Afghanistan veterans in Royal Mail suffering from poor mental health

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WAR veterans working in Royal Mail are suffering from poor mental health because of management pressure in workplaces, postal workers have claimed.

CWU Wessex delegate Rob Hayhurst told delegates at the union’s Bournemouth conference that workers who have fought in the British Army are struggling to deal with increasing workplace pressure.

This, Mr Hayhurst said, is leading some to take time off work.

Mr Hayhurst said: “We represent honest, methodical, hard-working people, who have professional integrity and don’t want to fail those who ask work of them.

“Royal Mail don’t know how lucky they are to have them.

“One of these men is a man in our place, Chris – he is an Afghanistan veteran, a really hard-working and salt of the earth sort of guy.

“The work was stacking up for him and he felt harassed by management.

“He ended up having an anxiety attack and was off for three months.

“He came back into work, after having built his strength up, and he went up to a tier manager who had been giving him stick for months.

“Chris said to his manager that he’s been to Afghanistan, he’s experienced and seen some terrible things.

“He said, ‘I could handle that, but why can’t I work here without feeling like this?’

“The manager just said ‘if you don’t like it then there’s the door.”

The motion Mr Hayhurst was moving on behalf of Wessex South Central demanded that the union push for stronger arrangements so that management are forced to organise weekly resource meetings that can agree and balance the workload of staff.

The motion did not pass on a technicality over its wording, but it was part of a series of motions at the conference that were related to workplace stress and the problem of growing mental health problems amongst Royal Mail’s workforce.

During his speech on Sunday, CWU general secretary Dave Ward warned that the ability of managers to use advanced technology to “control every minute of the working lives of our members” is “perhaps the biggest challenge we face at work.”

He pledged that the CWU would organise a national campaign that would fight to put “groundbreaking limits” on managers’ use of technology.