Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)

I also support this amendment. Last night there were references to the Dutch postal services, with someone mentioning there had not been deregulation. The Minister said yesterday that we are all afraid of competition but postal workers have a right to be afraid of competition judging by an article on the Dutch postal service in The Guardian on 29 April:

Somewhere in the Netherlands, a postwoman is in trouble. When I visited her, bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life had left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail had built up that it was getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she was working for, Selektmail, dropped off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. She was sorting and delivering the fresh crates but the winter backlog was tough to clear. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hallway [...] The postwoman had a similar problem with the other private mail company she works for, Sandd, a few years back. "When I began at Sandd in 2006, I delivered about 14 boxes of mail every time," she said. "I could not cope and at Christmas 2006 I had about 90 of these boxes in the house. By New Year's Day we had 97." [...] Each week, Dutch households and businesses are visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies. There are 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 delivers six days a week, Sandd and Selekt two, and VSP one. From the point of view of an ardent free-marketeer, this sounds like healthy competition. Curiously, however, none of the competitors is prospering.

The article outlines how many workers are sorting the mail in their apartments on their beds and that, curiously, when such backlogs build up, there is no system for complaints about delayed mail. That is why postal workers are fearful of competition and that is why I fully support the amendment. The Minister should take this on. It is not about trying to protect a corner. It is about providing proper, regulated and safe conditions and that postmen and women are provided with proper gear for the weather. These workers get a bag and a jacket and that is all. We should take this more seriously.

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