UPDATE FROM HQ

[DGP1]

So far all I've read is 'More work - less money and be bloody happy with it', I really think that our CWU leadership thinks that everyone only delivers for 3.5 hours and that all deliveries are fair, well I'm telling you that most of the duties in my office are 5 hours (some even more) and that we are really struggling, I want a reasonable workload and a reasonable payment for doing it but it seems that all we're going to get do more and be happy that you still have a job.

[fishtank]

dingo wrote
For the record fishtank the early shift payments ceased in 2007 what you recieve now is a reserved rights payment


For the record dingo i'm looking at my payslip right now and it says......Early 05:00 Shift Allowance (pens) NOT reserved rights payment.
Now you say very few will start at 6.00 nevermind 5.00
Care to elaborate? and will this be part of the agreement?

[Martin Walsh]

Dingo,are you saying they still haven't agreed how we're going to work fewer saturdays??

NO fewer saturdays have been agreed. What they want to work up is a menu of options so delivery units can choose the best option which suits the workers within that unit.

Yes fishtank I do care to explain. In a mail centre in future due to one outward plan work wont come into delivery units as early as it use to , equally when you have walk sequencing 40% of your work wont come into your unit until it has been walk sequenced.

No its not in the agreement but when you do a revision it is normally based on the facts on the ground and if you dont have any work or you have reduced work before 0600 then you dont normally plan for hours before 0600.

[jaja]

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.

I wonder if we will recieve a letter from the union "we strongley suggest you vote yes to this agreement"
like before??

not your fault dingo its just the shite state of the business

[fishtank]

Dingo,are you saying they still haven't agreed how we're going to work fewer saturdays??

NO fewer saturdays have been agreed. What they want to work up is a menu of options so delivery units can choose the best option which suits the workers within that unit.

Yes fishtank I do care to explain. In a mail centre in future due to one outward plan work wont come into delivery units as early as it use to , equally when you have walk sequencing 40% of your work wont come into your unit until it has been walk sequenced.

No its not in the agreement but when you do a revision it is normally based on the facts on the ground and if you dont have any work or you have reduced work before 0600 then you dont normally plan for hours before 0600.

Well that's just fine dingo because we already have walk sequencing and as well as 1 feed during the night our first batch of sequenced arrives at 4.50 with our second 40% arriving at 6.25 so it's all good and the facts on the ground say i will still be required to start at 5.00.
So the question is (and this is not aimed at you dingo)
Why has the union decided to capture my EARLY SHIFT ALLOWANCE and NOT the driving allowance.

[Stormproof]

Don't think I can afford to lose much more money. Over the past few years I've lost my driving allowance and half my early shift allowance because of doing a late shift in Callers every other week, since being back on earlies constantly the other half of my ESA has never appeared. From whats being said about the D2D HQ can roll them up and stick them up their a****!

[seanocelt]

Dingo,are you saying they still haven't agreed how we're going to work fewer saturdays??

NO fewer saturdays have been agreed. What they want to work up is a menu of options so delivery units can choose the best option which suits the workers within that unit.

Yes fishtank I do care to explain. In a mail centre in future due to one outward plan work wont come into delivery units as early as it use to , equally when you have walk sequencing 40% of your work wont come into your unit until it has been walk sequenced.

No its not in the agreement but when you do a revision it is normally based on the facts on the ground and if you dont have any work or you have reduced work before 0600 then you dont normally plan for hours before 0600.

Well that's just fine dingo because we already have walk sequencing and as well as 1 feed during the night our first batch of sequenced arrives at 4.50 with our second 40% arriving at 6.25 so it's all good and the facts on the ground say i will still be required to start at 5.00.
So the question is (and this is not aimed at you dingo)


Fishtank...........ok then thats YOUR sitch. But can you not at least try to see the big picture(i.e. the future for all, not your allowances?).
Really bro, the prospect for many of us is...............later sequenecd mail/less prep/fill up my day or im part time.

So, more d2d,park n poop..whatever, .......it means more chance of some of us getting to keep long term full time work, and more newbies AT LEAST A CHANCE of more hours in the future. I see/hear your pain Fishtank, but its not about YOU alone.
Winners/losers..........shorts n longs................its for the collective good..no? Oh, by the way, this whole "what about me?" , by all of us...........its manna from heaven for the gestapo, take some pain, think long term.

[fishtank]

Fishtank...........ok then thats YOUR sitch. But can you not at least try to see the big picture(i.e. the future for all, not your allowances?).
Really bro, the prospect for many of us is...............later sequenecd mail/less prep/fill up my day or im part time.

So, more d2d,park n poop..whatever, .......it means more chance of some of us getting to keep long term full time work, and more newbies AT LEAST A CHANCE of more hours in the future. I see/hear your pain Fishtank, but its not about YOU alone.
Winners/losers..........shorts n longs................its for the collective good..no? Oh, by the way, this whole "what about me?" , by all of us...........its manna from heaven for the gestapo, take some pain, think long term.

Interesting first post mate but i think you misunderstood the situation slightly.
I'm talking about allowances being absorbed into supplements i'm not talking about......................whatever you were talking about.

[Danelectro]

really dont think 100 BSI is ever achievable in the way most offices are set up,going by past experience royal are gonna be hitting people over the head with the performance issue stick.I was hoping the fair and achievable workloads was gonna be central to any agreement but it looks like its an afterthought?I really hope this is not the case or i wont be voting yes no matter what else is on offer.

