Day in the life of a postman: Two slices of bread and a toilet break between 12 hours of work

That is the gruelling pace of a postman as The Sunday Times follows him on his rounds. SingPost delivers three million mail items daily, which works out to 3,000 pieces by each of the 1,000 postmen.
By Janice Tai, Social Affairs Correspondent, The Sunday Times, 17 Feb 2019

Mr Rajab Abu Noh has been a postman for 43 years. He started as a 22-year-old, weaving among kampung huts and farms on a motorbike, avoiding chickens.

Today, at the age of 65, he wields a smartphone and navigates high-rise buildings while dodging dogs.

It remains a tough - if not even tougher - slog, given the drastically changed nature of mail delivery, as Singaporeans fall in love with the convenience of online shopping.

SingPost, the national postal service provider, seems hard-put to keep pace with the developments. On Feb 7, it was fined $100,000 for failing to meet standards on the delivery of basic letters and registered mail here over six months in 2017. It comes after a string of delivery lapses, such as a postman being arrested for mail found discarded.

SingPost has since vowed to lighten its postmen's workload and review their pay, among other measures, to improve service quality.

To better understand how such service lapses could have occurred and the gruelling pace that postmen undergo, The Sunday Times followed Mr Rajab around as he goes about a usual workday.



FUEL FOR A DAY'S WORK

It is 6.30am on a Wednesday, and he is at the sorting area at Serangoon North Regional Delivery Base, one of seven across the island.

He scarfs down his breakfast - two slices of bread with butter and kaya and a cup of coffee. That would have to fuel him through the next 12 hours of work as he opts not to stop for lunch. Save for a 10-minute trip to the toilet at 3pm, he takes no breaks.

Mr Rajab's daily route takes him through 38 condo blocks of about 1,750 residential units in the Yio Chu Kang/Sengkang area.

At 7.30am, he begins to carefully sort the mail according to the floors in their respective blocks. Any error means he will later have to double back to the correct block or level during delivery.

At 9am, the postmen gather for a briefing. The inspector of post reminds them of complaints about missed deliveries or articles damaged when the bulky items were squeezed into letter boxes.

He tells them to report back if letter boxes are full so that residents can be reminded - by slipping notices under their door - to clear them. He also reprimands the postmen for leaving the master lock for letter boxes unlocked in four instances in one neighbourhood.

The meeting ends. Mr Rajab looks at the mountain of mail - a mix of letters and packages - piled high in a trolley and quickens his pace.

There is no way he can put it all into the storage box on his three-wheeler scooter without its heavy weight affecting his balance. So he takes half of it and will collect the rest later at a SingPost storeroom at an HDB block along his route.

He departs the base at 11am.

MOUNTAIN OF MAIL

SingPost has to deliver three million mail items daily. With a fleet of 1,000, this works out to 3,000 pieces for each postman.

However, 350 out of the 1,000 delivery persons are part-timers, mostly housewives and retirees.

There are no fixed hours: a postman has to deliver his mail load for the day, which varies, before he can knock off. Each usually delivers mail to some 20 blocks in an area.

In the past, this volume of mail might still have been manageable, given that they were mainly letters that could be shoved quickly into letter boxes. A postman made an average of only 20 to 25 doorstep deliveries of packages a day in 2010.

Now, such doorstep deliveries have doubled for non-peak periods and can go up to 50 or 60 during the year-end peak season.

This means Mr Rajab works from 7.30am to about 6pm every day, or up to 8pm if overtime work - for which he is paid extra - is needed.

In the past, he could have called it a day at about 3pm.

Despite such time pressures, he says no postman should have to resort to dumping mail to cope with their schedules or vent frustration.

SingPost says it intends to alleviate their load by hiring 100 more postmen as a short-term measure.

Four hours after he starts work, at about 11.30am, Mr Rajab arrives at his first port of call, a condominium in Yio Chu Kang. He has to deliver letters to 13 blocks there.

At the bottom of a block, Mr Rajab whips out a Samsung Galaxy A4 smartphone.

Since January, all postmen are issued smartphones loaded with SingPost's Smartpost app. It is meant to assist the postman as well as ensure he delivers mail in a timely and appropriate manner.

