meeting with Union today with delivery staff

[RobertT]

crisis of our pensions and the employers cost going forward which is estimated to reach around 40% when the next actuarial is done and Royal Mail have said they will not pay which threatens the future of our pensions going forward. in post office ltd the company has announced a consultation process about closing the defined benefit pension scheme for all employees and putting all those employed before 2008 into an inferior defined contribution scheme.

Wait, what? When did this come about? The shortfall was all paid off by the government 3/4 years ago now.

I lose track of how many pension variations there have been now...

The government are responsible for the pension up to 2012, it’s RM after that.

The problem with defined benefit pension schemes is there are two main variables that cannot be exactly measured: Life expectancy and investment returns. So if people live longer than expected or the investments perform worse than expected, there will potentially be a shortfall.

With defined contribution pensions, the company just pay a certain percentage of wages, along with the employee share, and the onus on providing a decent pension falls more on the investment returns and the employee saving more of their own money.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

1/ 3 delivery offices in our area amalgamating into 1
2/6 hour deliveries
3/ 20% Fulltime and 80% Part time
4/one person vans , no P/L van pairings
5/ motorised HCT's
6/ no Tuesday delivery
7/ 10am start time and 6 pm finish
All to be implemented in the next 12 months ,

Its bull***t eastie you are just winding people up for a reaction and people are daft enough to take you're bait

It may be bullshit but its coming from the Union, and its even been partially confirmed by Dingo http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/communit ... 77#p722177" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Some of what is posted in there is true , sure there will be further delivery amalgamations . Royal Mail do see just one person in a van rather that paired vans under the strategy. Some will no doubt have an attendance as 10-6. Equally Royal Mail plan includes longer spans and they have said 6 hours.

What is not true is Tuesday will not be cut from the USO. Equally there has not been any set proposals for 20% full time and 80% part time. Equally it is a 5 year strategy and some of the plan is central to purchasing and deploying 20 large letter machines which they have yet to buy.

So of course it is understandable that when you relay a message or report a proposal it often gets things added to it the further the message is communicated.

The National Briefing will have Royal Mail there too explain the proposal and strategy.

[Martin Walsh]

Fish pensions have been a problem for a while :

40 thousand members are now in the defined pension contribution scheme set up in 2008 for new employees and as the new pensions laws people no in a pension scheme automatically get enrolled into this. Whilst the employer pays into a defined contribution scheme all the risks are on the employee.


There are 90 thousand members of the defined benefit scheme ie those who were employed prior to 2008 and were in either old poss or pops pension scheme.

Up to 2009 the employer was paying on average 9% this increased to 17.1% in 2009.

When the Agenda for Growth pension agreement was agreed Royal Mail agreed to pay until 2018.

Due to guilds falling , intrest rates etc the actual money Royal Mail should be paying is 30% but they adjusted future pay rises to RPI with agreement of the trustees and have been drawing on some surplus to top the payment up to 30% and will do so till 2018.

After which they informed the briefing tomorrow they believe at current rates that Royal Mail would have to pay 40% into the scheme. Royal Mail are saying they won't and that potentially means the scheme will close. All your past service will be protected but you will then be transferred into the inferior defined contribution scheme.

Obviously both the CWU , Unite and the trustees will have to negotiate on this issue.

Just another issue converging on us in what is the perfect storm brewing

[Martin Walsh]

Very good National Briefing , I think many were shocked at all the Royal Mail presentations on Pensions , national strategy and production control.

The last one especially when it showed you that they want to trial clock in and out of work , clocking out of every workload tasks and that you could be paid for the hours you actually work. They showed a slide with finger recognition , swipe cards , Scanners like RFID where your name badge is linked to the scanners and automatically records your time on each task.All of this information will enable resourcing in the future and and there will not be set walks as the machine linked to walk optimisation will generate the routes needed on the day !

A lot of people fell of their chairs when that was announced

[hans solo]

totally agree with clocking in and out lets see them run round their deliveries now

[toomuchcoke]

1/ 3 delivery offices in our area amalgamating into 1
2/6 hour deliveries
3/ 20% Fulltime and 80% Part time
4/one person vans , no P/L van pairings
5/ motorised HCT's
6/ no Tuesday delivery
7/ 10am start time and 6 pm finish
All to be implemented in the next 12 months ,

Its bull***t eastie you are just winding people up for a reaction and people are daft enough to take you're bait

1 and 7 are possible. 1 is possible if your DO can't handle 17.5tonners. 7 is possible if RM bring in one wave of sequencing

4 is obviously possible, but it's hard to see what the benefit would be. 6 is also possible, possibly even desirable? Though I believe they tried electric HCTs before and they where not a resounding success? (Though they probably had NiCad/NimH batteries which suffer from "memory effect" and I could well believe people forgetting, or "forgetting" to plug them in too.)

