Plenty of questions aimed atme. Easy ones first dirvers allowance is not included in the supplement and remains as now a payment which is decreasing in value in real terms with a limited amount of drivers still recieving it.
With regards to standards for indoor work , there is a commitment to agree standards within the next 3 weeks to go out to ballot with the new agreement.
The standards which Royal Mail want and to be fair some offices are already achieving is 1100 items per hour on the ips ( all work combined ) and 16 prep rate per minute inclusive of taking work from the frame, preping , dead letters , redirections , tieing up and weighing.
Higson is obssesed with standards and his desire is to ge everyone to an 100 bsi over the next 3 years. Over half of all offices are above 90%. The union has not agreed to the planning values of the indoor workload tool and will work with Royal mail to agree what standards they should be as part of this agreement.
Now lets get one thing straight , door to door in its present form is dead, regardless of whether there is an agreement or not. Royal Mail"s board have taken a decison that they can no longer continue to treadwater in a market which is growing and bucking the trend in the mails market.
Anyone who thinks it is going to are in for a massive shock. What avenues are there open to the empolyer putting it into workload without paying you as you have been employed to deliver mail and as long as it is within your contracted hours then that is one route they wanted to do so.
The union has achieved both a payment and it to be factored into workload which will cost them. Look I know most members will doubt this but this is a very profitable market and Royal Mail know that the only way they are going to expand is to ensure they improve quality and for everyone in the industry to give the product more of a priority. I have heard some call this market a cheap and rubbish part of the market , but can you imagine any car plant refusing to make a car cause it was cheap. The fact is door to door may well be the difference between some of our members having a part time job and the full time job.
Look at those numbers of IPS and prep and imagine when you only have 60% of work which you currently do in your delivery office at 0600 and you dont recieve the remaining 40% until 10 o clock in the morning. Ask a member there who is not due to start until 0830 whether he would like to start eariier then that by having door to door into workload ?
Plus lets examine the saturday issue in full , mail sort 3 is hardly around in any delvery unit as its has been lost to downstream access, Saturday traffic is on par with Fridays and a lot more then Monday and Tuesday , yet most units do the work in less hours then now, Yes I know most will say they do so as there is an incentive and they work harder. However Royal Mail s answer is well we dont need so many hours in the week to do the same traffic levels.
The union has attempted to argue at every point about saturdays but Royal Mail have said they have not bought the machines to run idle as they have in all trail units on saturdays. The union has therefore got a commitment for all delivery staff to have to work less saturdays the details will be in the agreement and are a fundremental part of any future agreement with a menu of options for staff to have less saturdays at work. Remember not all staff will have to work much later it will depend on where your office is in the sequencing plan and where a walk is in the batch system. Plus later saturdays will not apply until your office has walk sequencing in any case.
Now the problem the union has had is every time they have tried to get the work into offices early including the 40% of work, Royal Mail have responded by saying they could adopt the DUTCH delivery model by not having any walk sequneced between midnight and 0600 and start all 100% of work at 0600 which would mean some delivery offices not recieving anything until after 11 in the morning which would make the job in the main part time.
Now with regards to past walk sequencing sites they were including Bristol and Gatwick different as it did not included one outward pass in mail centres and the machines did not run on saturdays or Mondays and no revisons were conducted in delivery units based on the full walk sequencing model.
My fear and it is an honest fear that some of our members do not understand the scale of change which is coming regardless of whether there is a national agreement or not.
Costs them nothing to get you to do it.
. So we are back to needing more hours put back into offices to cope with D2D into workload....I know what the next point will be...Royalmail will never put hours back in.
Well, ok then....they'll pay for D2D into workload some where along the line....I for one won't work past my time because I've had to prep 6 D2Ds. So they'll have to get someone doing the bit I leave on overtime.
