“From Hansard”:http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm091020/debtext/91020-0006.htm , in the context of the impending UK postal strike:
bq. Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham) (Con): Does the Minister have any idea how many postal workers, particularly in London, have second jobs? It is the threat— [ Interruption. ] It is the threat that they might have to work a full shift for which they are paid that is adding to the militancy. [ Interruption. ]
Second jobs? Leaving work without working a full shift? I can well see that British MPs would be outraged by such practices. Here’s to the success of Billy Hayes and the CWU!
{ 53 comments }
dsquared 10.21.09 at 8:20 am
I have to say that I am amazed by the description of “job and finish” as an outmoded or restrictive practice – surely it’s the simplest and most incentive-compatible arrangement for paying a postman that you could think of.
Ben Saunders 10.21.09 at 8:45 am
I had a summer job with my town council where I was in charge of paying refuse collectors. There it was standard to pay them for a 7-3 shift provided that they finished the job and most knocked off around lunchtime. I don’t know whether many went on to second jobs, but some did overtime (which was only paid after 3) up to 50+ hours a week.
Barry 10.21.09 at 10:10 am
It’s a cross-Atlantic tradition; most US Congressmen and state legislature members have no problem criticizing government workers for the ease of the other guys’ jobs and the lavishness of benefits.
Alex 10.21.09 at 10:46 am
Tories, of course, never have any second jobs.
Stuart 10.21.09 at 11:26 am
Maybe they should reply to the MP that they would agree to not strike in exchange for being able to vote themselves pay rises any time the feel like it?
dsquared 10.21.09 at 11:35 am
cf this, from John in 1998, demonstrating that it’s a global problem (and also introducing me to the great word “rorts”).
Ginger Yellow 10.21.09 at 11:55 am
Speaking of parliamentary chutzpah, here’s David Tredinnick (Con, Bosworth) last week: “We must get away from this awful, mediaeval superstition.”
The awful, mediaeval superstition being skepticism about using astrology in medicine.
Barry 10.21.09 at 11:57 am
Stuart 10.21.09 at 11:26 am
“Maybe they should reply to the MP that they would agree to not strike in exchange for being able to vote themselves pay rises any time the feel like it?”
You forgot lavish benefits.
ajay 10.21.09 at 1:06 pm
Well, I wrote to my MP (on a separate issue) and haven’t received a reply, and I reckon that there is an equal chance that a) her office was too inefficient or lazy to write back or b) her reply was lost, delivered to the wrong address, hasn’t been delivered yet or (as with a bundle of voter registration forms the other week) was dumped in the cupboard under the stairs by a postman who didn’t want to go up the staircase. I didn’t really notice a significant decline in service quality when the strikes started. So there’s not really much to choose between them in that respect. At least in the 1980s the coal miners did actually descend into coal mines and extract coal, rather than just presenting the country with large sacks full of gravel.
alex 10.21.09 at 1:33 pm
Perhaps we should all just agree that, with regard to both the remuneration of elected representatives and the provision of basic postal services, the best place to start would be somewhere other than here?
KCinDC 10.21.09 at 1:35 pm
Barry, I’m assuming the point is that unlike US members of Congress (but like many state legislators and members of the District of Columbia city council), many MPs also have second jobs and don’t work a schedule equivalent to a full-time worker.
NomadUK 10.21.09 at 1:39 pm
Tell you what, ajay, I have never, to my knowledge, had a piece of post sent through Royal Mail go astray. That goes for parcels, 1st- and 2nd-class, special delivery, recorded signed, tracked, what have you. I have, on two occasions in the past 5 years, received post meant for someone in a nearby village whose postcode is virtually identical to mine, and those occurred when the postman, who has been serving our neighbourhood for 12 years, was on holiday. The service has, otherwise, been uniformly excellent.
I really do get tired of people wheeling out their wheezing, worthless anecdotes about how bad the service is. It’s the standard tactic of the Right to make government services as inefficient and insolvent as possible by cherry-picking, salami-slicing, and overburdening them to death, and then claim that government doesn’t work and the only solution is to privatise them.
Screw that. I say, ban private delivery service entirely, and hand the entire thing over to the Royal Mail, which becomes a purely not-for-profit government service.
