Royal Mail shareholders are making £500k a day now, so why can't workers receive some benefits too?

We all know the world of work is changing fast. But while rapid technological change may bring improvements to some people’s working lives – with drudgery removed and people freed up for more fulfilling work – many are having a very different experience.

Take the postal workers at Royal Mail. From the summer of 2015, increasing numbers of parcel sorting jobs in the Royal Mail have become automated, following the introduction of a new £20m parcel sorting system. This shift will significantly reduce the amount of time postal workers will take to sort parcels. As a result of this, the time spent on delivery rounds will increase from four to seven hours.

With automation taking hold, postal workers will counterintuitively see their work become more gruelling as newly extended delivery rounds cover the time freed up by parcel sorting. With an average age of 49, the prospect of pushing round heavy loads for seven hours is one that postal workers claim poses a serious risk to their health and safety.

And here’s the kicker. This week it was revealed that Royal Mail shareholders have been paid over £800m since it was privatised in 2013. At the same time, postal workers have lost their jobs, delivery offices have been closed, and there are planned cuts to pension schemes for employees. This does not feel like a technological revolution which workers can enjoy.

It is in this context that workers are fighting back. The CWU – who represent 134,000 postal workers – have been negotiating for four key demands, including a shorter working week. The demand for a reduction in working hours is a direct response to postal workers’ experience at the sharp end of technological change.

I spoke to Kevin, a London postal worker and union branch secretary, who told me: “The world of work is changing really quite fast in our industry, with drones and driverless vehicles. The change is increasing at an ever faster pace. Automation changes the way we work and do our job. This is about improving our terms and conditions based on changes in our working environment.”

By campaigning for a reduction in working hours, the CWU are arguing for the benefits of automation to be more evenly shared between workers and shareholders. This follows a long history of unions facing up to technological change and ensuring workers gain some of the benefits. The eight-hour day and two-day weekend were both in essence demands that workers share in the rewards of productivity improvements.

For postal workers, this is about being more in control of their own time. According to Kevin, “the top priority is work-life balance, about spending time with family and kids.” The standoff between the CWU and Royal Mail management is at heart an argument about workers’ time in a modern and fast-moving economy.

Of course, the postal service is not the only place where modern technology is presenting challenges for how workers spend their time. At the New Economics Foundation we are working with drivers, cleaners and others in precarious industries so that they too can start to regain some control over their working life. These are people managed by algorithms and unable to claim basic working rights. By seeking to set up co-operatively owned platforms as alternatives to their often monopolistic employers, they are looking to assert themselves in a working world which increasingly sees their time as a series of digits.

What unites these precarious workers and the Royal Mail postal workers is their determination to confront changes sweeping over the workplace and ensure they reap some of the benefits. As we all face up to the future, we would do well to learn from them.

Aidan Harper is a Researcher at the New Economics Foundation