true.

The problem with the NHS is largely a function of how it is structured. The only way to secure a payrise is to change bands - therefore after 12 months every single employee is incentivised to apply for alternative internal positions to hop up the ladder. Entire departments can exist where the staff have less than 18 months experience and half are looking for the next move.

Then you realise that all the most competent senior people are generally working in people management - due to the above salary banding. So you end up with the least experienced and lowest paid staff actually performing the main work. With lawyers constantly circling the ambulances looking for a payout, with inevitable mountains of paperwork created to mitigate against the lawyers.

Then you get into the surprisingly good pensions that are generally applied to people who may be earning £50-200kpa. The NHS pensions bill is astronomical. It is not unusual for a 40yr old NHS middle manager to have a £250k pension pot. Double or triple that for a 60yr old... And since NHS pensions are paid directly from public taxation (it is not cash invested in a share fund), you may be surprised to hear the taxpayer owes £650b to NHS pensioners

However, frankly it somehow works better than the ridiculous US system, so I am somewhat fond of the NHS despite its myriad of problems.

Strangely, was recently talking about how the NHS is seen as a cash cow by private companies.

A few years back, while I was still working for a hospital, it came to light that our stationary supplier had special pricing for public sector industries where the prices were two to three times that of the private sector. This was found when the person looking after our stationary got their hands on the other version of the catalogue and pricing and did a comparison. It started something of a game of getting quotes for things, like blinds and furniture first for private sector, then getting a quite for the hospital and comparing costs. And in near every single instance, public sector (NHS) quotes were higher for the exact same product.

That really doesn't help the NHS keep costs down and focus on patient care, now does it. Especially considering how much stationary the NHS goes through. So yes: private companies seem drawn to parasitic behavior when it comes to leeching on the public purse. Possibly, in their mind, a way to claim back taxes...

On the other hand I've seen firsthand the shit suppliers have to deal with when supplying public entities (local and regional municipalities, large hospitals, etc in the Netherlands in this case) and with all the extra trouble of having to deal with the bureaucracy and never getting paid (on time or at all, with "yeah, the guy who ordered those no longer works for this department, we didn't sign of on the order, now get lost" being frequent), the cost, risk and hastle for suppliers is quite often also much higher than it would be for any other entity. So there's a little bit of a dual problem going on. On the one hand inefficiencies and difficulties in dealing with public entities means that suppliers charge more just to be able to deal with them without losing their shirt, and on the other hand you have suppliers taking advantage of the fact that at many public entities there will be no-one in purchasing that actually knows what things SHOULD cost and purchase orders just get signed off. Because it's not their money they're wasting.

I am constantly surprised by how little people know about the NHS. What you mean by "tackle inefficiency and waste" is cutting services and rewarding the people who make those cuts.

A few years ago, maybe a couple of decades as time passes quickly, a Tory minister was interviewed on TV about removing "thousands of unnecessary regulations and business red tape" (my paraphrasing but accurate. He was put on the spot with a question like "such as?". His response was "errrrrrrrr licences for shoe blacks". That was his first and only answer.

Could the NHS do things more efficiently? I don't know for sure as I am not involved with it. But probably given its size it could.

We have a sanguine view of for profit health care in the UK. We see what it is like in the USA where people get a taxi rather than an ambulance because of the cost. And don't try and pretend that health care is better in the USA than in the UK. Life expectancy in the UK is higher than in the USA. And we also do not have an opioid epidemic caused by for-profit issuance of addictive pills. That's OK, there will always be some people to prescribe opium to = more profits.

Back when my mother was a nurse and wards had matrons, the NHS was fairly efficient and worked well.

They got rid of the matrons. They brought in levels of administration (who shuffle papers rather than anything to do with treating patients). They go on austerity drives and slash the budgets of departments time and time again. Private companies wander in to take up some of the slack (and whip the cream off the top).

And people wonder why it's a massive clusterfuck. I would be inclined to think that it was actual Tory policy to wreck the NHS, but I fear that would be crediting them with far too much intelligence when it's really a side effect of what should be criminal levels of negligence and incompetence. You know, like they're doing to the entire country now...

I see that somebody has given you a down vote. That somebody no doubt has a very small brain.

The Royal Mail used to be reliable and relatively inexpensive. Then it was privatised and the service got worse and more expensive. I guess that some people enjoy lower quality service and higher prices.

The Royal Mail used to be reliable and relatively inexpensive important.

Now it's greetings cards and junk mail.

Quite. Royal Mail's business model is optimised for delivering letters, and emails have taken over that role almost entirely; it used to be the case that wet signatures were required, but emails have even eaten that with the advent of easy electronic signatures.

