What the Screen Actors Guild and Postal Unions Have in Common

By Ron Wiener, CEO & Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail

If you work in the postal industry — and especially if you are a member of a postal workers’ union — you may not have been paying much attention to the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) dispute with the entertainment industry, but you should be. While the SAG’s beef with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) isn’t over jobs but payscale, it’s fundamentally about how the Internet has irrefutably altered their industry’s business model.

In the good old days life was simple. Actors would get paid residuals on their work based on the revenues that their TV shows and movies generated when they were rebroadcast. Along came DVDs as a new distribution channel and the SAG had to renegotiate their union contracts based on this newfangled medium. But that was nothing compared to the much less definable world of Internet distribution.

Today a television show or movie could wind up being distributed for free on hulu.com, for a small download fee on iTunes, or on any number of other outlets. Actors are trying to protect their incomes at a time when it isn’t even clear what the revenue models are for the production companies in this brave new world, and negotiations have been arduous and, so far, not completely successful.

Some SAG members are feeling that their union representatives waited too long before nailing these issues down. The long writers’ strike didn’t help matters; it only hurt the industry during a weak economic period, and ultimately reduced the future incomes of the SAG members. To be clear, I think there’s no justification for excluding actors from residuals on Internet distribution — but by waiting as long as they did to address the issue, a definitive resolution to this thorny issue has only become more difficult to conclude.

The not-too-obvious parallel to the postal industry is that postal worker unions around the world are fighting with their employers over job retention at a time when transaction-mail and advertising-mail volumes are both being eroded by electronic-media substitution, namely the double-whammy of email and online advertising. As more and more posts are calculating the trend lines and realizing that they need translate their national trust brands online and create new online revenue streams, for the most part they aren’t doing this in collaboration with their postal unions.

In most cases these liberalized or privatized posts — unshackled from the monopoly restrictions of USPS and the now-minority of the other posts of the world — are acquiring document-outsourcing businesses and online-billing platforms. Getting inside the envelope for revenue is turning out to be much more lucrative than just pushing the sealed envelope along, and posts are already racking up billions in annual revenue from these new activities.

Forward-looking posts like TNT (Netherlands), Itella (Finland Post), Swiss Post, Canada Post, La Poste (France), Belgian Post and Danish Post, among others, should be applauded for their pre-emptive moves into the electronic-document arena. They are saving themselves from certain diminution of size and relevance brought on by the increasing availability of Internet alternatives to their services. But while these companies are generally doing very well financially with these new divisions, the union workers on the other side of the fence — the traditional post business units — are battling an unbeatable foe.

The more times the workers strike against Royal Mail the more jobs are going to be lost due to the worsening financial condition of the post and the UK’s incipient decline in paper-mail volumes. Striking against irreversible societal trends is simply not an effective solution to their problem.

I’ve never met a leader of a postal workers’ union, but if I do, I would urge him or her to build relationships with the leaders of the post’s new business divisions and start now to redefine and broaden the spectrum of defined postal jobs. These new divisions need trustworthy, reliable and precise workers to run scanners and other equipment used in document-outsourcing processes. Just as SAG members are concerned about getting their fair share of the Internet media distribution pie, postal workers should be concerning themselves with finding replacement jobs in the new economy. The nearest substitute is already right under their noses, usually on the same org chart.

Working conditions for document-outsourcing workers are superior to what many postal workers must endure. On the scanning-operations line there’s no risk of rabid dogs biting their ankles, ice to slip on, frostbite, sunburn or bunions. While letter carriers might miss the contact with recipients on their route, they’re less likely to miss the chiropractic treatments and traffic accidents. Document-processing may not be for everyone, but there are bound to be a good number of postal workers who would enjoy a job that involves inside-the-envelope services instead of what they do today.

Of course some posts, like USPS, are unable to enter into document-outsourcing businesses because they continue to grasp their monopoly powers with a death grip. While privatization appears inevitable — if not in three years then in five or 10 at the most — tens of thousands of workers are now being offered early retirement packages because declining mail volumes are on an inexorable trend; the writing is on the wall.

It certainly appears that postal unions in countries whose posts are still monopoly operators would be wise to jump the fence and join with the advocates of privatization so that their employers will be free to enter replacement lines of business and create replacement jobs that could be filled by already-trusted, already-reliable, already-there postal-union workers.

Yes, worker payscales may potentially need to be adjusted so that posts can employ former postal workers while remaining competitive with private companies who also offer (after-delivery) document services. However, posts are farther upstream than private competitors and can potentially win more business because they’re able to intercept incoming documents earlier than the competition can. This advantage should allow posts to create some of the most secure and best-paying jobs in the document-outsourcing sector. With technologies like Earth Class Mail’s, posts can identify a customer’s incoming mail within an hour of its collection from the mailbox on the street — literally as soon as it is imaged during its first sortation — offering customers a tremendous time-savings benefit that no competitor can match.

July 24, 2008 | Filed Under Earth Class Mail, The Postal Future 

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