Come to that, I’d do the same for medical care and schools, while I was at it.
alex 10.21.09 at 1:59 pm
@12: On the question of anecdata, 50% stories about good services and 50% stories about bad don’t add up to an acceptable situation. You’re obviously very lucky where you are; clearly, other people are not. Hardly democratic to accuse them of being Tory shills. Maybe they just don’t like losing their post?
As for the desirable outcome, clearly it would be better to go back to the world of Lark Rise to Candleford, when the Royal Mail was a sacred trust, and the postie would rather run himself through the heart with a rusty knitting needle than shirk on the job, but people these days tend to need more incentive than a shiny badge.
Also, of course, your preferred solution couldn’t happen until we’d left the EU and its framework of competition laws, probably by way of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and strangling the last multinational executive in the guts of the last newspaper proprietor. Fine by me; but tricky to pull off.
Patrick 10.21.09 at 2:44 pm
Wouldn’t the more obvious way to screw over postal workers be to “reallocate” their routes into new patterns until it was impossible for them to finish more than a half hour early? Just sneakily pile on the work until “job and finish” starts being the same as a full shift?
ajay 10.21.09 at 2:51 pm
12: yes, you got me, I’m really an Adam Smith Institute propagandist trying to undermine the Post Office from within. Good grief.
ajay 10.21.09 at 2:53 pm
14: well, I’m not sure that “paying someone to work for eight hours, and then giving them enough work to do that they will be kept busy for eight hours” really counts as “screwing them over”.
Frowner 10.21.09 at 3:20 pm
Perhaps everyone has already read this fascinating piece by a Royal Mail postman about some very unpleasant numbers-jiggering by management and a substantially heavier workload.
Phil 10.21.09 at 4:09 pm
I’m not sure that “paying someone to work for eight hours, and then giving them enough work to do that they will be kept busy for eight hours†really counts as “screwing them overâ€.
It does when you’ve already given them what you believed to be enough work to keep them busy for eight hours, and they’ve managed to get through it in seven. This is exactly how the workerists said that capitalism innovates – by appropriating time- and labour-saving innovations introduced by workers to make their own lives easier, and using them to prop up the rate of profit. (Although, as I understand it, the workloads for most posties are such that ideas like “job and finish” are academic anyway.)
Charlie 10.21.09 at 4:17 pm
16: Huh? In a free society any working arrangement is negotiated. If one side unilaterally changes the terms – outside a certain reasonable range of give and take – further negotiation will be wanted.
Anyway, as I understand it, at the moment the delivery postman sorts his or her own mail and then goes out and delivers it. When the postron delivers all of it, he or she goes home. At certain times volume is up, at certain times it is down. I think this arrangement provides an good (and fair) incentive for not buggering about. For that matter, very many of the more respected jobs also feature this sort of autonomy: we don’t usually accuse those people of being workshy.
soru 10.21.09 at 4:50 pm
people these days tend to need more incentive than a shiny badge
It’s more that if you treat them like some kind of convict work gang, a shiny badge just adds insult to injury. You get good workers by establishing rules and standards that everyone follows, not by setting up some elaborate money game.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-sins-of-commissions.html?partner=fogcreek
But anyway, back to Austin, the Harvard professor. His point is that incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want, and even though you may think that all you have to do is tweak the incentives to boost sales, you can’t. It’s not going to work. Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else’s expense.
As some of your workers substitute making the most of an incentive program for serving customers the best way they know how, the customer experience will suffer. Your best employees will find themselves fighting with incentive seekers to keep the business on track. Meanwhile, they will begin to lose faith in your judgment.
ajay 10.21.09 at 5:01 pm
Anyway, as I understand it, at the moment the delivery postman sorts his or her own mail and then goes out and delivers it. When the postron delivers all of it, he or she goes home. At certain times volume is up, at certain times it is down. I think this arrangement provides an good (and fair) incentive for not buggering about.
Well, not really – as in my example, it actually provides a good incentive for sorting the letters badly because you’re in a rush to finish, dumping post in the cupboard under the stairs, etc.
For that matter, very many of the more respected jobs also feature this sort of autonomy: we don’t usually accuse those people of being workshy.
Yes we do, see the original post.
engels 10.21.09 at 5:07 pm
‘I think this arrangement provides an good (and fair) incentive for not buggering about.’
Well, not really – as in my example, it actually provides a good incentive for sorting the letters badly because you’re in a rush to finish, dumping post in the cupboard under the stairs, etc.
