"NZZ volgt speter"

It was Sunday morning after the changeover to summer time. As usual, I went to the letterbox shortly after seven o'clock to pick up the Sunday papers. One was missing, but there was a note on top, and on the note was scribbled in pencil: "NZZ volgt speter". At around half past eight, the promise was fulfilled. The newspaper delivery service works perfectly, even in rural areas. Irregularities occur at most two or three times a year.

The note must have been written by this friendly young man from Serbia or Montenegro, whom I met by chance on the same occasion a few weeks earlier: one of well over ten thousand colleagues who are never thought of, but who are more important than some newspaper people with illustrious names: the newspaper carriers. The loyal colporteur, if he is employed by the postal company Presto, receives an average of Fr. 22.10 gross per hour for his morning tour in all weathers, but his performance is predetermined. On Sundays it is Fr. 30.70. The regional, postal-independent early delivery organizations pay significantly less in some cases. The customs are tough. The tour manager has walked the tour with the carrier and set the reference value with a stopwatch. If the number of subscribers falls, as has regularly been the case recently, the paid times are also reduced. The special features and customer requests are listed in the tour journal: Mrs. Huber wants her newspaper in the milk crate; Mr. Hugentobler has a nervous dog, so close the garden gate quietly. Some newspaper carriers enjoy so much trust that they are given house keys so that they can use the otherwise inaccessible letterboxes in the hallways early in the morning.

6.30 a.m. on weekdays and 7.30 a.m. on Sundays are the latest delivery times for newspapers. Without early delivery, they would have an even harder time than they already do. If you don't receive your newspaper early in the morning between a shower and a coffee, you are lost as a reader for the whole day: people commute further and further, free papers are offered at the train station - and these also stand or fall with distribution. In all markets, the battle of the free papers was decided almost exclusively at the distribution level. The decisive factor, for example, was that 20 Minuten succeeded at the right moment in buying the exclusive right for distribution at SBB stations for very expensive money. The failure of .ch, on the other hand, was clearly linked to the failed attempt to organize early morning delivery to letterboxes. Since the never plausibly explained sale of the private delivery organization Zuvo, the early delivery of subscribed daily newspapers in the conurbations of Zurich, Basel, Berne and St. Gallen has been the monopoly of Swiss Post, which at the time, still as a state-owned company under strong trade union influence, had overslept the early delivery. A new collective labor agreement came into force last year, which above all increased social security: Continued payment of wages in the event of illness, accident insurance, retirement benefits. But the working world has remained tough for newspaper carriers. Time targets have been reduced in thousands of cases recently. And when it snows, for example, some newspaper carriers have to work half an hour or a whole hour early in the morning for free. Newspaper carriers - there are 10,000 of them at Swiss Post alone - are mostly people who don't have it easy in life anyway. The type of "sporty pensioner" who goes for an early morning run with the dog on a lead and earns a little extra is probably the exception. The vast majority of newspaper carriers are people from very modest backgrounds who rely on the meagre extra income. Trade unions have repeatedly complained that only unskilled workers in agriculture are paid less.

Actually, I'm a bit ashamed of my early-riser colleague with the idiosyncratic spelling!