On the first working day of this year over 130 former casual employees of the Guyana Post Office Corporation (GPOC) had no job to go to and for most of them – in the current straitened circumstances of the local economy – no prospects either. For them, and for their former employer as well, 2010 has had a bleak beginning. Moving to explain the decision to sack all of the casual staff at a press conference he held on Monday, Chairman of the GPOC Bishop Juan Edghill said that it was a means of regularising the post office’s employment system which has been so taxed that it is now $10 million over its budget and has on its books, staff which it clearly does not need.

The Chairman sought to blame the postmasters/mistresses in outlying areas, who generally hire casual workers as they are needed and then by some dint of magic, perhaps, manage to keep them on long after the task/reason for which they were hired ceases to exist. However, the fact is that no matter how far away from the GPOC they are, area post offices are not autonomous and postmasters/mistresses have to report to persons in authority with whom the buck stops and who were obviously lax in their monitoring of staffing. If, as the Chairman said, these casual workers were taken on to assist with excess work in some cases, and to backstop for employees who were ill, on leave or just absent from duty, then the conditions of their hire should have been made pellucid to them. In other words, the casual workers should have been told how long they would have been needed and been made to understand that at the end of that period their services would no longer be required. The fact that they remained employed and were paid long after the ‘contracts’ they would have made came to an end, would seem to indicate that the GPOC was hitherto a pilotless, rudderless entity.

In addition, the Chairman told reporters at the press conference that the GPOC’s Human Resources Department (HRD) had records which were at variance with the wages being paid. He specifically referred to November last year when 141 casual employees were paid, although in fact the HRD only had on record 118 such workers. While this may have been a genuine error, such discrepancies are a recipe for fraud and the GPOC has had more than its fair share of this over the years.

The GPOC Chairman openly admitted that several vacancies existed at the corporation and that casual workers had been performing in these posts, which will now be advertised and filled by qualified and competent people, which may or may not be the same casual staff. He also, more covertly, referred to nepotism in the hire of casuals, when he stated that some postmasters have been hiring them just so that they could be paid wages.

In a time when email and other more advanced forms of communication have virtually taken over the world, one would have expected that the GPOC would have been seeking to upgrade and modernise its services in order to remain relevant. Its performance has been abysmal. Aside from the employment disaster, the corporation is also known for its appalling sloth in the delivery of mail and for having some of the most uncouth public servants in this hemisphere in its employ. And the reason it gets away with all of this is because there is no real competition through which the printed/written matter that must be posted could be sent. The GPOC does not face the kind of competition and threat private mail delivery services in the UK pose to large government-owned corporations like the Royal Mail.

The GPOC chairman expounded at the press conference that the corporation was not a charity, but a business. 2010 should be the year he is made to show that by ‘business’ he does not mean ‘cake shop.’ Guyanese should demand improvements in the service offered at the GPOC – not just in the delivery of mail, but in every other aspect of service it provides.