Mr Rajab uses it to scan a Near-Field Communication (NFC) tag mounted on the wall next to the centralised area of letter boxes. This is for the postman to clock his time of arrival and departure.

He then proceeds to slot mail and advertisements into the letter boxes. Registered articles, and regular mail that cannot fit into the letter boxes, have to be taken to the doorsteps of the residents.

He goes up to a residential unit, rings the doorbell twice, knocks on the door and calls out "Postman". There is no response.

So Mr Rajab opens the app on his phone and scans the barcode on the registered mail. Once the code is detected, a countdown timer of 45 seconds is activated to ensure that the postman waits for a sufficient amount of time at the door.

After 45 seconds, the smartphone screen switches to camera mode for the postman to take a photo of the unit number as proof that he had attempted delivery. Then Mr Rajab notes down the time on the delivery notice, and slots it in a crevice in the door.

"No luck this time, no one in," he mutters under his breath.

Contrary to the perception that postmen prefer to just leave a failed delivery notice at the door and scoot off quickly, it actually takes him twice as long to complete all the steps to log a failed delivery on the smartphone system, compared with if the recipient was home.

The ST times Mr Rajab, and finds that he has to spend about two minutes outside the door to complete the process if a person is not home. If someone is at home, it takes just one minute. "I know doing all these can protect us from complaints from customers but sometimes technology can also be a waste of time," says Mr Rajab.

For instance, the app at times cannot detect the barcode even after multiple tries and he ends up having to manually key in the barcode number. This happens at least three times throughout the day.



DELAYS AND BOTTLENECK

At 3.20pm, Mr Rajab finishes at a second condo, and the box at the back of his scooter is finally empty.

But he is not done. He heads over to a nearby mail storeroom to collect his second batch of mail for two more condominiums. This means another bottleneck as the mail has not arrived from the base. It takes half an hour. The time ticks by.

At 5.50pm, he completes all his deliveries. By then, he would have covered 38 blocks for the day, including some landed properties.

He heads back to the Serangoon North base to return undelivered mail as well as returned mail.

He changes out of his blue uniform at 6.30pm, some 12 hours after he started his day there.

OLDER POSTMEN, LOWER PAY

After working for 43 years, Mr Rajab's basic salary is about $1,800. He works five days a week.

It is a big jump from the $300 he earned when starting out in 1976, but still below Singapore's median gross income of $4,400, which includes employer contributions to the Central Provident Fund.

It is thus perhaps unsurprising that of the 650 full-time postmen, just half are Singaporeans. The rest are work permit holders from countries such as China and Malaysia.

The average postman is older than the average Singapore worker - 51, versus 43 years old.

SingPost says its entry-level full-time postmen draw a basic salary of $1,600 a month. It is now reviewing salaries and career progression as part of a larger review of mail operations. "The pay is not enough and it needs to go up for more people to join. The work looks easy but it is very tough and only fit people can do this," says Mr Rajab, who walks with a limp.

Years on the job have partly worn out his knees and he has done a knee replacement surgery on his left leg and is due for another surgery for his right knee soon.

Three weeks ago, he was bitten by a large bulldog because the door was open and the dog was not leashed when he was delivering a registered article to the resident. He had to go for a vaccine injection.

He had worked in a few contractor jobs after leaving Geylang Serai Vocational School but those jobs did not last long. He then joined SingPost, going for a stable job with medical and other benefits.

Today, Mr Rajab is one of the oldest and longest-serving postmen.

He still enjoys what he does. "No enjoy, no work 43 years," says Mr Rajab simply.

His wife is a housewife, and they have three children.

The cheery and self-composed man chokes up when describing what makes his day.

"It is when residents say: 'Hello Mr Postman, long time no see' and I will answer: 'Every day I will come and I can see you'," he says.

His only son also works in the delivery line, but as a courier.

"I think he finds being a postman embarrassing and courier jobs are more popular with young people today," says Mr Rajab, who also has two daughters and one grandson.

He says that he has no plans to retire, even though his children are all working and can support him.

"I want to work as long as is possible. I don't want to retire, stay home and just makan (eat) and grow a belly," he says with a guffaw, gesturing wildly at his stomach.

