Our Contracts

[gb93]

Oh well we all best just get in the real world & accept the reasonable pay rise & change in terms & conditions that RM are generously offering us

[GRS]

Fire and rehire would be prohibitively expensive for Royal Mail in the short to medium term and the potential savings would not be large enough.

It made sense to P&O because they didn't intend to rehire but use a foreign pool of agency staff at a fraction of the cost (way below the UK minimum wage) this is only really possible in the maritime industry and on a relatively small scale.

That solution is not possible for Royal Mail, at best they could offer re-employment at minimum wage which is only a couple of quid below what we earn , agency staff do not come cheap because of the premium paid to the agency and there would be extra recruitment, training and retention costs.

Mostly though it would be the huge upfront cost of redundancy, you don't actually fire in fire&rehire you make people redundant and while the generous MTSF terms remain in place that route would be far too costly.

I'm not saying that some financial bod in Royal Mail hasn't scoped out the long term viability looking at everything from allowances to pension obligations and thinks it could eventually pay, it's just that the business would need a huge injection of upfront cash to survive the first 5 years, not sure the shareholders would like to see the £1 billion they might get from GLS being given away in redundancy payments.

You've made a sound and knowledgeable post there, hopefully it'll put a few minds at rest. At times likes this it's human nature for people to imagine worst case scenarios and start to wobble and panic, especially if they're getting a bit of grief from their partner over losing money or family members and friends who are anti strike.

[banner18]

People always make comparisons with other companies and past disputes but RM differs in one major way to many other businesses, their work backs up during strikes. It clogs up distribution centres, mail centres and delivery offices and eventually will result in being unable to accept mail etc into the network.
Employing these risky tactics, fire and rehire or locking us out sounds tough but this is a mail moving industry where the whole system relies on a continuous moving stream and there is a serious economic and even political motivation to keep that stream moving.

[seesred]

I have just read on this website (https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundam ... r-guidance) that with regard to Fire and Rehire, "Employees dismissed through a ‘fire and rehire’ process would be treated as redundant for the purposes of collective consultation but would not be entitled to redundancy pay."

This being the advantage for employers of Fire and Rehire. All employers have to do is follow the legally outlined consultation process and they should incur no additional costs for termination of contract. The only recourse employees have is to sue for unfair dismissal/constructive dismissal, for which as far as I know there is no legal aid.

Furthermore: this advice goes on to say that Fire and Rehire can specifically be used when, "Where the cost of contractual redundancy pay is prohibitive and would have an impact on the need to make more jobs redundant. Where the change is to reduce the level of contractual redundancy pay as a means of saving more jobs."