Every year Japan manages to facilitate the delivery of hundreds of millions of nengajo on time – to the day – using casualised labour. Why should we think that the Royal Mail can’t manage a casualised staff the same?

This is as strange a comment as dsquareds at 2, that job and finish is an incentive mechanism. What does this give the postie an incentive to do, besides finish their job as quickly as possible?

This is very simply not true: I knew it wasn’t true once I’d lived in Spain for two months. Plainly you don’t care whether it’s true or not, but it plainly isn’t true.

I notice you completely ignore the issue of casualisation. You’d have to, of course, but for the benefit of other readers: you can’t, for very long, do a bodged job if you have a fixed route, because the complaints will come in very swiftly and it will obviously be you at fault. If, however, deliveries are casualised, practically a different person every day, it’s a completely different story.

These are basic things that every other postal service in the world can get right. Why is Royal Mail still fighting to introduce basic modern technology like electronic sorting?

I’m all for striking to protect pay and conditions, but not for striking to maintain an essential service in a state of paralysis.

But if we did that, we might run the risk of finding out that the union was neither defending thieves nor responsible for them. And we might also find out that the trends which lead to an often unsatisfactory service are those which the management seek to extend and the union opposes.

You would have thought there should be – a mail carrier must be one of the single easiest businesses to regulate. Just set up one or two hundred people who send a few pieces of mail pretty much every day to a different location around the uk, and measure the frequency of issues and delays (outside of union action) over time. If there are issues in an area, send more mail to/from that area for a while to see if it was just a statistical outlier, and build in a system to make sure it is worth the while the people sending it not cheating (i.e. if they are caught not sending mail but claiming they had, they get knocked off the scheme and stop getting whatever cash is deamed necessary to persuade people to take part).

‘The Bishop is out for blood, not tea,” replied Clovis.

A simple re-distributive justice would have sufficed.

Also I am not sure working an 8 hour as opposed to a 7 hour qualifies as being relentlessly ground under the heels of your employer.

It isn’t trivial but I am not sure it really qualifies as scraps from the table.

Do you see any trade off issues? Especially in the US where the amount available for re-distribution is less.

“The mood in the tea rooms was venomous.”

In the US it can be a very long wait for a full time route.

That is because the remuneration is above a free market rate.

I have no objection to job and finish and I am not filled with rage about a 7 hour work day.

But make no mistake it isn’t always 7 hours in many cases it is 9 – 3 with an hour lunch. A typical NYC workers day.

And even at 7 hours it has a very real cost. Provisioning goods and services at a more expensive rate than they need to be provisioned means less goods can be provided. It costs taxpayers money.

I would think that this would be more of a problem for US progressives. They have a smaller pie to play with. But the answer is always redistribute and damn the efficiency. See the US educational system. (And actually a desire for redistributive justice really doesn’t explain the US educational system.)

I wonder why? Is it just progressives acquiescing to the public choice realities or is it something more?

Shorter version –
Why are progressives so happy providing horriblely inefficient goods and services?

I can see this applying to the academic world.
[checks own recent publication output]

Who can legitimately criticize such hard-working people? It’s just a pity they can’t make a decent living from only one job.

Have a nice day!
Antti