Why equalising new contracts makes business sense

[postslippete]

I have a friend who works for Amazon. It's a delivery franchise. Pay is a day rate which works out to be around £14.50 p/h for 9 hours of work. It's work till finish and some of the guys get done a couple of hours early. A van is provided too.

There are some drawbacks for him. It's all self-employed so there isn't the security of a role like RM. The hours also aren't particularly sociable in comparison. But yeah, it's not all as bad as people have been led to believe. Evri on the other hand probably ticks the below minimum wage box.

Well, thats a good example of the challenge that RM faces.

Amazon may be self-employed and offer less job security but (and I can't emphasise this enough) their model can tolerate a much higher churn than RM. A new Amazon driver can pick the job up within days because they are following a geo route sat nat that tells them 1. how many parcels they have and 2. roughly how long the route will take. Compare that with RM, where new entrants are expected to learn rounds, manage letters, parcels, collections and then face unenviable questions if they bring work back or can't absorb additional loops. It's certainly a more complex job that takes longer to get up to speed.

If new entrants view R< as lower paid but harder work because they are walking over 10 miles a day in all weathers wile multi-tasking mail, parcels and collections, then turnover is likely to increase. See RM has traditionally relied on stability and experience and thats why there is a strong business case for equalising contracts (that RM originally had an agreement in principle with the CWU). If the role becomes harder to recruit for and retain staff then the long term operational impact will outweigh any short term savings or profit....

RM shouldn't be competing at the bottom end of the market when its strengths has always been reliability, experience and service - and all that depends on having a stable and motivated workforce.

[Mr Rush]

Those folders on top of the frames in my DO may aswel be binned. As a fairly new postie two-ish years one folder the last entry was 6yrs ago. Absolutely no Info where to park the HCT or how to pull the walk. Complete waste of space folder.

Most of the red folders have been binned. Of the ones still above the frames, when I checked last year they were also last updated in 2019 - prior to the Great Tacking-On of 2021. Clearly the intention is the PDA will tell you everything about the duty, functioning as the surrogate brain for whatever organic automata they hire in the future.

Due to a cyberattack, RM employees are driving around in circles drooling. COM units, known as Blade Runners, are sent to track them down and stop them. It was not called execution. It was called scanning out.

I wonder how RM currently fares with turnover compared to historical trends. In 2010/11 it was half the UK average (annual report, p6). In the last days of two deliveries something like 1 in 150 working people worked for RM - I dare say at the rate we're burning through the local labour reserve you could fill a hall with that many and find more than two who could tell you about their short-lived experience doing the job since 2022.