By Paul Sheen — The Conservative Party’s policy of privatising Royal Mail (instead of protecting its market) to “avoid strikes” can only result in a dramatic increase in the cost of posting mail — which users will discover to their cost it they trust David Cameron at the next election.

While there is no doubt that everyone is inconvenienced by the strikes at Royal Mail, there is much more to the issue than the controlled media have revealed. Those who complain should consider what the consequences of Royal Mail’s destruction would be: by how much would postage costs increase?

Currently, the headlines state that the “postal dispute is over.” But is it? The controlled media says that a “deal was agreed to end a long-running row over jobs, pay and pensions.”

The reality is that a deal has not been agreed. All that has happened is that both the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Royal Mail have backed down.

The strikes were undoubtedly very damaging for the business and neither the postmen and women nor management want that. The only people who are hoping for a damaging dispute are those who seek Royal Mail’s privatisation: Lord Mandelson and the Tories.

To these people, damaging industrial action is just another way of promoting privatisation forward and even making it popular with the public. Yet they always fail to point out the long-term consequences which are inevitably a dramatic rise in service costs. This has been the case with every single privatisation to date, from railways to utilities.

So what does Royal Mail want? They seek part-time and (if they can wrangle it) minimum wage postmen. Or postwomen to be precise.

The ‘way forward’ (there was a ‘way forward’ paper a couple of years ago) was that machines (we’ve heard about them but never seen them) would sort the mail in the very early morning.

Then at about 9 am, after they had dropped the kids off at school (I kid you not) a small army of mothers would deliver the nation’s mail — all in time to pick the kids up again at 3. These women, of course, would not be breadwinners, just part-time workers, and of course the wages would reflect this status.

So the full-time breadwinning postman on a half decent wage would be replaced by machines and part-time low-pay mothers. This, I believe, is the Royal Mail blueprint for the future. This, I believe, is what most big business would like to do. A sort of McJobs?

The postmen and women want decent pay, working conditions and full-time jobs. In other words, the reality is that both sides are miles apart.

Royal Mail says that things must change to reflect “falling mail volumes” and keep banging on about email and nobody writing letters anymore, etc.

But has your mail count fallen? There is more ‘junk mail’ than ever before. Not to even mention the packets and parcels generated through internet-driven commerce which have gone through the roof.

Delivering those items has become more time-consuming and difficult than ever before to deliver.

The postmen and women want an independent body to count mail volumes to determine the real state of play with mail volumes. Royal Mail has refused to do this, which says it all, really.

About 18 months or so ago, Royal Mail changed the way they counted the mail. It had always been tallied by weight, but the new method decided upon was to count the trays of mail instead.

Not surprisingly the mail volumes fell overnight, sparking off a great controversy over how many letters are in a tray. Almost all frontline staff ridiculed Royal Mail’s “new” figures as an obvious and barefaced stitch up.

And as for the pension deficit? Well, Royal Mail — encouraged by the Government — took a ‘pensions holiday’ for 13 years. This is like not paying your mortgage, for example, for a similar period and then trying to catch up. No chance.

There is now a £10 billion deficit and of course no-one wants to take responsibility for this.

As for redundancies: no-one is fighting this and people are actually queuing up to go. But it’s the ridiculous workload which remains for the rest of the staff that is the problem.

When people go and are not replaced, their work is “absorbed.” For “absorbed” read “done for free by very disgruntled and bullied staff (bullied by managers who have themselves been bullied into carrying out the bullying by senior managers).”

Pay is not an issue in this dispute, despite what you may read.

So what has been sorted in all of this? Nothing. The two sides are miles apart. The build-up to Christmas is a dangerous time for a mail business to play chicken. But after Christmas I think it’ll be game on again.

The only way that more industrial strife can be avoided is for a deal to be fudged/bodged between the CWU and Royal Mail (with their mutual friends in the Labour Party pulling the strings) with the postal workers and the public being stitched up again.

PS the 30,000 ‘temps’ are on the minimum wage…