[dvbuk55]

Dingo are the talks concluded tomorrow or not? You now state that "in the next three weeks" & "to go out to ballot with the the new agreement" does that mean the talks are not concluded tomorrow and we now have another three weeks to wait to see the "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" agreement?

I mean we've waited for much more than 3 months so another 3 weeks doesn't seem that long IF we are given a concrete reason why these talks are stalled.

No Tomorrow is the crunch date for whether an agreement is concluded or not. However if there is an agreement then further guidelines have to be agreed and worked up on car derived vans , standards , menu for less saturdays , improved attendances and a couple of others. This will all be covered within the main agreement but the details on these will be worked up.

Even if there is an agreement by tomorrow I doubt if the ballot for the members will commence much before the end of march for a number of reasons , the PEC will decide , the divisonal reps will be consulted , national and regional briefings will be held , the agreement will be sent out to all members and prepartion for the ballot will have to take place with popluaris running the independent ballot. Of course this will allow all these issues to be agreed as well and Branch"s to hold meetings on whether they will recommend to their members to accept or reject it.

I don't really understand this, tomorrow is the crunch day for an agreement to be concluded, but there are issues still to be agreed. I would have thought over this period that the fine detail was already out of the way.

I would agree the time scale for the ballot but only if there is agreement NOW - the talk of a further three weeks of talks would take us into April to cover all the points you made. So really apart from the information you give us we need to get it from the horses mouth and it's time that the confidentiality was relaxed and various points released to the general membership.

If the agreement is 60 pages then those issues that have been agreed in principle and seem acceptable SHOULD be released, if there are any reservations for those issues they can be swiftly dealt with before it goes to ballot. It is no-ones interest to have a NO vote and the way to avoid that is to get the agreed issues out of the way NOW.

[Cut Off King]

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.

Frankly, this smacks of desperation from the CWU.... If RM want to play hardball like dingo says,
then why didn't they bulldoze their plans though?

Fact is - they run into talks with the CWU because the MEMBERS ( NOT the HQ leadership ) had the balls to stand up to them by striking.
We may lose £100's from our wages when we strike -
but RM lose MILLIONS
- Thats why they negotiate...NOT because they want to, BUT we forced them too...........


and we can do it again !

I havn't seen the deal in full, but if it's not right - then vote NO!

[wranglered]

going back to an earlier post dingo...and the apologies are accepted(!)......you say the following:-

The standards which Royal Mail want and to be fair some offices are already achieving is 100 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.

I do hope the CWU VIP's are going nowhere near any of this.

100BSI is a ridiculously fast work rate achieved by highly motivated employees....I think you would agree that is not the case nationally and will certainly not be the case when the new agreement is unfortunately accepted.

If the CWU VIP's allow this to sneak through performance issues are going to make the lives of many thousands of employees a total misery.....

...where is this information coming from about "over half of all the offices are above 90%"?????

RM have occasionally misled us with their figures...why should this be any different?

[Big Daz]

Well less than twenty four hours to go now according to dingo tomorrow is the day the talks reach the ultimate conclusion.

There will then be the reading of the 60 (?) page agreement plus Appendices - maybe we should get a solicitor versed in employment matters to give it a quick scan and just rip out the salient points for we mere posties to have a look at.

dvbuk55

CWU policy as made at conference 2008 is for agreements to be subjected to a plain english test.

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/about-us.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[bogstandard]

the salient points will no doubt be how much and when,
the rest will be ignored and denied that anyone voted for that.

[Spartacus]

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.

Does this mean we are accepting a uniform standard of workload? We currently have different values for packets, flats and letters, I honestly can't see any benefit to us abandoning that principle if the majority of our IPS work is going to be packets and flats.

A prep rate of sixteen is going to be very difficult to achieve if the frame already has several sets of D2Ds in it, not to mention frames that have single slots and 2 calls per slot and using the top row of the frame, will allowances be made for staff who have unworkable frames or will it be down to the DOMs discretion?

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 ?

While I accept the necessity to put D2d into workload, while I accept the importance of D2D protecting full time jobs, it needs a limitation, Ideally we should be going to every house every day, Ideally all walks should be managable, Ideally private cars should be be banned, the truth is we don't live in an ideal world and RM will exploit this to the detriment of our staff, I genuinely worry that increasing D2d with no limitation is going to make deliveries far more difficult and we will see increasing numbers of staff being dismissed for not being able to do the job in the allotted time.

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.

Fewer Saturdays is the answer, 4 day weeks 9 day fortnights etc, innovative shift patterns could resolve the Saturday issue ONLY if RM are as committed to implementing them as the CWU will be, my experience tells me that if anything will slightly benefit the staff then RM will do everything they can to stop it.

Gotta say that we were asked how important Saturdays were and the response was massive, that Saturdays are very important, this is a big failure on the CWUs part, they have failed to achieve the members wishes on shorter Saturdays, they should be held accountable for that, I will wait and see the agreement before making a judgement on it, I'm willing to read it and then make an informed decision. From what I've read on here from yourself and others if the money isn't right this will be rejected because that's what it will come down to in the end, we all know that.

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.

That is a failure of the union to get the message out and understood, area and divisional reps are going to have to visit every workplace to sell this, I don't envy them that task.

Is the delivery supplement pensionable or not?