This leaves Royal Mail being just another parcel delivery company.

" but at least the US Mail is still a government service. "

For now.

What a bunch of arseholes.

And then they won't understand why people become angry and begin to throw rocks and burn things...

It was probably posted by a disgruntled worker as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Unlikely to be management stoking a fire … !

As stated in the article "Royal Mail said in a statement: "The poster was removed and the local manager has apologised.""

So the local manager has apologised. They'd be unlikely to apologise if they thought it was a worker putting it up (likely they would be trying to find a way to sack them).

If they knew who'd done it.

Which they won't, because who'd admit it?

Not a great look I agree, but I fail to see why this appears on what should be a tech site. No tech angle at all as far as I can see. I can get this type of article from dozens of other places, I come here to get a breather from it on occasion. Too much to ask?

Type your comment here - basic HTML and hotlinks allowed

Did you not notice the side heading - OFFBEAT ?

Anyway, i have just collected my coins from the King, and i am off to the pub, to get a pint of bitter and some whelks.

It's a stiff contest between this and the actual pay offer, anyway.

And if the workers think their ability is worth being paid more why dont they move to one of the other delivery companies who will pay them more?

@codejunky

Maybe they want to provide a public service & are loathe to leave? Many is the occasion a postie has contacted the emergency services when they have seen signs of a break in, suspicious lack of activity at a property etc - it's not just about letter delivery. Remember, unlike most delivery drivers, posties know their areas and the residents very well

Postal rounds tend to be relatively local, and part time work often available, handy for people juggling work and kids, whereas most other delivery jobs are long days and often involve driving across large areas - there's a lot of female posties for that reason.

As an aside, a female postie I know is taking voluntary redundancy as she is getting on a bit & voluntary works out a lot better deal than taking early retirement as lots of inducements plus she can see how the owners are running the service into the ground, paying peanuts and huge profits are being creamed off instead of being re-invested. So she has a bit of supermarket work lined up for when she finishes to keep some cash arriving until she reaches retirement age proper. She has said *most* of the management she knows are OK (not all, but a majority though did say it strongly correlates with whether they did postie work first or just came in to management without ever having done the feet on the street part of the job), but they are having to go the "following orders" route imposed from above, else their jobs will go and has led to some of the more decent managerial staff quitting so she has seen start of a spiral of management layers getting progressively more full of the less pleasant individuals.

Many delivery services* do not directly employ a lot of their workers, instead you need to have your own van and essentially are a contractor for them, this could put people off as you need van & business insurance plus all the accountancy / legal hassles of some of the weird self employment style contracts on offer- hence the large number of deliveries you see in unbranded vans (& even worse those done by "hire" vans - workers cannot afford their own van so hire one & so a fair chunk of their pay ends up with the van hire company, the joys of the low wage gig economy) - so another reason posties might not want to change job.

* A few still do provide your van, uniform etc. Many do not.

@tiggity

"Maybe they want to provide a public service & are loathe to leave?"

Awesome so the pay is not too low to compensate them for their work because they are happy to remain there at current levels. Otherwise they would leave and if it caused a staffing problem would cause the salary to increase.

"Postal rounds tend to be relatively local, and part time work often available, handy for people juggling work and kids, whereas most other delivery jobs are long days and often involve driving across large areas - there's a lot of female posties for that reason."

So a job with non-pay benefits which attracts the workers.

"Many delivery services* do not directly employ a lot of their workers, instead you need to have your own van and essentially are a contractor for them, this could put people off as you need van & business insurance plus all the accountancy / legal hassles of some of the weird self employment style contracts on offer"

So the equipment for the job is provided instead of you having to deal with it all.

"so another reason posties might not want to change job."

And so this comes back to the compensation not increasing because the job is compensated enough to get the workers. The lack of desire (or ability) to leave for better compensated work keeps the wages where they are.

" it's not just about letter delivery "

Around these parts, it's possible to subscribe to a service where the postie can stop and check up on/chat with elderly people, and various other services. Could be useful, especially around here with the rural isolation, especially if the elderly person in question is alone.

[1]https://www.laposte.fr/services-seniors/les-visites-du-facteur-une-prevention-contre-l-isolement-des-personnes-agees

Other times, I've had my postie tell me things like "don't go shopping today, the road is flooded" and even how to cut back a rose. They're a way of linking people and communities, not just turning up to hand over the daily newspaper.

[1] https://www.laposte.fr/services-seniors/les-visites-du-facteur-une-prevention-contre-l-isolement-des-personnes-agees