It was with some surprise, that I learned (two years ago) that the Dutch postal service had been privatized; and the results are not pretty. Excellent reporting in the London Review of Books gives a sobering (if not scary) picture of how things have turned out.
Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice ... have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat ... and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around.... She sorts and delivers the fresh crates but the winter backlog is tough to clear. She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently.
I admit I was caught by surprise to read that a neo-socialist paradise like Holland would have gone this route; but at least the results might serve as a warning to other European nations plotting along similar lines. Not so.
Today I read that Great Britain plans to privatize the Royal Mail.
Why? The Royal Mail is profitable; and although it faces a large potential pension deficit in the future, that is hardly a distinguishing mark for any large enterprise, private or governmental. Presumably this is ideologically driven, although I have difficulty deciding whether the desire to punish a government office in the name of free-market wizardry derives from ideology, or something darker. We are thrown back on the old stupid versus evil debate-- an undecidable question.
The timing of the announcement may be have been rushed, to attempt heading off an impending strike by postal workers. (I admit, to my mind, this reads like stupid plus evil in concert.) This same link provides the informational tidbit that:
Following the sale, Royal Mail could fall into foreign hands because the government is unable to hold a "golden share" preventing an overseas takeover.
The British
opinion I have looked at tends to be cynical about the motivation and potential outcomes. Myself, I do not see how it can end well.
But the most pressing issue, on which the battle looms, but has yet to be fully joined, is over privatization of the U.S. Postal Service. In spite of the multiple social and climactic issues which demand our engagement, not to mention the man-made disaster of Fukushima, we must make every effort to keep our Postal Service a public entity.