SingPost looking into solutions such as larger letter boxes to tackle e-commerce surge and accountability for non-trackable mail
By Tiffany Fumiko Tay, The Sunday Times, 17 Feb 2019

Larger letter boxes to accommodate growing e-commerce volumes and accountability for non-trackable items are among the mail solutions that SingPost is exploring for the future, its group chief executive Paul Coutts has told The Sunday Times.

SingPost is in discussions with the authorities and stakeholders on increasing the size of both letter boxes and their slots to ensure that the infrastructure keeps pace with the boom in e-commerce, Mr Coutts, 62, said.

"If a customer orders four to five packages and they arrive on the same day, trying to get those in a letter box can be quite difficult," he noted in a recent interview.

Under current guidelines set by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), which administers the Postal Services Act, the minimum internal dimensions of units in a residential letter box nest are 110mm by 270mm by 380mm.

The maximum dimensions for packages that can be sent through the mail, however, are 240mm by 340mm by 70mm, an international standard set by the Universal Postal Union, a United Nations agency.

This means that mail items sent through the postal service may be larger than the letter box. In situations where items are too large for the letter boxes or cannot fit because the boxes are cluttered with uncleared mail, they are sent for doorstep delivery.

Speaking in Parliament last Monday, Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information Sim Ann said that SingPost delivers 38,000 items a day that cannot fit into letter boxes and its postmen now conduct more doorstep deliveries for parcels.



Apart from easing some of the postmen's load, another area that SingPost is looking at is providing accountability for items that do not have tracing, such as basic letters.

"Our group IT team is having an exploratory discussion with a couple of providers to see how we can do that," said Mr Coutts, who added that this may take some time.

For the year ahead, rebuilding the trust that SingPost has lost after a string of high-profile service failures is its top priority, he said.

The postmen involved in recent incidents have been disciplined and in some cases sacked, while measures to improve service quality are being rolled out amid a larger review of the organisation's infrastructure and processes.

From the arrest of one of its postmen last month, after undelivered mail was found discarded, to complaints about feeble home delivery attempts, to a $100,000 fine handed down by the authorities on Feb 7 for failing to meet government service standards in 2017, it has been a rough couple of months for SingPost.

While SingPost pointed to the growth in e-commerce as the main reason for its recent service failures, critics say that delivery issues have existed for years, and accuse the postal service provider of taking its eye off its core mail business, a charge that Mr Coutts denies.

"I don't think that we've neglected Singapore... the pain points that we're experiencing today are some of the same ones that other postal organisations have gone through in their own home markets as they've gone global over the last 10 years or so."

Over recent months, Singapore has seen a "very sudden and extreme surge in e-commerce volumes coming through", which exposed weaknesses in SingPost's infrastructure and processes, he said.

In planning for the peak season, SingPost conducted research and had discussions with major customers such as Lazada.

"We were looking at somewhere around a 15 per cent projected volume increase. In reality we experienced a 30 per cent increase, so it was double what was expected," he said.

At the current pace of growth, the volume handled over the peak season is expected to become the norm in six months, "so we need to be set up to be able to handle that", said Mr Coutts, who joined SingPost in June 2017.

The surge has also uncovered gaps in customer service, for example.

"At times when they (customers) reach out to our contact centre, we come across as not being as empathetic and proactive in resolving that customer's issue as we should be," said Mr Coutts.

To address this, it will provide training for its staff, while the role and responsibilities of its postmen will also be re-evaluated as the group invests more in technology.

This will be done as part of a broader salary structure review to enhance their remuneration. The starting pay for a postman is about $1,600 a month, excluding other incentives.

Hiring an additional 100 postmen is one of the immediate measures SingPost has announced to improve service levels, and it is seeking more locals and young people, said Mr Coutts.

While the furore caused by the postal service provider's lapses has begun to die down, the Government has said that further regulatory action from the IMDA can be expected as it reviews SingPost's letter delivery performance for last year, investigates infringements under the Postal Services Act and considers extra regulatory standards.

SingPost is required to submit quarterly reports of its performance on several indicators for the delivery of local basic mail, which fell below standards in nine instances in 2017, earning it its highest fine to date.

Mr Coutts declined to comment on last year's performance, citing the ongoing evaluation.

Neither would he be drawn into pinpointing the cause of the issues in 2017, or any systemic problems with the organisation that may have led to the recent spate of incidents.

"We've clearly let the public down, we've let ourselves down, and for that we apologise," he said.