No Saturday Delivery
Australia Post workers are going on strike, but scabs will be brought in to keep operations normal. Except there’s no mention of household mail deliveries. There are a couple of things that bother me about this: Australia Post is a government franchise, so bringing in non-union workers, a disreputable business practice in the private sector, seems doubly wrong when the government does it. The focus on Express Mail services appears to favor business over the public, which I would posit stems from the same point of view regarding the practices and goals of Australia Post that lead management to hire scabs, i.e., profit over people. Post offices are globally famous as unpleasant places to work, and although that has at its root as much the career laziness engendered by civil service-sinecure regulations such organizations have been fighting for a hundred years as it does that the work is brain-numbingly dull, my idea of reform doesn’t start with how many workers I can displace, but rather with what processes can be altered to improve workplace culture and worker productivity. The outsourcing trend has benefits in profitability, and rostering the workforce into shorter time on the line will also assist in that goal, but more people working fewer hours for more competing employers doesn’t necessarily translate into greater proletarian spending power, does it? Email isn’t necessarily cheaper than a first-class stamp when you take your ISP subscription into account, etc., but will everything else available on-line, it won’t be long before they start turning post offices into internet cafes at this rate, and we’ll all have plenty of time to spend there we’d have otherwise wasted standing in queues waiting for the next clerk to stop counting the register tray contents so we can buy a stamp.