Everyone Should Read This:Phase 3

[clashcityrocker]

True Blue Terrier,
every time you post I think you must be my long lost twin brother or something.
Spot on as usual.

[G O Root]

I'm sorry that most of you can't see the truth.
It's a fact that delivering the mail is by most standards, a relatively unskilled job, and as such, it is a low paid job.
You need to get your heads round the following:-
Things are going to change.
Being a postie will not be the cushy number it has been over the years.
There will be less post men.
Your pay and conditions will come closer to that of the private courier firms.
You will have to work all the hours you are paid for.
New machinery will be used.
You will not get paid more money for the same hours or the same money for fewer hours.
You will not get a better pension than the rest of us.
It may be hard to accept, but at some stage, you will, have to join the real world.
If you were all to work with the post office, and embrace a modernized system, you will be unbeatable, had this all taken place a few years ago TNT would not be doing any of your work now!
I sympathize with you, but at the moment you are heading on the same course as the miners.

Ah...Mr Crozier, we've been expecting you. :cfo

[jim1911]

I must have my facts wrong, I thought we gave up amongst other things, double time. Now they are clawing back every minute of our duty, but no mention of bringing back double time for any overtime worked.

[luddite123]

I'm sorry that most of you can't see the truth. .

I am sorry that you have not read the rest of this forum,

Your correct but I have read a lot.

It's a fact that delivering the mail is by most standards, a relatively unskilled job, and as such, it is a low paid job. .

This strike is not over pay - never mind what the media says.

This exerpt from CWU The Whole Story.pdf document see http://www.cwu.org/uploads/documents/CW ... 0Story.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
CWU PAY STRATEGY
NATIONAL AVERAGE
BASIC PAY
CATCH IT,MATCH IT,OVERTAKE IT.
How can the CWU expect an unskilled job to pay over the national average?

You need to get your heads round the following:-
Things are going to change..

They are already
Good, you must admit they needed to

Being a postie will not be the cushy number it has been over the years..

It aint cushy now 10 bags a day up to 16 Kgs in weight and walking up to 9 miles a day.
Surely thats the job?

There will be less post men..

We recognise that all we want to do is discuss it with the bosses and come to an agreement, just as they promised they would do in the Pay & Mod 2007 agreement
I'm sorry but the days of a Union telling the bosses what equipment they can use are over

Your pay and conditions will come closer to that of the private courier firms..

Ah the old race to the bottom, no thanks, you pay peanuts you get monkeys. You pay a fair wage and have decent conditions you get a dedicated and proud work force.
I think those who work at TNT, City Link etc would take issue with that.

You will have to work all the hours you are paid for..

Already Do and in some cases work beyond those hours for no pay
Joining the real world then, a start at least.

You will not get paid more money for the same hours or the same money for fewer hours..

Oh right we will never get an agreed reduction in the working week, or any more pay rises.
The CWU proposed walk sequencing machines would allow a shoter working week, I presume they were not suggesting less pay for less hours?

You will not get a better pension than the rest of us..

We don't want that we just want the pension we paid into for years, but RM did not - thats whats created the pensions crisis in RM, along with Brown changing the tax rules.
It's not just the post office, why should the entire civil service, get the sort of pension that is just not available to workers in private industry?

It may be hard to accept, but at some stage, you will, have to join the real world..

I walk in it every day.
Try to get the CWU to walk it with you

If you were all to work with the post office, and embrace a modernized system, you will be unbeatable, had this all taken place a few years ago TNT would not be doing any of your work now!

Why not modernize RM management at the same time. A modernized work force, with modern practices and modern machines needs a Modernized Management in place otherwise you have the situation we are now facing. Why is it always the workers fault and never the bosses. Why is it always the bosses fault never the unions?

I sympathize with you, but at the moment you are heading on the same course as the miners.

