Is the decline real ?

[tramssirhc]

For years we have heard the losing a million a day story, mail is in fatal decline, USO is unsustainable and now we have Union Leadership telling us accept the changes or else!!!

It may well be true but how ? It seems most Posties across the UK have unsustainable rounds, parcels are always “through the roof” and mail always seems plentiful at least where we are. Maybe not Ist class but the amount of other mail i deliver daily always seems to stay pretty level. Before Covid my van share partner used to complain daily if parcels where 50 a day and we ended up leaving stuff. Now the same duties are separate vans as daily we take out between 120 to 200 parcels each. (Partner has since left).

The point is how does a company that has seen parcels quadruple , mass amounts of new builds go up across the Nation adding hundreds of thousands of new delivery points along with customers collects etc still be declining? And why are those that work the hardest expected to kill themselves even more for what’s really a wage cut ?( not those roles that go for nature walks u see on the Robin app all backpatting each other)

Seems the Union have decided its us who need to save the company but maybe someone can explain why we all need to have 3-4 managers in an office of 50 people or why they need to recieve such extortionate bonuses? Why are we always being fed the doomsday scenario? Maybe Martin can explain it.

No it isn't. The CWU is too lazy to come up with anything original or to roll up it's sleeves and do good old fashioned organising fighting back trade unionism.

[postslippete]

When RM was privatised in 2013 and sold off by the government for £3.3 billion we all know that it was massively undervalued. JP Morgan reportedly valued RM at around £10 billion at the time! Kretinsky bought IDS (RM and GLS) for just £3.6 billion last year, so he has effectively bought GLS and got RM thrown in for free. And yes, DK has had board access, internal financial visibility and years of observing the business.

RM has already shown during periods like the pandemic that it can generate huge revenues when parcel volumes explode and mail gets delivered as and when. The frustration for many of us though is that ever since privatisation, those profits have mainly gone towards shareholder payouts, management bonuses, consultants, restructures and obviously the billions that have been spent on automation and parcel infrastructure.

No one is against the company investing heavily if parcels and reduced mail deliveries are where the profits are, but there are never any cast-iron guarantees that the people on the shop floor will benefit from any of it. And that, for me, is where the CWU leadership are letting their members down because they are just peddling the company's narrative that the business is barely breaking even and that we must work even harder to save the company.

The message that Martin is putting out is all wrong. He is basically saying that unless members accept these changes, the owners will eventually turn RM into a gig-economy operation within a few years. But surely that's exactly why members expect strong union leadership in the first place?? To prevent that from happening - not to repeatedly tell the workforce to accept more changes because there is "no alternative". If RM ever does end up drifting towards a gig-economy model then it will be because the CWU leadership have failed to draw a line in the sand long before it reached that point.