Definitely not mailcentre staff to blame but not really themselves to blame either. The majority of staff who vote will take their advice from their reps or branch or both and they are being advised by HQ that this deal is wonderful so the bottom line is if the deal fails to produce the goods on delivery the members will probably justifiably blame the reps,the branches and the union as a whole.aiden01 wrote:apoligies if you think i.m trying to blame reps but if this agreement is vote in we all know that mc staff or in the minority so del staff will only have themselves to blame.
That's the risk you take when you oversell a deal rather than take a pragmatic,honest approach. You tend to set yourself up for a fall. If these delivery "reviews" go the way I think they will with the employer making far more visible gains than we do then resentment can only grow towards the union and the decision to put an agreement to members without resolving the delivery issues will be seen as a sell out of those members.
I've heard some absolute garbage from senior reps over the last few weeks about how the relationship will change now and managers will start following procedures and the business is heading in a new direction, To be honest it's as if they've been missing for the last 20 years and there is nothing in the reality of what the business is facing that will make any of that nonsense come true.
I'm not defending them but the pressure on front line managers and delivery office managers can only increase exponentially over the next few years, pressure to save money and cut costs and too many of them lack the training and the basic management skills to deal with that ramping up of expectations without resorting to bullying their staff. Both the business and the union to a certain extent are in denial as to the scale of the problems on delivery from the flawed tools and measurement to the flawed implementation of revisions and to be honest the whole thing needs an "out of the box" rethink instead of just applying more layers of failure on top of each other.
We are where we are and the deal will go through but it might have been wise for the union to take a step back from the sales pitch and try to imagine where we might be in 12 months and how the membership, especially on delivery might feel about that, who they might blame and how many of them might be looking for another use for their subs.