This really is a surreal debate. Royal Mail purchase the automation kit borrowing money off the tax payer. Sequencing means that you can only sequence the mail when an MPU receives it and some of that mail is coming from all around the UK and it was posted anytime up too 19:30 before. The USO demands and is written in law within the Postal Services ACT. Now the union could not convince either Royal Mail to shut off sequencing on a Saturday morning especially as the Hooper report called for sequencing and after Royal Mail borrowed over a billion pounds to purchase them.
Now of course if the customers post the same way they do Monday to Thursday on a Friday then your delivery office should be getting the work roughly at the same time as Monday to Thursday. This obviously means that it will mean later finishes.
The union did try and change this but how do you convince the employer to switch of the whole workplan on a Friday night to allow delivery staff to have a early finish ? Instead the union got in the agreement less Saturdays entitled to all staff during revison activity. There are lots of postmen and women working less Saturdays now then prior to BT2010.
of course some of our members have turned down the option of less Saturdays and some managers have denied some offices the opportunity to have less Saturdays.
The union seems to get blamed for lots but the union don't have a veto on change , remember the miners ,print workers, dockers and the car plants.
No industry has gone through the amount of change we are due to a variety of issues. The union's campaign will either convince you to support it or not. But don't for one second believe by nt supporting the union your better off cause privitisation especially with what Royal Mail and the Government have got planned is going to be good for the workforce in terms and conditions or TNT delivering mail is going to improve your conditions or that Royal Mail and the Government won't want to set up a speperate delivery workforce to deliver the growth.
No one is yet talking about balloting for strike action this is a start of a campaign where the union must address the members concerns in the workplace before expecting them to support the wider issues of privitisation but of course you can never rule out a strike.
Now the person who said lets work to rule clearly has never been in a situration when a whole office has done this. As Royal Mail's tactic is to take an indivdual of pay for not working normally and this forces an office either to go out unofficially or allowing Indivduals to be left high and dry. You can take a trilingual out but months later. Both Streatham and Watford were successful at a tribunal but a year later.
Look we are a voluntary organisation which is trying to stop what the NUM failed to , what the print unions failed to do and dockyards failed , and that is privitisation , modernisation and deregulation as well as Royal Mail wanting to reduce costs.
A lot on here believe the RMT are a strong union and they are but the did not defeat privitisation. The CWU have on 4 different occasions,.
it's your choice you either fight the threat now or you continue to be bitter about the past and allow yourselves to be stitched up for the future.
