Hello there am so sorry posting this a bit late...
KEEP CALM AND WAIT? NO WAY!
How long are these closed-door negotiations on our pay going to take? They’re 7 weeks late already, but our bills haven’t stop increasing since!
ACCOUNTING TRICKS
We suspect RM has an ulterior motive in dragging out these talks. It allows them to earn interest for longer and time any pay rise in a way which pleases the share market and the shareholders...
WE KNOW HOW TO DO IT
Anyway, union officials are certainly blaming RM for the delay! And Ray Ellis, acting deputy of the CWU, says they’re “pressing the business hard” to make an open offer… Maybe we can suggest a couple of ways to “press” even harder?
RAMPING UP ACTION? HARDLY!
As for the managers’ “action” against their 1.3% pay rise, Unite had the wonderful idea of asking managers to work to rule, from the 4th May – and to ban OT from the 18th… a great idea, indeed! While it may not scare RM at all (who can possibly notice when managers work or not?), at least we don’t have them getting in our way!
BANNING FROM THE SHOP FLOOR
But really, what are the consequences of managers' banning OT? Given their heads were also recently chopped, maybe there won’t be enough cover and we will be left unsupervised. We suggest that this applies on nights asap, with the withdrawal of all cover provided by someone whose name begins with "B"…
PSA: PRESSURE, SWEAT AND... ANGER!
In PSA, trackers are on the increase… again!! While on nights we just about manage to clear the T48s, the T24s are a proper headache. When RM introduces new services for customers, we know exactly what it means for us, since they never, ever, introduce the new hands it requires.
SURPRISED?
No wonder RM missed its target on 1st class mail, delivering 92.5% on the next working day, instead of the 93% target. (Even with their doctored figures and the exemption of Xmas…) Yeah, the cut in the number of collections and the cutting off of our heads can't result in anything else!
WHEN PIGS WILL FLY
But RM has another version: it says that it faced “events outside its control”… A war? A natural disaster? No, they say it was Cyber week after Christmas! As if this was not a predictable period of high mail volume! But the day RM predicts anything correctly and acts accordingly, chickens will grow teeth, as the French saying goes…
2 FINGERS TO THE 2D
So RM is announcing yet more "fantastic news" to customers: free delivery confirmation on standard parcels starting this summer, via scanning of these 2D barcodes. This, when deliveries is already so short of feet that managers do walks and rounds and take on agency - both forbidden! And of course, it’s yet another means of pressurising us. We can think of another word starting with an “F” to describe this news.
WE NEED A BETTER RISE, NOT A CUT!
So this is how “being part of RM” is turning out for Romec workers: we've been told weekend OT pay will be cut… by close to £3 an hour?! Our rates are already unacceptably low, and we count on every bit to make our ends meet! No way can we accept any cut. In fact our pay needs to go up by £3/hr!
BRING BACK REGULAR COLLECTIONS
As we said, collections cut to 1 per day have brought chaos to processing. And the huge volumes just come later and later! Yet the night shifts were all cut. So the shift with the least hands is now dumped with the most work? It was totally predictable. And making Lates workers stay, on OT, is tried, tested and unacceptable. The simple answer would be to bring back the more frequent collections. But for RM bosses nothing is simple.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN?
Some of us drivers are very worried about the building developments at HMP. Now that Boris is out, are they still going ahead? We’ve heard rumours that construction will start in October, so what is going to happen with drivers? Are we going to be a sent to another mail centre?
LIB-DEM U-TURN?
Yet another DO is closing in Sheffield (after closures in Maltby, Malmo, etc.), but this time Nick Clegg is part of the campaign against the closure! When he was in the government that finished off the job of privatising RM - and was all for it!
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