The two assertions don’t exclude each other. It creates both incentives but second (unintended) one isn’t necessarily a problem provided there are counter-incentives to deal with it eg. the risk of disciplinary action if you are found out. Which I would assume to be the case.
engels 10.21.09 at 5:08 pm
Anyway: good luck to them.
alex 10.21.09 at 5:19 pm
They will certainly need it. As I said above; for a good outcome, don’t start from here.
dsquared 10.21.09 at 5:59 pm
But anyway, back to Austin, the Harvard professor. His point is that incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always
Austin, the Harvard professor, is a dick, then.
As far as I can see, shiftwork, piecework and job-then-finish are all defensible ways of paying postmen, and job-then-finish looks to me to be a reasonable compromise between shiftwork and piecework. I don’t see how it can be held up as a horrific Spanish practice, relic of the past, etc, that has to be removed and actually doubt whether the benefits which the RM management hope to obtain from moving to shiftwork will actually accrue.
roac 10.21.09 at 6:36 pm
Footnote to #2: Years ago, the president of some US college took a job as a trash collector* for a while, and then wrote about it. It sounds like a cheap stunt, but the article was illuminating. A shift was nominally 8 hours, but the crews got to go home when they finished — IIRC, typically somewhere between 6 and 7 hours. At some time during the author’s stint, there was a move to make them punch a time clock. This led to great unhappiness, because the existing arrangement was the reason all these guys had taken the job and stuck with it.
* We say trash, you say refuse — but whatever happened to “dustman”?
mpowell 10.21.09 at 6:45 pm
I don’t understand how you can argue that incentive based plans always fail. Somehow, employee performance will be evaluated. Some people will get raises, some will get promoted and some will get fired. Some mechanism besides flipping a coin will be used. You can extend that mechanism to adjust bonuses which are not called salary. Whether it ‘works’ or not has everything to do with the details of the implementation. Lame MBA-inspired up-sell targets are probably not the best way to go, but if these things didn’t work literally no company could function.
Certainly, job-and-finish is an acceptable plan. It requires some monitoring to be sure that mail is being delivered properly, since that is where the disincentive will lie. If you think postmen are paid too much, just argue it directly. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a workforce that is paid to work approx 30 hours, or whatever the case may be.
Barry 10.21.09 at 7:01 pm
roac 10.21.09 at 6:36 pm
“Footnote to #2: Years ago, the president of some US college took a job as a trash collector* for a while, and then wrote about it. It sounds like a cheap stunt, but the article was illuminating. A shift was nominally 8 hours, but the crews got to go home when they finished—IIRC, typically somewhere between 6 and 7 hours. ”
For how many weeks did he do this? Because I’ll be that there’s a lot variation (I’d love to see that guy do it in the winter, or a soaking rain).
roac 10.21.09 at 7:17 pm
# 28: I dunno. I don’t recall the guy’s name, or where he did it, and it was pre-Internet. Somebody probably will if we wait long enough. (I have an inkling that it might have been somewhere in Tennessee.) As I said, though, I was left with the impression that he was not any kind of poseur.
Thinking about the trash collection instance, it seems to me that this is a win-win: either the trash gets picked up or it doesn’t, and this is obvious to the taxpayers, so the prospect of mail-dumping as raised by ajay doesn’t exist. The residents want to get the containers off the street as quickly as possible. And the sight of the collectors busting their anatomy (which the ones in my town are certainly doing when I see them) presumably raises the general level of confidence in the efficiency of local government.
(Regarding the weather — when you’re working as hard as these guys work, cold is not generally a problem — ask a cross-country skier. When they’re not on hanging on to the truck, they’re running. But rain, as you say, would be unpleasant.)
steven 10.21.09 at 7:40 pm
dsquared—
And not just a postman, either. (It’s how I’m paid.) I notice that the friends of mine who are most active on Facebook are those in offices essentially being paid by the hour and therefore slacking off as much as possible.
I’m with NomadUK: can’t remember ever having any gripes with Royal Mail. The French postal service, though, now that is really amazingly bad.
Charlie 10.21.09 at 7:43 pm
… provided there are counter-incentives to deal with it eg. the risk of disciplinary action if you are found out. Which I would assume to be the case.
