The Telegraph: Royal Mail suitor to spend £800m and take on Amazon

[Mr Rush]

Don't think they have any choice with the duties, these days they probably get told by higher up to remove x hours from the office or you'll be replaced by someone who will remove x hours from the office

That's certainly what I've been told, which essentially means there isn't local management - there's a local executive. The biggest, and probably worst, change in this job is the loss of autonomy and that likely goes for management too.

The trend in all aspects of life seems to be constant centralisation and the end result is a whole lot of disempowered people realising there's no point in trying. Owning a home is out of the question, but work hard now and you will receive a hundredfold in the kingdom of heaven! Serfdom is coming back in a big way.

DK is going to buy RM off the back of a bunch of loans (a leveraged buyout, not his personal fortune) and it'll be our responsibility to pay it back. Throw another duty into the firebox!

[sweepster70]

You can all argue the toss about delivering/not delivering mail, there is one overriding factor here, the USO which goes hand in hand with this company, bought and paid for when it was privatised and a obligation that at the moment shouldn't be ignored.

Isn't there an obvious other side to that argument?
When you take the job you know that the USO is an obligation. Why should you be allowed to cut off and fail it?
I can see commit to deliver raising its head again.

Sometimes the USO fails due to the individual.

In any job, there should always be a start time and a finish time. If the job cannot be completed within those times, then it's the failings of the company, not the individual.

[sweepster70]

Don't think they have any choice with the duties, these days they probably get told by higher up to remove x hours from the office or you'll be replaced by someone who will remove x hours from the office

That's certainly what I've been told, which essentially means there isn't local management - there's a local executive. The biggest, and probably worst, change in this job is the loss of autonomy and that likely goes for management too.

The trend in all aspects of life seems to be constant centralisation and the end result is a whole lot of disempowered people realising there's no point in trying. Owning a home is out of the question, but work hard now and you will receive a hundredfold in the kingdom of heaven! Serfdom is coming back in a big way.

DK is going to buy RM off the back of a bunch of loans (a leveraged buyout, not his personal fortune) and it'll be our responsibility to pay it back. Throw another duty into the firebox!

That comes down to one thing..........Greed.

[Barnacle]

Don't think they have any choice with the duties, these days they probably get told by higher up to remove x hours from the office or you'll be replaced by someone who will remove x hours from the office

That's certainly what I've been told, which essentially means there isn't local management - there's a local executive. The biggest, and probably worst, change in this job is the loss of autonomy and that likely goes for management too.

The trend in all aspects of life seems to be constant centralisation and the end result is a whole lot of disempowered people realising there's no point in trying. Owning a home is out of the question, but work hard now and you will receive a hundredfold in the kingdom of heaven! Serfdom is coming back in a big way.

DK is going to buy RM off the back of a bunch of loans (a leveraged buyout, not his personal fortune) and it'll be our responsibility to pay it back. Throw another duty into the firebox!

That comes down to one thing..........Greed.

He’s definitely not the Messiah. The more he speaks, the more I think he will be disastrous for RM.

[sweepster70]

Don't think they have any choice with the duties, these days they probably get told by higher up to remove x hours from the office or you'll be replaced by someone who will remove x hours from the office

That's certainly what I've been told, which essentially means there isn't local management - there's a local executive. The biggest, and probably worst, change in this job is the loss of autonomy and that likely goes for management too.

The trend in all aspects of life seems to be constant centralisation and the end result is a whole lot of disempowered people realising there's no point in trying. Owning a home is out of the question, but work hard now and you will receive a hundredfold in the kingdom of heaven! Serfdom is coming back in a big way.

DK is going to buy RM off the back of a bunch of loans (a leveraged buyout, not his personal fortune) and it'll be our responsibility to pay it back. Throw another duty into the firebox!

That comes down to one thing..........Greed.

He’s definitely not the Messiah. The more he speaks, the more I think he will be disastrous for RM.

How would you personally solve Royal Mail? To me it definitely needs reform on the Universal service and also needs Government intervention. It is an important part of the UK infrastructure, but maybe only in times of need.

[postslippete]

He’s definitely not the Messiah. The more he speaks, the more I think he will be disastrous for RM.

That's my impression. He reminds me of a snake oil salesman saying things like Royal Mail will deliver letters forever and "as long as I'm alive" but will only commit in writing to honour the USO for 5 years. Then he says that anybody who would be his successor would absolutely understand this and that RM will be the provider of the USO for as long as we are going to be around which sounds like he has a clear exit plan after buying the company. It certainly doesn't include the Union's proposals for us to have a stake and a say in the running of the company with board representation. By putting up obstacles about its 'complexity' speaks volumes about what his plans really are including a potential break up of the business which has been festering ever since the company changed its holding company name to IDS.

[Barnacle]

Don't think they have any choice with the duties, these days they probably get told by higher up to remove x hours from the office or you'll be replaced by someone who will remove x hours from the office

That's certainly what I've been told, which essentially means there isn't local management - there's a local executive. The biggest, and probably worst, change in this job is the loss of autonomy and that likely goes for management too.

The trend in all aspects of life seems to be constant centralisation and the end result is a whole lot of disempowered people realising there's no point in trying. Owning a home is out of the question, but work hard now and you will receive a hundredfold in the kingdom of heaven! Serfdom is coming back in a big way.

DK is going to buy RM off the back of a bunch of loans (a leveraged buyout, not his personal fortune) and it'll be our responsibility to pay it back. Throw another duty into the firebox!

That comes down to one thing..........Greed.

He’s definitely not the Messiah. The more he speaks, the more I think he will be disastrous for RM.

