CWU:The People's Post campaign

[POSTMAN]

On Thursday the CWU will launch The People's Post campaign at a rally and briefing in London. The campaign sets out to defend postal services and decent employment standards in the postal industry - both of which are now under serious threat from privatisation and aggressive regulation.

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http://www.cwu.org/assets/_files/images/jul_15/cwu__1436197280_620x349.jpgThe People's Post campaign

The People's Post campaign sets out to defend postal services and decent employment standards in the postal industry - both of which are now under serious threat from privatisation and aggressive regulation. Our campaign can be successful despite Ofcom's determined to push Royal Mail into a race to the bottom on terms and conditions and to promote competition and efficiency at the expense as well as the Government's privatisation agenda.

The ownership of Royal Mail may have changed but it always has been, and must remain, the People's Post.



What we are calling for to protect the People's Post:

1. New and Stronger Legislation to Safeguard Daily Deliveries
Privatisation and years of regulation promoting competition and cost cutting are putting the UK on a path that leads to the end of daily deliveries. The Postal Services Act must be amended to put protecting the USO front-and-centre of regulation, including a ban on competitors cherry-picking in the letter market. The government must publish a review of the regulatory provisions in the Act in 2016, which should be the gateway for this.

2. An Overhaul of Regulation to End Ofcom's Push for a Race to the Bottom
When the body in charge of protecting and promoting an industry for the country sees its duty as promoting zero-hours minimum wage employers, at the expense of decent employment standards and the service for the public, something has gone fundamentally wrong. Ofcom's starting point that Royal Mail is inefficient and overpaying its staff is disproved by the fact Whistl could not survive despite being free to cherry-pick the profitable parts of the market.

3. The Government to Retain a Public Voice in the Company
We want Royal Mail to be renationalised as agreed at Labour Party Conference, but as a minimum we want to retain a public voice in the company and increase the workers' stake. The government has a 15% stake in Royal Mail. Selling this off will threaten daily deliveries and service standards, pressure the company to engage in a race to the bottom on terms and conditions and will mean the loss of any public voice in an important public service.

4. Fair Employment Standards with the Living Wage as a Legal Minimum in the Postal Sector
Royal Mail currently sets the high benchmark for pay, terms and conditions, but the wider postal industry, and particularly the parcels market, is rife with insecure employment models from zero-hours and short term contracts, piece-rate pay below the minimum wage, bogus self-employment and a lack of basic rights (from holiday and sick pay to pensions). This comes at a cost to the public through poor service standards and the welfare system and puts pressure on companies like Royal Mail to join a race to the bottom.

5. Protection for Consumers - New Products and Services and safeguarding access to Post Offices
The postal service exists to serve the public and businesses throughout the UK but regulation and privatisation have not been driven by their interests. Rather than managed decline, we want to see new and innovative services with an enhanced role for postal workers in their communities, and continued access to Post Offices. There must be sensible protections for consumers to guarantee affordability and quality of service. There also needs to be consumer protection in the parcels market - no credible approach to regulation can ignore this as Ofcom has done.

6. The Establishment of a Workers Trust in Royal Mail that gives staff a Meaningful Collective Voice
When it announced the sale of half of its remaining stake in June, the government said it would give 'up to 1 per cent' of its final 15 per cent to employees. When the government awarded employees free shares in the initial sale, it designed the trust to deny them the ability to exercise a collective voice. If it wants employees to have a long-term stake and a proper voice in Royal Mail it must reverse this and set up a meaningful workers trust.

[POSTMAN]

CWU REPRESENTATIVE BRIEFING – COMPETITION, PRIVATISATION, REGULATION, THE PEOPLE’S POST CAMPAIGN

In the past month we have seen three major developments affecting the postal industry and Royal Mail. Firstly, Whistl’s announcement that it was pulling out of the letter delivery market because talks with its financial backers had collapsed. Secondly, the sell-off of half of the government’s remaining share in Royal Mail, leaving it with just 15% and thirdly, the announcement from Ofcom that it will conduct a fundamental review of regulation.

Whistl
The first of these is clearly a significant change. Members in Manchester, Liverpool and London had seen a loss of as much as 20% of volumes to Whistl almost overnight and its expansion plans were clearly a real threat to daily deliveries in the UK.

The development tells us something about the market. Whistl was free to cherry-pick what, when and where it delivered; it kept staff on zero hours minimum wage contracts; it had more than half of the upstream market; it had the support of Ofcom; and it knew the letters business, being part of the Dutch operator PostNL. If it could not make a profit with all of these advantages, the market is clearly an extremely tough one and the idea that Royal Mail is inefficient and overpaying staff does not stand up to scrutiny – despite what Ofcom says.

Privatisation
The second development (the sell-off of half of the government’s remaining stake in Royal Mail) would not have come as a surprise to any of us, though there was no mention of this in the Tory manifesto or its election campaign. The shares were sold overnight to ‘preferred bidders’ – i.e. big city investors.

This final stage of privatisation is important for three reasons. Firstly, daily deliveries (the USO) and service standards now face the biggest ever threat from commercial pressure. Whistl could not find backers for a 3 day service which was free from regulatory constraints and from the energy market to the rail industry, we see the public suffer when natural monopolies are in private hands.

Secondly, jobs and employment standards will come under increasing pressure. Investor reports by city analysts repeatedly highlight staff costs as areas they want Royal Mail to target to improve profits and we are making it clear in the strongest terms that we will defend the legal protections in the Agenda for Growth Agreement. Thirdly, there is a fundamental question of the balance of forces in society – no government has ever explained why the public who owned it in the first place should lose their voice in Royal Mail entirely.

Under the terms of the sale of 15% of the shares in June, the government cannot sell off any more of its shareholding until September. While we will be campaigning against this, our campaign has to be broader than privatisation – we have to be the defender of the service and jobs and make clear that whether Royal Mail is public or private, we are not going away.

Ofcom
The final development we have seen was Ofcom’s announcement of a fundamental review of the way it regulates Royal Mail in the wake of Whistl’s withdrawal. While Ofcom spun this as ‘protecting the universal service’, the reality is that the focus of the review is looking at restricting Royal Mail further on pricing and putting ever greater pressure on it on efficiency.

Ofcom has criticised the Agenda for Growth, called for a more ‘flexible’ workforce in Royal Mail and is using an efficiency measure that classes any pay increase above CPI as an ‘inefficiency’. It is clear from this that it is coming after our terms and conditions and that Ofcom is pushing Royal Mail towards employment models that would breach our agreement.

The union will not stand by and allow privatisation and an aggressive regulator to threaten a public service that this country relies on and can be proud of: the People’s Post. Today is the start of our campaign.

The People’s Post Campaign
The CWU is launching a campaign to defend postal services and decent employment standards in the postal industry – the People’s Post. Both of these things are now under serious threat from privatisation (and the complete loss of a public voice in Royal Mail) and aggressive regulation, with Ofcom determined to push Royal Mail into a race to the bottom on terms and conditions and to promote competition and efficiency at the expense of daily deliveries. Our Campaign can be successful despite the Government’s privatisation agenda. The ownership of Royal Mail may have changed but it always has been, and must remain, the People’s Post.