One counter-incentive being that incorrectly delivered mail just has to be collected and delivered again. For free! And mail that goes missing might well get sent again. Or at least complained about. People do often mean for recipients to get their mail. I think the people at Royal Mail understand this. Certain other delivery companies: not so much. I have no idea what happens to the
junk mailunsolicited advertising: quite possibly some of that gets junked. So there’s your disciplinary measures.Neil 10.21.09 at 8:36 pm
13: On the question of anecdata, 50% stories about good services and 50% stories about bad don’t add up to an acceptable situation. You’re obviously very lucky where you are; clearly, other people are not.
Uh, no. Any number of anecdotes do not amount to evidence for anything whatsoever. All that counts is properly controlled data. Is there any?
Bloix 10.21.09 at 8:41 pm
According to the link, the postal labor contract prohibits job-and-finish:
Mr. McFadden: It is certainly true that one of the changes agreed in the 2007 agreement is that, instead of the previous practice, which was known as job and finish and sometimes meant people going home a couple of hours before the end of the hours for which they were paid, postal workers would work the hours for which they were paid, which might also mean being more flexible about how they went about their job during that period.
“Being more flexible” presumably means taking on other tasks.
So either Atkinson is incorrect or the agreement is not being enforced. Either could be true.
Gene O'Grady 10.21.09 at 9:23 pm
As to incentives to misdeliver mail, in my (US) experience sorting and forwarding mail the missed forwards are tallied and used to negatively evaluate the postmen/women on those routes. This is far from the only measurement, but it’s from the part I was familiar with — and was accepted as reasonable by the union representatives.
Again from my limited US experience, I saw far more incentives for the higher level managers to manipulate or misrepresent data on their pet automation projects than I ever saw for the working stiffs like me to try to jimmy the system. Oh, and it may be just me but somehow in the 72 weeks over the Thanksgiving/Christmas season I was never man enough for a second job.
soru 10.21.09 at 9:28 pm
I don’t understand how you can argue that incentive based plans always fail. Somehow, employee performance will be evaluated. Some people will get raises, some will get promoted and some will get fired. Some mechanism besides flipping a coin will be used.
The only mechanism fit-for-purpose at that task is an engaged human brain. Problems come when you try to replace it with something simpler, like a rulebook. You can hand-wave an argument about complexity theory and competing strategies here, which will match the observed result that such schemes _always fail_. The number of business they have killed is legion, and I’ve seen it argued that they were proximately responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Of course, this doesn’t really apply to the postmen, where the incentives are not a new plan, but just one way of looking at the status quo. The basic issue here is that being a postman inherently involves having in your hands, out of sight of anyone else, up to about fifty quids worth of someone else’s property. So either you pay, or otherwise compensate, them enough to attract trustworthy types and keep them happy, or you move entirely to recorded delivery.
mpowell 10.21.09 at 9:59 pm
35: Well, I’d agree that the evaluation process requires engaging the human brain. But plenty of sales people are paid on commission and those businesses do just fine. It’s up to the sales manager then to insure that people aren’t abusing the system on their team. This is not a simple problem and simple rules alone will not suffice, but you can’t say they’d never help.
The reason I think it does apply to some of the arguments made about the postman’s job is that you can’t get around a system that involves some imperfect incentives. You just have to manage them correctly, and I don’t see anything wrong with the job-and-finish approach or the shift approach. But also we shouldn’t confuse a debate about the structure of the compensation with the amount, which seems to have happened somewhat in this case (not here so much as in the news).
Michael 10.21.09 at 10:15 pm
enough with the theorizing on random experiences. The Post Office carries much of the post which has been supposedly handed over to private carriers, and the plan to extend such advantages to profit oriented companies made to seem necessary because of the burden to which the understaffed PO is increasingly subjected: the strike is a result of an increase in work loads and an systematic sapping of trust by management. Perhaps P Mandelson would best spend a few months on the route, and see what he thinks then. If, on the other hand, the sense of public service in the PO which still survives, tattered and bruised, were to be encouraged … But that is a form of management that escapes the contemporary governmental imagination.
steven 10.21.09 at 10:50 pm
I don’t myself understand at all why the “Labour” party does not position itself as the stout defender of widely-loved institutions such as the Royal Mail and the BBC against the promised ravages of the opposition. It would surely be a much better electoral strategy than the current one, whatever it is.
