More Junk Mail!

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I suppose it is good news that Royal Mail and the postal workers have kissed and made up in a new national agreement that has averted further strikes and go-slows.

But it is definitely not good news that we could now be deluged with unlimited amounts of junk mail delivered by our postmen who, until now, have only had to deliver three items of unsolicited mail a week.

Speaking for my own household, all of the junk mail which arrives on our door mat is trashed immediately, so now we will be putting even more rubbish out for the council to take away.
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What Did They Expect?

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Television news and newspapers all report that the Communication Workers Union are angry at Royal Mail’s decision to hire up to 30,000 temporary workers to help clear the backlogs caused by recent walkouts, and to help with the Christmas rush.

It is the CWU that have called a strike. What did they expect Royal Mail to do; sit on their hands and do nothing?
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Will They, Won’t They?

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Postal workers have voted three to one in favour of a national strike over a dispute with Royal Mail over future job security and working conditions.

Royal Mail say that, faced with an annual drop of 10% in their core business of delivering parcels and letters, they need to modernise, and even the Communication Workers Union say that they understand this but that ‘it needs to be done in a way that protects workers’.

It’s hard to understand what a national stoppage will achieve except vast inconvenience and expense to ordinary people, businesses and the economy in general. Perhaps the British Chambers of Commerce have it right when they say the strike is ‘akin to a death wish’.

Personally, I doubt that a strike will take place. For one thing it would be ruinous for the postal workers themselves, let alone the country. Secondly, if Royal Mail dig their heels in and risk a major strike, then other companies may well follow suit faced with their own demands for higher wages, better working conditions and protected pensions.

Will they, won’t they? We will have to wait and see.
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Sorrow On The Bosom Of The Earth

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I was interested to learn that recently Westminster City Council threatened legal action against the distributors of free newspapers after it was found that they created four tons of waste a day. It seems that two of the publishers then agreed to meet some of the costs of recycling.

Our weekend papers now come with all sorts of supplements and inserts, most of which are discarded immediately. Perhaps I am one of the few that only read the news and, sometimes, the travel and book supplements, but all the rest are uninteresting rubbish to be put out with all the other stuff for recycling along with the two free newspapers we receive each week.

When you sit and think about it, we are inundated with paper we do not need and haven’t asked for every day. It’s not only the free newspapers, supplements and inserts but all the stuff we get by hand through the letterbox. We regularly get flyers from the local traders, supermarkets, Indian and Chinese restaurants and pizza parlours to name but a few, all of which go straight into the recycling bin without being read.

Royal Mail do their bit also to help our bulging recycling sacks, for they have for some time now been delivering flyers and commercial announcements along with the morning mail. And if you attempt to block these unwanted items you are told that this will also block unaddressed, and possibly important, notifications from the police and from the local council as well.

You have only to sit on a commuter or London Underground train after the morning rush hour to see the shambolic effect that all this free ‘stuff’ has on the carriages, for it all has to be collected up and taken away in rubbish sacks and dealt with.

So the stand of Westminster Council is a good one in my view. It is a move that other councils could follow suit and demand a contribution towards their waste collection and disposal. That would reduce unwanted paper and so help the environment that the government and others bang on about each day.

And couldn’t people that read all of the weekend papers along with their supplements and inserts from cover to cover pay more for the privilege? Or, better still, could I pay less for receiving less?

If the sacks of paper that my household put out each week is anything to go by, the sheer amount of unwanted paper being produced around the country - and the trees and other materials used to produce them - must be phenomenal.

Maybe, it’s time to do something about it and, in the process, help the environment.

As Shakespeare warns us in Richard II, act 3: ‘Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes, write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.’
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Strewth!

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The Communication Workers Union is in dispute with Royal Mail over plans to modernise the service and have been staging a series of 24-hour walkouts around the country.

Though the strikes seem to be having little effect according to Royal Mail, the union are now planning to ballot its members on holding a national strike and have called on the government to intervene.

Lord Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, has rejected these calls and has told the union to ‘wake up’ so as to avoid Royal Mail's further decline.

Strewth! This is a Labour minister telling a union to wake up!

Whatever next?
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Ours Are ‘More Biodegradable’

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As I write, there are five red rubber bands discarded by our postman lying on the pavement outside our house. At some point, I will pick them up and add them to my growing collection of Royal Mail rubber bands. It is one of the small parts I play in recycling!

Why am I bothering to tell you about the rubber bands outside my house? It is because, under a Freedom of Information Act request by a Mr. Woods of Bristol, Royal Mail have admitted that they use 871 million rubber bands every year and that this total rises by around 50 million a year.

Amongst the tosh put out by their spokesman, Royal Mail state, ‘Unfortunately, given the quantity that we use, it is inevitable that some rubber bands will be dropped by mistake.’ Yeah, right!

Obviously trained by a PR company, the spokesman then added that Royal Mail’s rubber bands were ‘more biodegradable’ than ordinary brown ones. Interesting! How biodegradable is an ordinary brown one and how much more biodegradable are the Royal Mail red ones?

In any event, wouldn’t thousands of pounds, and much pointless litter, be saved if the lazy postmen just recycled the rubber bands they took out?
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