Royal Mail strike plan: bosses will deliver post.

[NEWS]

TELEGRAPH

Royal Mail has drawn up secret contingency plans for 6,000 of its senior managers to deliver the post as it digs in for a summer of crippling strike action.

The result of a strike ballot of 127,000 postal workers over radical plans to modernise the group is due this Thursday. The employees are expected to vote over-whelmingly in favour of national industrial action, the first for 11 years. Senior Royal Mail executives were last night bracing themselves for a bruising fight they expect to last for as long as three months.

"This will be bloody. We have had the miners, we have had Longbridge and now we have this," said one director. Another executive described the likely strikes as "the tipping point" in Royal Mail's history.

A vote in favour will wreak havoc across the network and could see all of Royal Mail's senior management team, including Allan Leighton, its chairman, and Adam Crozier, its chief executive and the former Football Association chairman, delivering mail. Other contingency plans have been put in place, but these are being kept under wraps. "The company will use every resource in our power to keep the service going," said a source close to Royal Mail.
advertisement

The Communication Workers Union, the mail workers union, will announce the result of the ballot on Thursday morning. An independent poll of company workers last week suggested that two thirds of those balloted voted for strike action.

The CWU needs to give the Royal Mail just one week's notice, meaning that the national postal service could be paralysed by the middle of this month. A CWU spokeswoman said strike action was the "last resort" but added that the union was "quietly confident" of a "yes" vote.

The CWU balloted its members over pay, conditions and the business plan at Royal Mail, which is undergoing a radical modernisation programme under Leighton. The company had offered staff either an up-front £600 lump sum payment or an increase of 2.5 per cent on their basic pay.

In addition, staff were offered dividends from a newly created share plan, dubbed Colleague Shares, which could be worth up to £800 if performance targets within individual business units and across the group as a whole were met.

Staff were also being offered a chance to benefit from any further cost savings made within their divisions. However, the union rejected the offer.

Last night a Royal Mail spokeswoman said: "We have no choice whatsoever but to modernise, and for the first time we have the money to do it. It is not an option for us not to do this."

The spokeswoman added that 75 per cent of workers at Parcelforce, the Royal Mail subsidiary, voted in favour of a 2.5 per cent pay deal on Friday night.

Both sides have been involved in an increasingly heated propaganda campaign over recent weeks.

Other unions have rallied to CWU's aid. Unite, the merged T&G and Amicus unions, dubbed Royal Mail "old--fashioned" and "stuck in the 1970s" with its offer to staff.

Although not all Royal Mail workers are CWU members, it is thought that few if any will cross the picket lines. "It will be very difficult for anyone to go into work," said a source last night.

Summer of discontent

If Gordon Brown thought he was getting a honeymoon, it's time to put the Asti Spumante back in the fridge. The first serious test of Labour's new Brownite colours looks to be coming through the letter box courtesy of the Royal Mail.

A drawn-out strike battle between Allan Leighton, its chairman, and the Communication Workers' Union would pitch one of Tony Blair's favourite business leaders against one of the biggest funders of the new-look Labour party. Only the appointment of former postie Alan Johnson as deputy prime minister could test loyalties any further.

Painful as the strike will be, Leighton is right to force matters to a head. The union has proved an immovable obstacle to modernising Royal Mail. Until now, Labour has preferred to ignore the matter. But competitors are picking the business clean and if Leighton is not allowed to restructure and cut jobs, a far worse financial crisis is inevitable.

Harsh as this may sound, this is precisely the process that every other public utility went through - from BT to the energy suppliers. Most of the job cuts in the Royal Mail can be achieved voluntarily, but changing working practices requires dragging one of Britain's more luddite unions out of the 1970s.

The real question is whether Brown will give Leighton the public backing he needs to win. The answer has ramifications far beyond the postal service. Here's where we find out what type of prime minister we didn't elect.

[Bloke7]

Is that from the paper or the internet article? On the net article it stops at "a source last night".

Luddite union? No one is reporting this story properly and thats just annoying. If the media could see what they're trying to do to our work and how late THEIR mail will be they might think differently.

It's all propoganda and biased reporting.

[POSTMAN]

Internet article,i aint gonna type all that out
Biased!! You think so
Lets see ONE report that aint

[ade@cambs]

Just as long as the management remember it's illegal to use agency workers to cover strikers jobs.

