Uso agreement

[Thommo44]

What hours are your £45K PA earning posties working? Also are they DO OPGs, do they cover a walk every day, do they receive the London weighting allowance?
My original argument was do you consider COMs as unskilled? because it looks like you do, yet you are championing delivery posties being paid peanuts.

They are maxing their hours every week, and yes some do get London weighting.
It's needed when your rents are almost twice the national average.
Managerial roles in any occupation are better paid because they come with added responsibilities and pressure.
They do have frequent courses while learning too.
Doesn't mean I think they are more intelligent or able than OPGs.
Getting caught up on the terminology.

Explain your colleagues "maxing hours" please. I would especially like to see how your non London weighting recipient colleagues are earning what you say.

33 hours a week overtime, some of it SA.
Like I say they work hard

What’s their step count?

[kazardaimenu]

I'm a postman.
Low skilled jobs fall under the bracket of any occupation that needs minimal training to be able to work.
We fall under that bracket, like many other jobs.
We work extremely hard and many of us are very intelligent but it falls under the bracket of unskilled work.
That's just fact.

You shouldn't undersell yourself and your OPG colleagues tbh. Do you think that your COMs deserve the £45K wage for being 'unskilled' workers? Because most of them don't have any formal managerial qualifications or training, therefore fall under your bracket of unskilled work also.

That they do.

[tramssirhc]

I'm a postman.
Low skilled jobs fall under the bracket of any occupation that needs minimal training to be able to work.
We fall under that bracket, like many other jobs.
We work extremely hard and many of us are very intelligent but it falls under the bracket of low skilled work.
That's just fact.

The fact is that there is no such thing as low skilled work. The training plan for postal workers is lengthy and extensive with a very high benchmark. The industry and the CWU may have convinced you otherwise but you're wrong. All work is skilled, paid or unpaid.

[hans solo]

I'm a postman.
Low skilled jobs fall under the bracket of any occupation that needs minimal training to be able to work.
We fall under that bracket, like many other jobs.
We work extremely hard and many of us are very intelligent but it falls under the bracket of unskilled work.
That's just fact.

You shouldn't undersell yourself and your OPG colleagues tbh. Do you think that your COMs deserve the £45K wage for being 'unskilled' workers? Because most of them don't have any formal managerial qualifications or training, therefore fall under your bracket of unskilled work also.

I know postman that earn more than that to be honest and they deserve every penny of it because they work extremely hard.
You can get caught up on factual terminology that I have used.
People often get offended by that term and I can see why but to earn what we do or can earn without an extensive training programme is not the norm.
Because of our union.

In spite of our union

[Surreypostie]

Further up in the thread somebody said they should just go to 5 days a week with 1st class and packets on a saturday, doing this would save at least some money, if we went monday to friday you would no longer need the day off cover staff, for units that work the wallington shift, 1 week off in 6 you would not need to week off cover staff.
Also when OFCOM made their decision, the headline was, Royal Mail scrap saturday delivery, they made no mention of only delivering 2nd class mail every other day. When I have mentioned this to the public they were not impressed, they were more accepting of losing their saturday delivery.
At the end of the day we probably won't get much say in it, what I have heard is, Royal Mail will simply say to unit managers come up with a plan that makes savings. No 2 units will run the same.
If this doesn't work and we don't hit our quality targets then I can't see OFCOM or the government allowing them anymore changes, after all, doing what they propose was supposed to be the answer to all their prayers, we knew it didn't stand a chance of working.

[norris9]

If you only reduced the USO to no 2nd class letters on a Saturday, is that really going to save us that much time so that we can take more from other rounds. What % of mail per day is 2nd class?

Maybe we shouldn't deliver 1st Class or 2nd Class on Saturdays and invent a new class called '1st Class + Saturday' which is more expensive and includes Saturday delivery. In theory it would significantly reduce the amount of letters we have to deliver on a Saturday so that we can pretty much just have a team of parcel drivers in on the Saturday, just like on Sundays.

[Idk]

If you only reduced the USO to no 2nd class letters on a Saturday, is that really going to save us that much time so that we can take more from other rounds. What % of mail per day is 2nd class?

