In my experience the CWU is all talk - It is all they ever do and they are quite good at that!! What I would have liked Mark Baulch to say is rather than highlight the obvious issues which affects its members i.e. abuse, annual leave, uniform, the lack of equipment and abuse of part-time members. How about telling us all
how he is going to tackle these issues in all the delivery offices in the country. Are we to encourage everyone to turn up for work in jeans and trainers? Are we to refuse doing any deliveries if we don't have the trolleys provided?
And how exactly are part-time workers abused? I am assuming that its because they often work full-time hours for the Royal Mail, yet they don't have a full-time contract? Could it be the pro-rata payment of D2Ds? If so, what steps are the CWU doing to tackle this??? Will he be posting his advice on social media for this? How is he going to engage more with his members?
Without telling us any real sort of plan for dealing with any issues, it is not surprising why many CWU members get apathetic, and this often leads to the worst case scenario whereby members are really only left to fend for themselves when it comes to bullying and petty harassment from managers.
Obviously the new outdoor secretary has only just been appointed and he needs time to get things changed. Its promising that the mentality of the frontline is ingrained in him BUT he does sound like another clone. We need a stronger union that is fit for the 21st Century. And I wouldn't be critical without putting up some ideas of my own. Put yourself forward as a Rep, Mark Baulch says, leaving everything down to the postal workers to sort out and not himself. Very lazy.
However, I do think that the only way that we can strengthen our Union is to somehow empower all our CWU members. At the moment, if staff have an issue, they often go to their Union rep. Now, some reps are really good at what they do, but one or two are all but useless, only looking after number 1, getting looked after for promoting things in the weekly resource meetings with the DOM. This cannot be allowed to happen. All it does it create more conflict and apathy with its members. So what if all the Area Reps put out and advertised that they needed MORE local CWU reps. What if every CWU member was officially classed as a 'Rep'. Then the Area Rep could come down to our office maybe once a month and brief a 'class' full of CWU reps. We could talk about the issues and we decide by majority vote ourselves exactly what it is that we are all going to do. And if Reps are banned from having official Union meetings on site, then we should be banning ourselves from having official WTLL sessions and 'daily huddles' with the management. The business is determined to ensure that its managers gets its key points across to staff, so I can't imagine it will ever want to eliminate them. They just have to learn to listen to us 1st.
We need to be doing this now. The CWU is only as effective as its members, and judging by the current negotiations with the Royal Mail, does the Union really want to be an Industry leader of Unions or are the Union officials at the top, quite happy to let our Union rot whilst they take as much out of it as they can in terms of our member subs??
On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.
, and what have the cwu done ?????? , f**k all , people don't go to work to be treated like s**t , this should be a priority and the dims doing it should be out the door and not moved to other offices to do it again 
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, so I'm not interested and they can do what they want. .