I have been a part time postman in the UK for 6 years and this debate is interesting to me because I have seen the good and bad of competition as Royal Mail undergoes changes due to competition or globalization or whatever(parasitic monetary system perhaps
).
Being a postman used to be a really good gig, you would finish early most days, the pay was good and the job was secure. But it could be seen as being very inefficient, some people used to do two shifts and finish them both in the time it took to do a single shift. One guy I knew was coming home with two wages every week without really ever doing any overtime
This is the perhaps the main problem with public services, there is not really a desire to become more efficient.
Now we have competition and we are mostly working all our contracted hours. Lots of people have lost their jobs due to sorting machines and Royal Mail is back in profit.
So capitalism works and we all win?
Well almost, we now have lots of workers being contracted to less hours than it takes to do their jobs, leading to a lot of job dissatisfaction. I had to have fight my corner today to finish to my contracted hours and not take the extra mail we are supposed to take 'if' we have time.
Also, there used to be a kind of postman 'code' where every item was always delivered, this has been eroded somewhat. It's a shame but the service we provide is not as good, I don't think it's reached the point where customers are noticing this on any large scale but that could happen soon.
I think this story is very common, my nephew just started a job in a sports shop and they are already arguing over £150 worth of overtime they said he never did. They also contract him to 8pm but expect him to stay until 9pm to tidy, this is the source of the disputed overtime.
Competition is also inefficient as a whole, you could have 10 businesses all spending time and resources setting up, hiring people, operating at a loss until perhaps there is 2 or 3 left, running efficiently perhaps, or perhaps paying lower wages, or perhaps some of both.
I'm going on a bit. I will just say that I am pro capitalist and pro competition. But to ignore its obvious deficiencies would be a mistake, something is wrong where machines can take our jobs, freeing up peoples time and resources, yet we are more in debt than ever, the jobless are treated as second class citizens instead of being seen as liberated from work by machines
I put some of the blame at the monetary system, but I have said enough about that in other threads