Maybe we shouldn't deliver 1st Class or 2nd Class on Saturdays and invent a new class called '1st Class + Saturday' which is more expensive and includes Saturday delivery. In theory it would significantly reduce the amount of letters we have to deliver on a Saturday so that we can pretty much just have a team of parcel drivers in on the Saturday, just like on Sundays.

We could call it special delivery Saturday guaranteed

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Please quote carefully - Please don't over-use the quoting feature - most replies won't need to quote anything. Lots of unnecessary quoting results in long pages that take ages to download and read. However, do use this function if you are replying to a post several pages higher in the thread.

If someone has a different position to you please respect their right to have differing views, and enjoy yourself when picking holes in their position in a constructive way. We would much rather have a long winded well thought out argument, picking out weak points in someone's position, than have a thread full of 1 line insults.

To confirm calling someone a liar is at best only an opinion on someone's Character and is not a constructive argument, at worst it's an insult designed to silence an opposing view, in either case its not welcome.

[chickenwittle]

Please quote carefully - Please don't over-use the quoting feature - most replies won't need to quote anything. Lots of unnecessary quoting results in long pages that take ages to download and read. However, do use this function if you are replying to a post several pages higher in the thread.

If someone has a different position to you please respect their right to have differing views, and enjoy yourself when picking holes in their position in a constructive way. We would much rather have a long winded well thought out argument, picking out weak points in someone's position, than have a thread full of 1 line insults.

To confirm calling someone a liar is at best only an opinion on someone's Character and is not a constructive argument, at worst it's an insult designed to silence an opposing view, in either case its not welcome.

Do you not see that usual suspects come on here specifically to provoke , 2 accounts especially that are prolific posters that are always in the middle of it ?

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Maintaining community standards is a shared responsibility. We encourage all members to report posts that appear to break our guidelines. The 'report' button, marked with an exclamation point, is conveniently located in the top right corner of every post. It's simply not possible for one person to oversee every single post.

[Basildon Bond]

Maintaining community standards is a shared responsibility. We encourage all members to report posts that appear to break our guidelines. The 'report' button, marked with an exclamation point, is conveniently located in the top right corner of every post. It's simply not possible for one person to oversee every single post.

I think the point was that there are always going to be a subset of users that revel in stirring things and the MODs and Admins should keep an eye on them daily and proactively. Granted that members can report spam attacks and individual posts, but it isn't hard to spot a few posts on a lengthy thread and know that that thread is about to be derailed (yet again) and go off topic and descend into a flame war.

I also think the admins should use the tools available to ensure any one person finds it hard to have multiple accounts.

Try timeouts (24 hour ban); IP logging; user hit list; monitor new users (especially in the weeks after banning an existing member); banning with appeal; final ban. Etc. etc. However, you should have a clear and comprehensive rules of the forum - without that it's unclear exactly what is expected. It seems swearing is banned but admins and mods do it so..beep! :o)

[Mr Rush]

Also when OFCOM made their decision, the headline was, Royal Mail scrap saturday delivery, they made no mention of only delivering 2nd class mail every other day. When I have mentioned this to the public they were not impressed, they were more accepting of losing their saturday delivery.

How it is being sold to the public reminds me so very much of scrapping the second delivery.

Ed Mayo, the chief of the Government's new consumer champion, Consumer Focus, hit out over the cost-cutting reforms that now mean most homes and businesses do not get their post until the afternoon.

And he told the Daily Mail that mail bosses had effectively lied when announcing the end of the second post in 2004 when, in practice, it was the first, morning, delivery that was being scrapped.

Lieing by omission again.

[postslippete]

Decimation.
Still one of, if not, the best paid low skilled jobs out there with job security and union representation on every shop floor.
Not including the new t's and C's in that.
If the equalisation of terms is achieved the CWU will be the first union in history to reverse a two tiered workforce.
Besides the sick policy changes that will hopefully be addressed within time I really don't see the decimation that you do.
EP have committed to addressing both these issues within time.
The reality is the company need to achieve healthy profits again for all this to filter down.
Our jobs have got harder with the increase in parcels but the uberisation of the delivery industry have created an environment that it's hard to complete with these other firms that don't offer any of the benefits to employees that we get.
The return off delivering parcels is not as financially beneficial as it should be for royal mail.
It's not a equal playing field as it stands.

