…………more like heartbreaking, backbreaking or piss-taking. Whatever …king this deal is – it is not the King of Deals that it is being presented as by RM, the CWU and the media that loves to say how fantastic we are in one breath and what a shower of lazy bastards we are in the next one.

The CWU position seems to me to be that the most important aims of the industrial dispute have been achieved and they are very nearly right in this. Royal Mail has engaged in meaningful discussion and agreed many things we needed such as working towards a more negotiated way of introducing changes and the inevitable automation with consideration for the effect on job losses and improved compensations for those who lose their positions.

The last industrial action was claimed by the Union to be “not about pay” but rather more about preserving a service and respect for us in the workplace. The wording in the “agreement” points towards those aims having been achieved but this then begs the question…

Why did we have to buy those terms from Royal Mail ?????

Every so called lump sum is something we have already been promised but has now been dressed up as something new – the proposed delivery supplement cannot be a “supplement” if it is in fact a decrease in allowances which it is for the vast majority of delivery staff, whether full or part time.

We now appear to be paying Royal Mail to employ us, instead of them paying us fairly to carry out a difficult job on behalf of both them and their attendant leeches on the DSA side of the postal market.

There is a lot of clarification to be made at Bournemouth this week and by next week I think we will all have made up our minds very clearly about what we expect our Union to do.

We need to know exactly how many net hours now constitutes our working week (do we get paid for meal relief’s or not?), How are we expected to deliver the DTD traffic, all over a part of the walk, or one a day over a 100% call rate and will the walks genuinely change to reflect this or will we be bullied into absorbing even more work into already unmanageable walk structures?

There is so much to ask and so little time but the message that must go down to the briefing must surely be “THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH”