True Business- real life for small businesses

Today the Communications Workers Union decide whether postmen at the Royal Mail should progress towards strike action.

I wonder what has gone wrong.

Because it seems to me that the Royal Mail is in a parlous state – and the reason I care is that the state of the Royal Mail affects me and just about every other business in the country. I generally send my invoices by post (although of course, now I’m emailing them over). Mail order and internet companies need the postal service to ensure delivery to customers – and Christmas, their biggest trading period of the year, is coming up. Jeff Bezos, the legendary founder of Amazon.com said at the start of this decade that the existence of the Royal Mail was the main reason that the UK was Amazon’s first market outside the US.

Business in the UK needs the Royal Mail.

But it’s not looking good. It seems to me that the Royal Mail’s management has messed up:

• The toughest challenge they have failed to solve is the massive pension deficit (I haven’t checked the figures, but I believe it stands at around £9bn)
• The company still has a truly abysmal record on staff relations, with much acrimony between management, staff and unions.
• Customers see very little to feel positive about, too. Second class deliveries barely exist; and in a world of email, the vast majority of postal mail is bills or unwanted junk mail (the sort that if it was online would be considered spam).

And then, there’s the staff. They’ve messed up too.

• They have a reputation for militancy.
• The Sunday papers this week featured stories of mail and parcels stacked up, unsorted and undelivered, in postage depots; while sorting office staff went home early.
• The staff seem to have little understanding of (or involvement in) the major challenges facing their company: the threat from modern media like email, the effects of the recession etc.
• And they also don’t seem to have noticed the threat from deregulation: companies like Deutsche Post are making great inroads in picking up more lucrative delivery and parcel handling operations from under the Royal Mail’s nose.

As a small business, it seems to me that I have much to worry about in watching this important part of daily British business life fall apart. And fall apart it will, unless there’s a dramatic improvement in industrial relations.