Should we deplore it or live with it? On January 1, the red stamp, synonymous with urgent mail, disappeared, arousing a flood of reactions sometimes nostalgic, sometimes angry. But for La Poste and its tens of thousands of agents, the end of the red stamp marks above all a beginning, that of a vast reorganization intended to reduce the mail deficit. The end of letters delivered the next day, at least for 100% paper mailing, is accompanied by another, no less important development in the offer: the green stamp, now the standard mailing solution for individuals, has seen its delivery time extended from two to three days. In short, in the era of always faster, La Poste presses the brake. And arranges its logistics accordingly.
The entire mail chain will be affected, from transport plans for delivering letters, to the working hours of certain postal workers and the contents of the mail carriers’ bag. The adaptations will be progressive, over the year 2023 and even 2024. “With an organization as dense and complex as that of the mail, we cannot afford a ‘big night’ where everything would be changed at once”, observes Yves Xémard, director of mail at La Poste. Not to mention that rushing change exposes the company to social unrest. The SUD and CGT unions of the company are already denouncing an attack on the public service. The objective is to generate savings. The universal postal service has been in the red since 2018. Its deficit now exceeds one billion euros per year. The government has undertaken to pay annual compensation of 500 to 520 million euros. Insufficient, therefore. La Poste, owned by the Caisse des dépôts and the State, hopes to achieve 100 to 120 million euros in savings this year, thanks to the adaptations made possible by the slowdown in mail.
At the risk that the potion aggravates the patient’s condition? “Slowing down the delivery time can only accelerate the decline in the use of mail. The individual who must send a check quickly will no longer put it in a letter, he will look for another means of payment”, s’ worries Joëlle Toledano, economist, professor emeritus attached to the University of Paris-Dauphine-PSL. In the background, the collapse of the volumes of letters to be distributed is accelerated by the digitization of exchanges. Who still receives their bills on paper? In fact, the number of letters has been divided by three in fifteen years, going from 18 billion in 2008 to 6.5 in 2022. The impact is colossal, because whatever their number, the company must be able to route letters from any point in the Hexagon to any other. Mail sent by companies, which constitutes more than 90% of the volume processed, has been slowed down for a long time. Barring exceptions, its distribution takes four to seven days. Only private mail was still fast. “The deadline constraint imposed maximum tension on the supply chain, for a very small volume of letters”, explains Yves Xémard.
The construction site of the last kilometers
At all levels of this chain, change is therefore coming soon. The industrial sorting platforms (around thirty in France) were running 24 hours a day? They will experience a nocturnal cut. Daily flights carried letters between Ile-de-France and Marseille, Montpellier and Toulouse? They will be deleted. The date of the last flight is scheduled: it will be March 24. Transport between regions was also based on a network of more than 300 vans, often sparsely filled. La Poste cites the example of a vehicle making the 600 km Dijon-Rennes journey every night for only 500 red letters. The vans will be replaced by a smaller number of heavy goods vehicles with optimized loading: the imperatives of deadlines being less, different mail flows can be pooled in the same truck. For national routes, the total number of kilometers traveled will increase from 212,000 to 138,000 km. The postal operator does not hesitate to highlight the CO2 emissions thus avoided. Without a red stamp, the company would be greener…
But the most sensitive site concerns the last kilometers traveled by the letters. In other words, the postman. “With our European neighbors who have also slowed delivery times, this choice has been accompanied by a reduction in the frequency of passage of the postman. This is what makes it possible to make real savings”, assures Joëlle Toledano. The unions say it more brutally: “The end of the red stamp is the end of the daily passage of the postman in front of your house”, denounces Pascal Frémont, SUD-PTT union representative.
La Poste formally denies. It must be said that the distribution every day from Monday to Saturday is an obligation enshrined in law. Experiments will be carried out in 68 areas from March. They will not relate to a passage to one day out of two, assures the management of the company, but on the concrete organization of the work of the factors. With fewer letters and more parcels, it is sometimes necessary to adapt the direction of a round, to modify the vehicle used… A report is planned for the autumn, before a broader development.
But the change should lead, in fact, to a less frequent passage of the postman. Internal documents present an objective of “increasing the consolidation of objects at each point of delivery”. Translation: to avoid the postman having to stop every day in front of each letterbox, the mail can be kept at the sorting center in order to be distributed in bulk the next day. The postman only stops every day where he has to drop off a parcel, a newspaper or a “red e-letter”, this urgent letter to be sent from a computer, which La Poste presents, without convincing, as a substitute for the red letter on paper…
Less mail, fewer postmen?
The question of the passage of the postman is therefore potentially explosive. This applies politically, as its presence symbolizes that of the state, especially in rural areas. This also applies on the social level, internally, with a major issue on employment. “We estimate that within three to five years, 20,000 jobs are threatened, out of the 65,000 mail carriers working in distribution and in sorting centers,” warns Pascal Frémont. The first inclinations to disengage have also appeared in the areas where the postmen are concerned by the experiments.
Less mail, fewer postmen? The equation seems logical, but La Poste refuses to confirm it. The management prefers to insist on the 2,800 recruitments planned for 2023, and to kick in for the maintenance of employment in the medium term: “The number of factors is linked to the activity. We are putting all our energy into developing it”, argues Yves Xémard. The growth in parcels linked to the explosion of e-commerce provides a valuable contribution to business. But the traffic partly escapes La Poste, especially in the big cities. Amazon is able to deliver there with a speed that would make a postman green with envy… Joëlle Toledano deplores a strategy that is not ambitious enough: “With a strong synergy between mail and parcels, it would be possible to maintain a good quality of service and to offer French e-merchants the real possibility of competing with Amazon.”
One of the keys to success for La Poste will lie in its ability to supply its network of postmen by diversifying. The company relies, for example, on services provided to individuals’ homes such as the delivery of meal trays or medicines, or visits to the elderly – the “Watch over my parents” service, billed from 21.90 € per month. But these incursions outside the postal field, sometimes launched for years, are struggling to develop and even more to find balance. According to the specialized site L’Informé, the La Poste personal services subsidiary had a deficit of 2.5 million euros in 2021. Historical activity, mail today represents less than 20% of the group’s turnover. . Whatever the success of the other services offered, one thing is certain: this share has not finished declining.