Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't Outlines Plans To Privatize Royal Mail
Ellie K writes "After 500 years, Britain announced plans to fully privatize Royal Mail today. Shares of stock (common equity) will be offered to the public 'in coming weeks', according to Reuters. 10% of shares will be given to current Royal Mail employees, Deal size is estimated at $US 3 to 4.7 billion. Goldman Sachs and UBS were chosen as lead advisers." That doesn't mean you'll be able to buy a piece tomorrow, though; as the BBC's report notes, "The plans have provoked strong opposition from unions. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) is currently balloting members on strike action. Ballot papers are due to go out on 20 September to 125,000 Royal Mail workers. The earliest possible strike date would be 10 October. Plans to privatise the 250-year-old postal service have been on successive governments' agendas since the early 1990s."
Things will likely go the same as with every other UK public service that has been privitized: The service will get worse, costs for consumers and end-users will go up, fewer workers will be paid less, but some 'top executives' will be brought in to 'clean things up' and make a mint.
This plan is corruption at its most horrible. Activate the usual propaganda merchants to persuade everybody the government has a good plan for how to improve a public monopoly service, sell off the public asset to private entities, let politicians earn massive fees (bribes!!), increase prices charged to the public, cut costs thus boosting profits but decreasing the quality of service to the public, publish tons of fake statistics proving how much better it all is now, etc. We've seen all this nonsense before. The train services in Britain are outrageously expensive (compared to cars, planes, and buses), often late, usually dirty, with an aggressive security force with police powers of arrest. Thirty years ago, the public monopoly train service in Britain, called British Rail, offered a much cheaper, and more reliable train service to the public. Prices of many ordinary train tickets bought at the counter or automated ticket machines for journeys at peak times were less than 20% in real terms of the current equivalent ticket prices charged by the private companies who now greedily charge whatever they like. There is no free market. For most journeys, you simply cannot choose which train company to use. Similarly at whatever level of granularity they choose to convert it into private companies, the home-delivery portion of a postal service is a natural monopoly, especially in the more isolated, rural locations. During the last five or so years the public postal service in Britain has been the victim of a disgraceful government push to deliberately degrade the quality of the service, e.g. by encouraging a 50% increase in postal loss rates, so that when private companies take over, they can easily demonstrate an improvement. Etc etc
Follow the money: from whence comes cash the proponents of this collect? If only I'd been in on a stake in "Railtrack", the company which got to own the tracks the broken-up British Rail trains would run on with no requirement to actually maintain them.
Dude, do you live in Portugal? That's exactly what they've been doing over here.
As a screaming example, our few transportation companies that are still public: Every time there's strike, there's hate stories in every media about how they should be privatised and all those workers fired, because they are leeches, they make too much money, don't want to work, etc. etc. etc. All those companies are technically bankrupt and the workers are blamed for running the company into the ground with too many benefits, bla, bla, bla.
However the story is pretty different. Our governments in the latest decades, being right-wing or Socialists (which is right transvestite as left), have been holding the transfers of money from ticketing, forcing the companies to make bank loans to keep operations running. After all these years, the companies are spending a lot more in loan interests than wages.
The solution to this? Easy. The government will take over all those companies' debt and privatise them really cheap (because nobody wants an "unprofitable" company full of "lazy" employees). The private groups that buy them will fire half of the staff, treat the remaining staff like cattle, increase tariffs to sky high levels, reduce the service to ridiculous minimums and then demand huge subsidies from the government because they are running such a "ingrate and unprofitable" public service.
Supreme irony, the privatised companies receive money from the state for every passenger they carry and also for the others they've lost due to their shitty service and excruciating tariffs.