ATTN NEWSDESKS
Please find below a letter from Royal Mail’s Regional Operations Director for the West, Geoff Braden, outlining why we believe there are no grounds for the Communication Workers Union (CWU) to go on strike – they are currently balloting their members for industrial action.
Feel free to publish this online as a comment piece as well as in your paper.
Dear Editor,
Your readers may have read about a potential strike at Royal Mail by the Communications Workers Union (CWU).
Our postmen and women have the best pay – and the best terms and conditions – in our industry. They do an amazing job in all weathers – rain or shine. Average pay is 45-50% above the National Living Wage. None of that is changing. There are just no grounds for a strike.
Previous strikes at Royal Mail meant we let our customers down. Some of our major rivals today were actually established because of those strikes. There really is no point shooting ourselves in the foot.
So, what’s at issue? Well, not the great terms and conditions postmen and women have, as I said before. On pay, we have made a very good offer. That follows a 10.8% pay rise in the four years since privatisation. That compares favourably with the 6.4% UK national average earnings increase over the same period.
On pensions, we know how important pension benefits are to colleagues. Our proposal would be by far the best pension scheme in the industry – and one that benchmarks well to other large employers. Many of our postmen and women are in a Defined Benefit scheme - 63%, in fact, compared to just 6% of workers across the UK private sector. We do need to change to a different type of Defined Benefit arrangement. That’s because - every year - it would cost us at least three times more than the cash we generate just to keep the existing pension open. No business could do that.
Royal Mail is a very good employer. We provide great terms and conditions. We are working hard to keep improving our services to customers in a very competitive industry. There is no need to strike. We want to work with our postmen and women, our great ambassadors, to keep being the best delivery company in the UK.
Yours sincerely,
Geoff Braden
Royal Mail Regional Operations Director – West
Regards
Sally Hopkins
Senior External Relations Manager
Royal Mail Group
100 Victoria Embankment
LONDON EC4Y 0HQ
Colleagues of mine would really like a contact name/number for a Western area CWU press spokesman, as being old fashioned local regional media we can't and won't give a one-sided account (especially with me knowing how dire the situation really is within RM
). If you can post or PM me here it would be mucho appreciated. 