Antti Nannimus 10.21.09 at 11:19 pm
Hi,
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
herr doktor bimler 10.22.09 at 3:01 am
incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want
I can see this applying to the academic world.
[checks own recent publication output]
Sebastian 10.22.09 at 4:36 am
Part of the reason job and finish exists is that you have to hire for the somewhat above average times, not the minimum times. If they can finish a few hours early every day, something may be wrong with their shift. But much more likely is that they can finish early on the days that are light for their route.
Kenny Easwaran 10.22.09 at 11:36 am
Does anyone know of any rigorous data on postal delivery? I suspect things like average delivery time are well-known, and in fact quite standard. (In my own experience, in the US the New Yorker would always arrive on Wednesday or Thursday, and Netflix always had a two day turn-around. In Australia, the New Yorker is very irregular because it gets shipped from France for some reason, and the local Netflix substitute seems to take about two days to get from the delivery centre to my place, though it’s harder for me to tell because I don’t know exactly when they ship. Neither of these items has ever been lost in the mail.) From all the anecdotal experience I’ve seen, in the US at least lost mail almost never happens, but it would be nice to know if “almost never” means .5% of all mail or .0001% or what.
someguy 10.22.09 at 2:48 pm
What is the waiting list for a postal (delivery) job in the UK?
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?
Walt 10.22.09 at 3:04 pm
It might be the way we don’t like to see workers relentlessly ground under the heels of their employers, even for the sake of being able to mail a first-class letter for 30 cents rather than 44. I realize that you think that less-skilled workers are a servant class for whom the best they can hope is scraps from your table so that they can thank you for your beneficence, but this sentiment is not universally shared.
Bruce Wilder 10.22.09 at 3:30 pm
The BBC, reporting on the resentment among members dinged in the expenses row, used a delightful phrase, that still has me chuckling:
“The mood in the tea rooms was venomous.”
someguy 10.22.09 at 3:43 pm
Walt,
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.
ajay 10.22.09 at 5:09 pm
“The mood in the tea rooms was venomous.â€
‘The Bishop is out for blood, not tea,” replied Clovis.
Stuart 10.22.09 at 10:07 pm
Uh, no. Any number of anecdotes do not amount to evidence for anything whatsoever. All that counts is properly controlled data. Is there any?
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).
sg 10.25.09 at 9:02 pm
Yes, here’s to the bunch of thieving lazy idiots who can’t deliver my mail and would rather steal it than put it in the right letterbox. We can only hope that they hold back the evil capitalist system of mail-sorting which enables every other country to deliver its mail accurately, by christmas. Why should we expect to pay a reasonable amount to receive an efficient, effective service delivered courteously by people who take pride in their job, when the CWU can defend postal staff who refuse to deliver mail on time, steal from parcels, and are rude to you when you try to get anything as irrelevant and non-essential as mail delivered?
ejh 10.25.09 at 10:29 pm
Well, if I were looking for someone lazy, idiotic and rude it might well be the author of that last posting – who, if they had the slightest interest in anything other than venting their prejudices, might ask what proportion of theft and error is likely to be the responsibility of full-time postal workers (very likely to be CWU members) and what proportion is likely to be the responsibility of casual workers (much less likely to be CWU members, but much increased in numbers recently, by Adam Crozier, against the CWU’s wishes).
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.
sg 10.26.09 at 9:18 am
Of course, it’s not the sainted Union staff who deliver registered mail unsigned, drop boxes unsafely at your doorstep without knocking, leave a delivery slip without checking if you’re home, or just don’t deliver them at all – and I’m sure that the rushed and bodgy job they do has nothing to do with job and finish and is all the management’s fault. Likewise the christmas cards delivered in February, the crushed and broken objects, the misinformation at the counter and the redeliveries that just never happen.
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.
ejh 10.26.09 at 10:28 am
These are basic things that every other postal service in the world can get right.
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.
sg 10.26.09 at 5:02 pm
How is that, ejh? The delivery service hasn’t been casualised yet, for starters – though the union claims there are plans to. And why should we expect that casualised deliveries will lead to ineffective complaints? Doesn’t Royal Mail know who worked the route the day my registered mail was dropped off without a signature? So I complain about the Thursday delivery and they can’t discipline the casualised staff?
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?
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