[Martin Walsh]

One man per van is their plan eventually but not in the first phase and not under one wave.

They did scope dropping Monday's from the USO but as they want to capture more of the parcels market and they want to try and deliver parcels ordered between 7 and midnight the next day they have stated that they will continue with a 6 day service.

Yes they will be more delivery office mergers the Royal Mail Managers stated that there are 1258 delivery offices in the UK currently and approximately 500 SPDOs most of these buildings are only used for about 6 hours and day and prep frames for 2 hours and IPS for around an hour and that merging units is definitely a big part of plan as is to have bench merging rather than prep frames as it frees up space.

Better delivery equipment yes but the highways and councils do not allow certain delivery equipment which is used in other European countries and motorised HCTs were trailed and then abandoned as the parts had to be imported from Europe.

Oh and yes much later delivery times for the majority of workers 9-5 or 10-6 or even later but some firms and specials will still be delivered before 9.

Oh it is a 5 years plan and not 12 months

[steve1873]

Very good National Briefing , I think many were shocked at all the Royal Mail presentations on Pensions , national strategy and production control.

The last one especially when it showed you that they want to trial clock in and out of work , clocking out of every workload tasks and that you could be paid for the hours you actually work. They showed a slide with finger recognition , swipe cards , Scanners like RFID where your name badge is linked to the scanners and automatically records your time on each task.All of this information will enable resourcing in the future and and there will not be set walks as the machine linked to walk optimisation will generate the routes needed on the day !

A lot of people fell of their chairs when that was announced

I cannot possibly stress this enough.... LOL

[dundee]

Dingo,What in your opinion can be done to combat these later finish times?Anything?I like many other posties are worried about this,I have young kids that need picked up from school at 3.15.Will cost a fortune in childcare.I know that's not Royal Mails problem,never thought a postie would struggle to pick kids up from school.

[citypostie]

So royal mail must be going to spend a fortune on all this technology, no set deliveries because the machine will decide on them for day depending on mail!!!! They've not been able to get the PDAs to work properly or stay charged for more than an hour so good luck with that. Clocking in and out and only paid for what you work, great an incentive to go as slow as possible and get paid for tossing it off like a fair few already do.

[GRS]

Seems to be lots of rumours doing the rounds regarding 'a new way of working' and some of them it seems are going to be a massive shift in the way we do things. However what I believe to be the bigger picture and more worrying is whether these rumours are being encouraged by RM while they sit quietly in the background allowing the workforce to get their knickers in a twist whilst they chip away at our terms and conditions. Can see a scenario where massive debate and argument is had over future start/finish times and delivery spans and then these are 'deliberately' scaled back so we think we have a victory. We will then look round and realise that as all that was going on RM have stopped sick pay for the first 1 or 3 days, taken holiday weeks away from those who get over the legal requirement and as already seems the case our pensions are again cut back,D2Dpayments will be taken away along with the early start supplement. These sort of things the shareholders will be after as it will cut RM overheads drastically and it doesn't help that the regulator believes we earn to much and will be encouraging RM on this. Beware of what their real targets could be - your terms and conditions.

[Martin Walsh]

Dundee I can understand your and lot of other concerns and I do think the union need to take a strong line on this issue. We should also campaign and highlight to business and the public that work for many will not be delivered to well after 4 .

Equally we should not agree to one wave without having a solution in place for people like you who have built their lives around an earlier finish and say pick the kids up or even grandchildren.

There is lots the union can do , look at some of issues we have stopped in the past monthly pay , reduction in sick pays , reducing annual leave , having regional pay bargaining , no set start and finish times swings and roundabouts , removal of seniority , removal of MTSF , in 2005 Royal Mail proposed to put D2D into workload without any payment or supplement , stopping team working as well as compulsory redundancies .

However nothing ever is easy and only by fighting and sticking with the CWU will progress be made.

[Martin Walsh]

So royal mail must be going to spend a fortune on all this technology, no set deliveries because the machine will decide on them for day depending on mail!!!! They've not been able to get the PDAs to work properly or stay charged for more than an hour so good luck with that. Clocking in and out and only paid for what you work, great an incentive to go as slow as possible and get paid for tossing it off like a fair few already do.

The new PDAs are being rolled out this year and have huge capability. People cost is the biggest cost in Royal Mail and that is what they want to reduce.

[Postie45]

How likely is a large scale offering of EVR to get rid of the full time contracts over the next 24 months do you think ?

[stodgy88]

One man per van is their plan eventually -so if you are a non driver,part-time ,where does that leave you exactly.