[POSTMAN]

Just as long as the management remember it's illegal to use agency workers to cover strikers jobs.

Is it? Didn't know that.

[robmacca]

I'm sure the senior RM managers will use whatever underhanded tactics to try and undermind the legal strike, if there is one.

Lets see if 6,000 managers can do the work of 127,000 postmen and women - Leighton seems to think they can, although HE might find it hard to do it with his part time hours (but for once he might earn his money if he did!)

[ade@cambs]

Just as long as the management remember it's illegal to use agency workers to cover strikers jobs.

Is it? Didn't know that.

Something like £5000 fine per agency worker.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

I'm sure the senior RM managers will use whatever underhanded tactics to try and undermind the legal strike, if there is one.

Lets see if 6,000 managers can do the work of 127,000 postmen and women - Leighton seems to think they can, although HE might find it hard to do it with his part time hours (but for once he might earn his money if he did!)

Actually from What Burslem guys said and what I saw in Halifax when I first started it takes about 3 managers to 1 Posties work so they got no chance.

[wakkono]

lets see if the fat useless bas***d in charge of our unit will go and walk i doubt it he breaks into a sweat just walking up the stairs

[IWW Fellow Worker]

Luddite? If only the writer of the article had bothered himself to find something out about the Luddites, he would have known that Ned Ludd and his followers were very progressive. E.P Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' is well worth a look.

General Ludd and Captain Swing. The two finest officers Britain has ever produced!

[Townfan]

I'm sure the senior RM managers will use whatever underhanded tactics to try and undermind the legal strike, if there is one.

Lets see if 6,000 managers can do the work of 127,000 postmen and women - Leighton seems to think they can, although HE might find it hard to do it with his part time hours (but for once he might earn his money if he did!)

Don't forget that not all workers will go on strike. So it might be 6,021.

[cruisey]

JUST READ REPORT. CAN,T STOP LAUGHING. WORK IT OUT. TO SERVE THE USO A MANAGER WILL HAVE TO DO ABOUT 20-25 WALKS PER STRIKE DAY. DON'T FORGET THE COLLECTIONS AND PROCESSING AS WELL. ANY FALIURE OF THE USO NATIONALLY DUE TO AN ALL OUT STRIKE COSTS RM £300M PER STRIKE DAY. (ALLEGEDLY!! THESE FIGURES WERE ISSUED BY A SENIOR MANAGER AT BIRMINGHAM MAIL CENTRE DURING A PLEASE DON'T STRIKE PLEA). BIAS PRESS COVERAGE. PRO RM MOST OF THEM. WE SHOULD BOYCOTT BUYING PRO RM PAPERS UNTIL THE DISPUTE IS OVER, OR UNTIL THEY GIVE AN IMPARTIAL VIEW OF THE DISPUTE.

3 VOTING DAYS LEFT. USE THE VOTE WISELY AND SECURE YOUR FUTURE! NOT LEIGHTON'S FUTURE OF PART TIME WORKERS WITH NO RIGHTS!

[johno47]

I think we can expect all this biased reporting from now on in certain conservative papers, its just really sad and annoying that we are trying to preserve a universal service, something for the benefit of all customers and yet it amazes me when papers condem us for trying to preserve jobs and service and yet when RM plan to close POs everbodys up in arms.
It says in that article that the union had proved an immovable obstacle in modernisation, and yet only 4 years ago we completely changed the way RM have operated for years, by going to one delivery per day plus losing 45,000 jobs, all done through negotiations with the union, and only 12 months ago RM promised to work with the CWU in any future modernisation of the business.
Unions always get slated in any dispute, when unions began years ago people lost their jobs were bullied and harrased some lost their homes and their lives so that ordinary working people had rights, and yet now that people in all walks of life and different employment benefit from them rights even journalists they still condem people for fighting for them.
UNITY IS STRENGTH..

[johno47]

Just an added extra if the bosses they are going to use are like the bosses who turned up at Burslem then weve not got much to worry about, what a bunch of useless morons they were, they were about as usefull as a concrete parachute.
UNITY IS SRENGTH..

[DirtyHarry]

The Telegraph , Britain's favourite toilet paper.

With apologies to Andrex !