“I love the smell of
subsidy in the morning.
It smells like … a
free lunch”
Paraphrased from ‘Colonel William Kilgore’
in ‘Apocalypse Now’
A few months ago, the Dutch former state postal service PostNL passed these lines, due to the
unwanted side-effects of the flexibilization of their workforce.
Today, however, PostNL was ‘back with a vengeance’ at BNR
Business radio (www.bnr.nl). The company had much
better news:
PostNL stated that it is intending to hire 500
people with ‘a distance to the labour market':
- People that received welfare for a prolonged time;
- Physically and/or mentally disabled workers;
In an interview with BNR, CEO Werner van Bastelaar of PostNL
stated that the company took this action in order to take its societal
responsibility. ‘Expenses were not an issue here’. Of course, they were not...
Here are the pertinent snips from the
interview [this and the next featured interview in this article are available behind the link –
EL]:
Bastelaar: "The expenses
that we make to hire these people, are the same expenses that we would make
when we would hire regular mail-deliverers. So, expenses and cost-saving are not an issue here.
We pay amounts that
are common in this market and, on top of that, we pay the 'Sociale Werkplaats
Bedrijven' to counsel these people.
[Sociale Werkplaats Bedrijven or SWB are the pseudo-commercial
branches of the so-called Social Workshops in The Netherlands. These Social Workshops
are heavily subsidized general workshops, where disabled workers and other
people with 'a distance to the labour market' can get working experience, while
being in a safe environment- EL]
The job is and will remain a ‘welfare’
thing, as these people will not receive
a direct contract from PostNL. The purpose is to reintegrate people in the
labour market, who initially have a distance to it. This distance could either be
formed as a consequence of people being long-term welfare recipients or by the
fact that people are physically / mentally disabled. Both categories have under normal circumstances little chance for
a real job. We do our best to get these people to work again.
PostNL will be guiding
these people thoroughly, by using the expertise of the SWB-companies, but we
will also set some conditions for them. They must be mentally, as well as
physically capable to deliver the mail.
And as a matter of
fact, the people that we intend to hire are indeed capable of delivering the mail. Until
now, the experiences have been satisfactory; the people are very motivated. The
quality of mail delivery probably won't suffer from it."
Well, does that sound great or does that sound great?!
Almost too good to be true… and it probably is!
The recent history of PostNL is that of a company which fired
a lot of real postmen with fixed contracts, in exchange for mail-deliverers with
flexible contracts, who are either paid per item or on a part-time basis.
The following lines are from the earlier mentioned article
(see the 2nd link in this article), that I wrote on 5 December, 2012:
In order to keep the
company profitable under the deteriorated circumstances for normal mail, the
board of directors decided to discharge thousands of the official postmen with
fixed contracts and to replace them with flexworkers that worked on a
payment-by-the-piece basis.They did so to cut the excess fixed expenses per
letter.
This decision caused
massive unrest among the fixed contract workers, who suddenly saw their secured
future deteriorate. They quite rightly feared the ‘false’ competition of
non-qualified, parttime workers (often youngsters), who would receive much
lower payments for the same amount of work. Especially for the older, often
highly compensated workers their discharge meant often a dismal course to
longterm unemployment.
Like I already wrote in this article, I do understand that
PostNL tries to cut expenses to stay competitive. When its most important
competitors radically cut their expenses, a company has to cut its own
expenses, in order to stay in business.
Nevertheless, the negative side-effects of the
aforementioned actions by PostNL have been that the older postmen who had been
fired, often became unemployed with a grim future of prolonged joblessness ahead. And the
new mail-deliverers with their freelance or flex-contracts, stayed behind with
a salary that, since then, has often been below the official minimum wage per month in The Netherlands.
Read for instance this
article for additional information on the hazards of freelancing and working
with flex-contracts, as this is, in my opinion, the nasty flipside of
unemployment.
Summarizing: in recent years, PostNL has not exactly been ‘the
usual suspect’, when it came to societal involvedness and philanthropy of large
companies in The Netherlands. Therefore it would be naive to solely count on
the philanthropic intentions of PostNL, when it decides to hire 500 workers
with a large distance to the labour market.
The assumption that PostNL does not hire these disabled or ex-welfare
workers only from the kindness of its heart, was emphasized in a second
interview (see the link behind the first interview for the Dutch-spoken, taped version of this second interview). BNR held it this afternoon with professor Ronald Dekker, labour economist of the
Tilburg University:
Dekker: "PostNL stated
that these ‘people with distance to the labour market’ have the same costs as
regular mail-deliverers, but this is not per sé true. PostNL does not bear any employer’s
responsibility for these workers, as the company does not offer them a direct
contract.
This strongly reduces the
risks of such workers: for instance, they don’t have to be paid during times of illness. Besides that, when
such a mail-deliverer is found to be not fit for the job eventually, there will be no lay
off-expenses for PostNL.
These risks have been sold off within this contract, without any additional expenses
for PostNL. As PostNL doesn't have to
pay one cent for these risks, such a contract form is much cheaper than the contracts with
regular workers.
It will be great for
disabled people and long-term welfare recipients to have such a job, but I have
still mixed feelings about it. It is always nice when large companies take
their societal responsibility, but in this case the whole construction fits just
in too nicely with PostNL’s goal to
save loan expenses.
On top of that, it is slightly
cynical that PostNL can now hire these disabled people, due to the fact that
the company firmly guided thousands of mailmen to the exit, over the last few
years."
I had to leave some very interesting sidelines out of the transcript from BNR’s
interview with Ronald Dekker. Nevertheless, for everybody who understands Dutch, the whole interview
is a 'must-listen'.
Unfortunately, PostNL seems one of those companies, which cause
that many of the new flex-workers and freelancers might turn into 'the poor
of the 21st century'. People in this situation are called ‘freelancers’, but in
reality they are nowhere near of earning a decent salary. A decent salary would
include: enough money for pension-building, health and working incapacity insurances, with on top of that a utility
‘for a rainy day’ aka a future without an assignment.
When the contracts of such freelancers will eventually be abolished by their principals, they often stay behind without a penny in savings at the bank.
The same is true for the flex-workers at PostNL, with their parttime
contracts. People like these flexworkers must often have two or three jobs to
earn a decent salary to live from.
That is a very worrisome development and it will only get
worse in the coming years.
No comments:
Post a Comment