"Low skilled" imho is a corporate term that is used to justify low pay and it is a tad disrespectful coming from anyone who claims to represent us. Obviously, I understand why you said it (and we often think it) but skill isn't just about formal qualifications. Many RM managers don't have qualifications (nor common sense for that matter) and most of them are very well paid for what they do. How did line managers who used to earn roughly an extra £70-80 a week more than full-timers suddenly end up as COMs with a hefty salary increase to £45k?

As I've mentioned in a previous post, a postie's real wages is down when you account for inflation which has outstripped any of the pay rises that the Union has secured over the last 10-15 years, and that includes this current pay rise. It is very naive of any Union to think that the company needs to achieve healthy profits again in order to pay its staff well. In 2022, RM managers voted to strike over threats to jobs, pay and working conditions and their Unite union came out and said that RM is awash with cash and that it was all about boardroom greed and profiteering and nothing to do with securing this vital public service. They were absolutely right then and they are right now. But what we have is a Union that prefers to feed us a load of bull about what everything costs to the business instead. This union keeps using the same language time after time - "competitive", "profitable", "modernisation" and it is all code that means less for us, and more for them.

The "profits will filter down" that you mentioned is nonsense. It's a stalling tactic because IDS and RM have structured their losses via inter-group transfers and asset sell-offs disguised as investment. What the Union really needs is for IDS to open the books independently and get someone in who understands the financials to see the real picture of what is going on. I know it's a bitter pill for many Union reps to swallow...but the fact is this CWU leadership have got far too close to the RM board during negotiations. They have asked their own members to accept pay deals in the past that have been tied to brutal terms and conditions like reduced sick pay and seasonal variations. Has that not actually saved anything?

And when you talk about the "CWU being the first union to reverse a two-tier contract" - wasn't this tied down to the company making a return in the last agreement? What have they made since then exactly? There is a real danger of doing negotiations that are tied down in this way. But let's be honest, if the Union really intended to reverse the two-tier contracts then that would have been the starting point of these negotiations rather than another optional future clause just like in the last agreement. Don't believe me? I've already said that 17,000 staff on inferior pay, terms and cons over 17,000 legacy staff is saving the business roughly over £100 million per annum. And that is a very hard saving for this company to reverse!

Hopefully, I'm wrong but I'm just being realistic about the empty promises that we have had in the past on resourcing and maintaining any resemblance of quality of service. Our job is underpaid and increasingly overloaded. The union has lost trust in the past by accepting deals that have gutted terms and conditions while they claim some sort of victory that they have saved mass redundancies. And the company has been making money but hiding it very well through creative reporting. Not Union bashing here - just saying it as it is. What we really need is to stop accepting vague promises and start demanding clear timelines, open financial scrutiny and imho a negotiating position that prioritises the reversal of the two-tier terms as the first clause, rather than the last one.

[SpacePhoenix]

Maintaining community standards is a shared responsibility. We encourage all members to report posts that appear to break our guidelines. The 'report' button, marked with an exclamation point, is conveniently located in the top right corner of every post. It's simply not possible for one person to oversee every single post.

I think the point was that there are always going to be a subset of users that revel in stirring things and the MODs and Admins should keep an eye on them daily and proactively. Granted that members can report spam attacks and individual posts, but it isn't hard to spot a few posts on a lengthy thread and know that that thread is about to be derailed (yet again) and go off topic and descend into a flame war.

I also think the admins should use the tools available to ensure any one person finds it hard to have multiple accounts.

Try timeouts (24 hour ban); IP logging; user hit list; monitor new users (especially in the weeks after banning an existing member); banning with appeal; final ban. Etc. etc. However, you should have a clear and comprehensive rules of the forum - without that it's unclear exactly what is expected. It seems swearing is banned but admins and mods do it so..beep! :o)

I've been a forum member since 2008 and this week has been the very first time that I've had to use the foe list, putting one of them trolls onto it.

[Sean06]

Hopefully its the one with 4 accounts