20/03/24 Mount Pleasant Bulletin

[jimallen]

Hi, here's the Mount Pleasant bulletin of 20 March. Comments are always welcome!

RESTORE OUR JOBS!
We "supernumeraries" are only being told on a Friday
- and by text(!) - what shift we'll be working the
following week. Depending on management's whims,
we could be asked to do an Early, Night or Late
shift... This is clearly an impossible situation. So the
question for us is, what do we do about it? And not
just us, but the whole workforce.

BOMB SQUAD NEEDED
Imagine, in this situation of so-called "super-numerari-ness",
managers in Processing brought in
casuals...! You'd think that even they wouldn't have
the cheek. On top of it all, they dare to tell us that
they want to make more of us redundant! You'd think
they were deliberately sabotaging their own
"business". We wouldn't care, except that it's us
who're getting blown up!

THE BUG IN MANAGERS' BRAINS
This just doesn't make sense. Why would they go to
the trouble of recruiting casuals when all they have to
do is reinstate part-timers' cut hours and reinstate so-called
"supernumeraries" in their old jobs, instead of
using them as "casual" spares!

RACE TO THE BOTTOM
We know that Processing managers are planning to
offer even more VRs during their next "realignment",
which they say may happen in April... If workmates
want to go, we wish them all the best. But we won't
lift a finger to compensate for managers' on-going
job-cutting spree!

AS FOR US...
We could tell Monday was busy in PSA because Mr
Witless was looking absolutely frantic. He was
tipping like there was no tomorrow! But to no avail.
The work still failed... He'll just have to try harder
next time!

… WE CHILL
One thing we won't accept in PSA though, is being
moved from one duty to another according to Mr
Witless's whims... We've signed for our duties and
these are the duties we'll do, and at our own pace. If
he finds himself short of workers, his problem, not
ours!

ROYAL AMAZON
We can't believe the kind of permanent jobs
advertised on RM's website. There are currently over
400 vacancies at DOs, with crazy shifts: a job in
Croydon is 30 hours/week, anytime between 8am
and 7pm, 7 days a week; one at Woolwich says that
on Sunday, you'll be sent to another DO! And pay is
just a few pennies above the Living Wage Foundation
rate: £14.58 in London (£12.29 outside)!

COMPLETELY ANTI-SOCIAL
It's the same in MCs: a part-time job is advertised in
East Midlands MC for 20 hrs/week, starting at 11pm
and finishing at... 3am. Another in Inverness MC
starts at 1.20am! Of course, it's because RM is
moving network ops from air to road&rail, pushing
arrivals to MCs later in the evening. But... they
impose conditions like this at their own peril!

CUT OUR PAY? WE'LL CUT OUR WORK!
Next month, we're due a "pay rise" of 2% as part of
the 3-year agreement. At the time, the bosses (and
government) claimed that inflation would already
have gone down to their 2% "target". Of course it
hasn't! While CPI is "down" to 3.4%, RPI is 4.5%! So
we get a 2.5% real wage cut! MPs, on the other
hand, just awarded themselves 5.5%...

WE NEED FULL PAY WHEN SICK
One more thing that condemns this latest agreement,
is that we're not getting paid our full basic wage when
we're sick. If we're off sick a second time in a period
of 12 months, we only get statutory sick pay for the
first few days - i.e., about £20 per day! So what are
we supposed to do, tell bugs and viruses to keep
away from us? Or should we come to work and
sneeze them into managers' faces?

WE NEED TO CHANGE THE WORLD!
Every day, we're reminded of the incredible sell-out
that we were subjected to by the union leaders last
year. And they keep justifying it, when they've left
every single category of worker in the lurch, saying
that the "world's changed" or there was "nothing they
could do". But there was nothing they had to do, we
were the ones on strike, and we can go on strike
again.

CUTE...
The Elephant did make us laugh recently: he told us
he realises that the duties in the latest (still pending)
resign are too heavy. But he said don't worry, sign
anyway, as he wouldn't really expect one of us to
cover the job of two; he was only trying to please his
superiors. Perhaps his "superiors" will laugh when
they hear this.

TIME OFF FOR CASH
Why has the 2nd floor cash point near the canteen
closed? Managers said we didn't need it any more,
but we did, and they didn't even ask us. It was useful
to be able to get the cash we needed inside the
Mount. Since we now need to go outside, we'll need
extra time off to do so.