Read Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else for Free Online

Selekt gave her a jacket and a sweatshirt but she got no other clothing or footwear and had to pay to maintain her own bike. The company was able to offer such miserable conditions because of loopholes in Dutch employment law. The postwoman was paid a few cents for each item of mail she delivered. The private mail firms controlled their delivery people’s daily postbag to make sure they never earned more than €580 a month, the level at which the firms were obliged to give them a fixed contract. Somehow Selekt hadn’t noticed it was getting fewer empty crates back than it sent full crates out. When I followed the postwoman to the kitchen, I saw, like some recurring nightmare, twenty more crates filled with letters.
    Selekt’s crates were yellow and stamped with the black hunting horn logo of Deutsche Post, the former German state mailmonopoly that, like its Dutch counterpart, was privatised long ago. For years the two had been locked in a struggle for business on the streets of the Netherlands, part of a fratricidal postal war across northern Europe into which Britain’s newly privatised Royal Mail has been drawn. Privatising old state post companies doesn’t necessarily make it easier for rivals to compete with them. Privatisation isn’t the same as liberalisation. But in Holland privatisation and liberalisation combined have altered the post in a way far beyond anything Britain has so far seen.
    At the time I visited the Netherlands, Dutch households and businesses were visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies each week. There were the ‘orange’ postmen of the privatised Dutch mail company, trading as TNT Post but about to change its name to PostNL; the ‘blue’ postmen of Sandd, a private Dutch firm; the ‘yellow’ postmen of Selekt, owned by Deutsche Post/DHL; and the ‘half-orange’ postmen of Netwerk VSP, set up by TNT to compete cannibalistically against itself by using casual labour that is cheaper than its own (unionised) workforce. TNT delivered six days a week, Sandd and Selekt two, and VSP one. From the point of view of an ardent free marketeer, it sounded like healthy competition. Curiously, however, none of the competitors was prospering. TNT was being forced by the hedge funds and other transnational shareholders who controlled its destiny to split up, even as it tried to beautify its bottom line by replacing reasonably paid jobs with badly paid ones. Deutsche Post was pulling out of the Netherlands and selling Selekt to Sandd – a company that had never made a profit.
    Sandd, set up by a group of ex-TNT managers, pioneered the distinctive Dutch style of private mail delivery. ‘Sandd’ stands for ‘Sort and deliver’. In Britain, as in many other countries with big postal networks, private companies can now collect and sort mail, but delivery, the so-called ‘final mile’ of a letter’s journey, has remained until very recently a Royal Mail monopoly. Mail is delivered from distribution centres to local delivery offices,where salaried Royal Mail postal workers sort it into individual rounds and deliver it by van, bike and on foot. Under the Sandd system, crates of mail are delivered to casual workers’ houses. These workers sort the mail, on whatever flat surface they can find, then deliver it on set days at a time of their choosing. Besides slashing the mail companies’ overheads, the system has the advantage, from the management’s point of view, that there is little danger of the postmen and postwomen meeting each other to swap grievances or talk about joining a union.
    I watched the postwoman sorting mail in her kitchen, dividing it up into piles on the steel counter on either side of the sink, carefully dried after the evening’s washing-up. It seemed to be mainly Ikea catalogues, the cover showing an exquisitely lit arrangement of blond, cheerful furniture. The Ikea ideal did not include any obvious area for the sorting of mail. As the greasy slap of the