Stoke I have never accused postman and women of working slow or being lazy. I would like to think I have represented postman and women in the best way possible. Remember union reps are not their to win popularity contests , a lot of our job has always been to explain what is changing and sometimes what we need to strike on and fight against.
Now whether we like it or not and I dont every postal adminstration has lost mail , in every reccession we lose mail. Now we can justify argue that changes to the IPKs or that a mail centre does not measure the mail properly but even in the audits the union have done traffic in most streams have falled in the last 6 years. Not as much as Royal Mail have argued but they have fallen. Now I totally accept that whilst traffic has fallen in letters , packets and flats have increased and of course total hours have reduced meaning delivery postman are delivering more mail on their round then ever before. The reason is their are less of them , not because traffic is growing.
Now in terms of facing reality well lets look at this issue , we have a company which announced a 10.5 billion defcit which has been know since last years dispute but they did not legally have to declare it until July. We have a company which opened up to compeition years before the rest of Europe which has meant that compaines have cherry picked via downstream access and therefore mail centres have lost a lot of outward mail. The problem being is that Royal Mail have not been able to compete because they have an access price and a mail sort 2 price which they are not allowed to reduce meaning that down stream access is better value for customers as the difference between those margins maximises the profit.
The problem for Royal Mail when they get back into talks with Post Comm if they reduce mail sort 2 prices come companies will then go straight to by pass which means they will deliver in some towns on one or two days a week only to certain addresses which maximises profitablity.
Whether we like it or not mail centres are going to outward and one in ward pass which allows more mail to be meched and of course there are going to be ilsms and CSS machines which can sequence mail. Equally this means that the arrival of mail into a delivery changes fundementally , of course no one likes that and union argued against it, but Royal Mail have invested millions of public money into automation and were not prepared to leave the machines idle from 0600 in the morning or on Saturday mornings.
So instead of having almost all your work in an office at 6ish most offices will only have 60% of your work in but apart from packets ,flats and non rejects this will reduce your IPS and that sequencing will reduce your prep time not by a massive amount but by 19 mins for every thousand items. However your reamining 40% of work has to come in any time from 0700 to 10 00 which means that there will be pressure on whether you need 100% of your offices hours at 0600. Which is why the union insisted that door to door is included into workload in an attempt to plug a gap in workload.
The CWU is heavily criticised on this site but lets look at the agreement and its protectionfor both full time and part time jobs. Europe have better employment rights than the UK and yet TNT in Holland are getting rid of all full time jobs and reducing part time contract hours.
So the question is that do the CWU ingnore all those element and protect a status quo option and agree to no changes. Is that really the solution ?
Hi Dingo, let's not turn this into a personal slagging match! I think the original post was all about walking speeds which most of us know are unrealistic! And time and again, the Union seems to be agreeing with R/M about the decline in mail volumes and all these changes are based around that. Most of us on the shop floor do not see it this way, with the huge increase in the number of packets and signed fors we now deliver, more time is needed for delivery, not less.