It really depends on which way you look at it , if you look at the fact that every other industry which has been privatised have seen their work outsourced , fanchised and with all agency staff the norm getting more hours then employed staff. The Agenda for Growth agreement does not allow this.
British Telecom Branch"s have just accepted that new staff will come in on worse conditions and you know that call centres are now done aboard.
Royal Mail would love to compete with both TNT and Amazon by outsource work to be done cheaper so they can both compete.
The legal guarantees which are secured in the Agenda for Growth are the envy of other unions and this weeks TUC reflected this.
Now lets deal with the competition threat , Amazon have a strategy which is that they want to use a range of carriers for their delivery network. They want to use Royal Mail in the remote areas and in the cities they want to use white van man etc. The same with TNT they want to delivery to 42% of UK addresses but only covering 9% of the land mass. So this double whammy mean that Royal Mail are losing revenue in the cities where high density makes it cheaper and more profitable to deliver and are being left with the more costly areas.
So some delivery offices have not seen any change and may even seen some growth but other areas have seen huge impacts and this is why some postmen and women are oblivious to the threat Royal Mail under. The common conversation of reps who have seen the impact and it is real is how long has the USO got unless of com acts and even then it maybe too late in the areas who have TNT. This is not scaremongering as we are still willing to fight for our future but what is happening is real.
This is of course changing the way Royal Mail are acting. Areas who seen TNT are now less productive as the traffic has gone and of course Royal Mail are saying why are we going to pay an incentive when areas are less productive then they were last year. This is not just in London , Manchester and Liverpool but other areas which have seen the impact of amazon etc.
The drop in mech mail has now led them to thing they could move all the mail through the machine in one wave rather than two waves.
So in conclusion we better off having the agenda for growth agreement and then dealing with the issues against the background that we have a commitment that they can't make you compulsory redundant , cannot reduce your hours , cannot reduce your terms and conditions , cannot outsource work , cannot franchise your work , cannot change agreements and cannot employ someone on worse terms and conditions.
