Martin Walsh wrote: ↑15 Jan 2021, 07:25
Neil no agreement will change the fact that less and less people are posting into collection boxes.
Royal Mail would love to simply remove those pillar boxes all together. However Of Com won’t allow them to. Hence why we have seen the growth in collections moving to delivery.
No union is going to achieve that collections duties continue collecting less than 50 items in a post box which less than 15 years ago would have been full.
Most of the post boxes had been tested with an electronic counter which records how many items have been posted into it over a reference period.
The difference with this agreement is that we are committed to looking at other aspects of growth in other areas which can help to not only protect jobs but also create them.
We have had LAT , covid test kits , consumer collect all will help protect jobs in both deliveries and collections.
There will be other opportunities such as local to local opportunities to capture growth.
In addition there will be circa 35 thousand pillar boxes still remaining with a collection post 16:00 on top of POL outlets and firms.
Rejecting this agreement won’t change the pillar boxes issue or the threat to collections moving forward it will simply mean that Royal Mail try and introduce PBS3 without the protections in this agreement and the pay and shorter working week.
A company which announced a loss of 187 million in November is not to going to allow collection drivers to collect an hand full of stamp letters from pillar boxes up to 7 per day.
This is why this agreement is titled Parhway to Change as it sets out a direction on how the company can capture more growth in parcels , attempt to sustain and tackle letter decline but also attempt to create new products especially in local to local solutions.
In addition it provides job security, key protections and principles as well as a pay deal up front and one in April along with a shorter working week.
The choice you will be making if your voting no is that you don’t want an agreement to cover you when they propose to reduce the number of collections require a post 16:00 collection.
As the company will not sit back from that change as they have significant evidence to identify those collection boxes who outside of the peak period especially during COVID gets less than 50 letters post per day.