Why they did not have a democratic vote we did. Thatcher stockpiled coal, cant do that with post. If you mean we will end without a job or a RM - well that's what we are trying stop. RM want a casualised work force, less delivery offices and less Mail centres - so in effect we are damned if we strike and doubly damned if we don't. RMs plans will mean a permanent loss of service to the customer.

Thatcher did more harm to British manufacturing industry than the Luftwaffe did in WW2. My point is, that your Union seems to have the same lemming instinct as the NUM did!

[BELIAL]

Thatcher did more harm to British manufacturing industry than the Luftwaffe did in WW2. My point is, that your Union seems to have the same lemming instinct as the NUM did!

Since you seem to be completely ignorant of all the facts then your opinion is more than a little bit worthless

[bitchface]

luddit lemmings dont really jump of cliffs..it just how they were percieved at that time..
education
education#
education

[chunk]

I did a bit more digging on revenues/costs (I'm in bed with 'flu at the moment, so nothing better to do) - good source of info at ftp://ftp.royalmail.com/Downloads/publi ... udited.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

Using 2008-9 figures, it costs RM 14.5p per item of downstream access mail (ie. mail delivered on behalf of competitors) vs revenue of 13.2p per item (so a loss of 1.3p per item. Interestingly this compares with an average cost of 31p per item for RM provided services (1st class/2nd class stamps and meters, various business delivery services etc.), which does suggest that RM has to do a lot less work per item of downstream access mail than other mail (ie. less than 50%).

One thing I didn't understand was the big discrepancy in costs for handling stamped vs metered mail - stamped mail costs 46.8p per item on average and metered mail only costs 31p per item to handle. Why such a big difference - does it really cost 15.8p more to check that a letter is stamped corrected rather than metered correctly?

It's interesting that all of RMs analysis looks at costs per item, but presumably the cost of the last mile delivery service depends both on the volume of mail and the number of delivery addresses (ie. every item has to be sorted and walks have to be planned to pass every address). Looking at it the other way, there were 18,354m items of mail delivered in 2008-9, so an average of 705 to each of 26m addresses - which suggests it costs an average of £102 per year to provide a last mile delivery service for each address (assuming the downstream access costs are representative of last mile delivery costs for all mail). This seems like a pretty low number to me as it suggests the average 3.5 hour walk must be passing at least 2-300 addresses - and urban walks far more - so more than an address per minute. Does this number sound about right to the postal workers on here? If so, then it sounds to me like the regulator has simply got his figures wrong!

Such a lot of assumptions here goes
The size and shape of most stamped mail is random,also handwritten items(more likely to be stamped mail) are still a problem for the ocr machines
and have to be manual sorted metered items are printed and regular.
this goes some way to explaining the "discrepancy "
Downstream access does not require manual sorting in mail centres hence its half the cost to the customer.

walks are typically 4hours+ (part of the current dispute)!and town drops are 500+ letterboxes that is closer to 30 seconds a drop
and makes no allowances for signatures knocking & waiting etc .
You seem to trying to work out the cost to deliver a single letter?

With respect (for your research efforts) your asking the wrong questions.
instead of asking how does stamped mail justify 40p? (this is still some of the cheapest in Europe)
you should be asking why rm should subsidize its competition 1.5p a letter
if TNT got only 20p a letter before passing it on to us they would still make 7p a letter to cover there own costs.

This subsidy which was supposed to be a stopgap while TNT and the like built up some infrastructure and created their own networks postman etc.
why would they bother when they receive heavily discounted services from us.
Ironically this subsidy is is holding back change in the marketplace because its created a cozy safe place for our competition.
This stems from the regulators naivety in believing the competition want to deliver letters which are the least profitable end of the business.

[kingtubby]

...Downstream access does not require manual sorting in mail centres hence its half the cost to the customer.

Um, not quite true, we get some non-machinable DSA at our MC. Add to that the usual machine rejects; maybe 2 or 3 thousand items on a typical shift. For the record, we typical put around 300-350 thousand DSA items through our machines per day - about 50% of the workload.