04/09/24 Mount Pleasant Bulletin

[jimallen]

Hi, the Mount Pleasant bulletin is back! Here's the bulletin of 4 September. Your comments are always welcome!

CRIMINAL MISNOMER
It remains the case that there are more
positions/jobs/vacancies here than there are workers
in this place. No matter to management: they still call
a large number of us "supernumerary". Of course
we're not surplus to requirements at all. They know it
and we know it.

NO TO SUCH NONSENSE!
But now they want us to "pick" a job - they call it
"Repick 3.0" which is "available to displaced and
supernumerary staff". Worse, these jobs are
supposedly part-time, and involve working Saturday
and Sunday! And worst of all, some Saturdays are 10-
hour or 12-hour days: midday Sat to 10pm, or 6pm Sat
to 6am on Sunday!!

INCREDIBLE!
So, MP bosses now want permanent full-timers, (for
now only those falsely designated as
"supernumerary") to cut our hours... (regardless of
contract, pay etc...?) and work extraordinary weekend
shifts or nights... for instance on duties which can vary
from just 10 hours a week to 28 hours a week! It's
against any contractual agreement ever seen before in
RM!

IT'S A TOTAL NON-STARTER
Is anyone going to accept to do any of these new
duties or the conditions which come with them? Of
course not. These managers are crying for the moon.
And we would happily send them there.

...AND THEN THEY CAME FOR THE FULL-TIMERS
By the way - this is precisely what happened to the
part-timers earlier this year. They were blackmailed
into cutting their hours (taking a wage cut they could
not afford!!) on pain of being sent to work at an unnamed
DO, again, as a designated "supernumerary"!

ADMISSION OF GUILT
And then, Processing managers have the cheek to
bring in casuals? It's an open admission that they're
short of hands in almost every area during normal
week days! Why aren't they designating those duties
as permanent jobs, that we (and casuals) can "pick"
from?

PING-PONG GAME
And we expect the situation for us "reserves" to
change: we used to be allocated to jobs in a particular
area, but now managers try to move us anywhere they
like. And on top of that, they think they can change
our start and finish times... We are just not having it!

SPILLING THE BEER
But actually it's affecting everybody, this business of
interrupting us in the middle of our job, and sending
us somewhere else. How can you possibly run a pissup
in a brewery this way? What you certainly can do
is piss-off the workers to the nth degree. Management
can guess what the result of that will be...

REINSTATE GOODBYE PARTIES!
On top of it all, 23 work mates will be leaving soon;
most of them on 20 September. Of course they're not
being replaced and they will be sorely missed by us.
So this time, why don't we at least down tools to have
a big party in order to wish them well on their last
day?

WE DO MIND
On Nights in PSA, it's the manager who sometimes
pushes the yorks to the platform. True, it keeps him
busy and off our backs. But it just goes to show that
they're really short of hands down here.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH!
A couple of weeks ago, RM-PFS cleaners got a selfcongratulatory
letter from Union officials, saying
they'd negotiated a great pay deal on our behalf...
which comes to just £13.15/hr (£12 outside London)!
And they think that's good? Let them try living on it.

"TRAINING" US TO SEE THRU THE B-S
DOs everywhere are taking on lots of agency temps...
who get an "induction"... which mainly consists of
telling them that parcels come first! What they do
learn pretty quickly is that duties are just impossible:
as spares, they rarely get to prep the same frame or do
the same walk twice. And sometimes end up cobbling
together a parcels route because the PDA doesn't
work!

NO HANDS
DUMs try to guilt-trip us when we haven't been able to
complete an outdoor duty. But it doesn't work. As
one old hand said, it's not just that the left hand
doesn't know what the right hand's doing. Sometimes
it doesn't even know there is a right hand!

...INTO THE POTHOLE
In July, private equity firm Apollo Global Management
bought Evri for £2.7bn, and announced it was going to
hire 9,000 more staff. It will have 28,000 couriers, who
are all self-employed. From Evri's website: "There’s
no limit to the number of parcels you can deliver in a
day - except the limit you set yourself. Once you have
your load for the day, simply plan your route and off
you go". Wow. And which planet was this on again?