How would you personally solve Royal Mail? To me it definitely needs reform on the Universal service and also needs Government intervention. It is an important part of the UK infrastructure, but maybe only in times of need.

Me personally: the first thing I would do is scrap the DPR routes. Separating parcels from letters has cost RM dearly as was spelt out in the recent financial report. A separate parcel operation only made sense when parcels were at Covid levels but they’ve since dropped off.
Walks have to be put back into offices and posties take their oversize again. That is the way to make the maximum profit from the parcels.
Manager’s get a bonus if they carry out a proper revision which balances walks. If walks can’t be completed, no bonus. They HAVE to get it done.
Afternoon shifts available for the delivery of LATs and hoovering up any scraps.
Sunday delivery: parcels need to be filtered so that Tracked flats that aren’t Moonpig are not being delivered by parcel drivers. In other words, only our priority customers have their stuff delivered on a Sunday because it makes zero financial sense otherwise.

These would be my day one instructions.

[ted_e_bear]

Me personally: the first thing I would do is scrap the DPR routes. Separating parcels from letters has cost RM dearly as was spelt out in the recent financial report. A separate parcel operation only made sense when parcels were at Covid levels but they’ve since dropped off.
Walks have to be put back into offices and posties take their oversize again. That is the way to make the maximum profit from the parcels.
Manager’s get a bonus if they carry out a proper revision which balances walks. If walks can’t be completed, no bonus. They HAVE to get it done.
Afternoon shifts available for the delivery of LATs and hoovering up any scraps.
Sunday delivery: parcels need to be filtered so that Tracked flats that aren’t Moonpig are not being delivered by parcel drivers. In other words, only our priority customers have their stuff delivered on a Sunday because it makes zero financial sense otherwise.

These would be my day one instructions.

I like the cut of your jib, sounds exactly like something I'd have have thought was a great idea.

[Jb1969]

Martin Seidenberg, former CEO of GLS is being kept on under this new regime.
It does not take a rocket scientist to see what direction RM will take.
Delivery/Distribution/Collections/Voc will all be franchised off in time.
The rest will be on minimum wage with a worthless pension!

[Basildon Bond]

Sunday delivery: parcels need to be filtered so that Tracked flats that aren’t Moonpig are not being delivered by parcel drivers. In other words, only our priority customers have their stuff delivered on a Sunday because it makes zero financial sense otherwise.

But a love Tracked 24 flats! They are the ones that take something like 10 seconds to deliver and hop back in the van and on to the next one!

RM should make a reserve weight all the address per duty. Plus/ minus/ average for the actual difficulty of the location to deliver - not some central planning software that know nothing about the location. Anyone sending to a "plus" address has £3.00 added on or something. Average gets a £1 added; and minus (easy/ not rural/ no steps/ not an apartment complex, decent size and height letterbox, etc., etc.) gets 50p off. How many customers will get a decent box at the side of their door for small packets and seal up their low letterboxes then!

"Plus" addresses can go get one of those new promised lockers for their parcels and save money.

More money for the business; happier posties; cost saving to the customer. Win. Win. Win.

[postslippete]

How would you personally solve Royal Mail? To me it definitely needs reform on the Universal service and also needs Government intervention. It is an important part of the UK infrastructure, but maybe only in times of need.

What I believe is eating up most of our time out on delivery isn't delivering the post but trying to deliver an increased amount of parcels 1st time and is auto-redelivery really that efficient? Many posties are obviously trying to get rid of parcels first time round so that they don't have even more parcels to deliver the following day, but is trying 2 or 3 different neighbours really that efficient? I'm sure many posties are dumping stuff in blue bins and throwing over back fences just to get rid and I wonder how many customers complain about denial of receipts and what cost this has on the business.

A large office might immediately save on a few callers staff but if an office of over a hundred staff spent an extra hour of their day trying to deliver parcels 1st time including those that need to be re-delivered, is this really saving the business money? Regardless of any mail that hasn't been delivered, one look at all the docket sheets for today would suggest otherwise. On the occasions when we deliver just the Tracked items for a whole duty we don't actually save that much time as it would as if we delivered them with the post. I've worked out that it is taking us up to 2 and a half hours to get one full duty of Tracked items done between us whereas its +3 hours to get that full duty done with the post when there's 1-2 trays of mech for the round. I also believe that adding parcel drop boxes to the mix will just add up even more time to our duties in the same way that consumer collections are.

Also, a lot of the larger stuff really should go with LAT drivers in larger vans rather than with posties on paired duties in small combi's. I'm sure many posties understand the frustration of having a small combi crammed full of medium parcels, bags of mail, trays of bulk calls and specials without having some of the bigger parcels that occupy half the van space thrown in the mix as well.

[GizzardPuke]

I'm sure many posties are dumping stuff in blue bins and throwing over back fences just to get rid and I wonder how many customers complain about denial of receipts and what cost this has on the business.

Having been recently pulled up for 'unofficial' doorstepping I was told the cost to RM is £80 (I assume in costs dealing with the claim) plus whatever the item costs to replace. I have no idea how many complaints we get either locally or nationally but didn't I read today there were 900,000 claims of non-receipt last year? If every item cost a tenner to replace that's £81 million a year.

We used to get up to 300 docket left items a day back in our office, it's now down to about 20. Two deliveries is responsible for some of that but most of the decrease is that, since the pandemic, everyone doorsteps.
Very few people actually use the delivery preference system or send us a message of where to leave things when they're not in. I had 90 Tracked today and only one message popped up saying where to leave it.

Without unofficial doorstepping, I'm back up to a dozen P739s a day. I told the managers this would happen and now I'm often failing due to the extra time taken. They don't like this but hey, I'm adhering to RM policy. If everyone did it we'd be failing on the Tracked massively every day. It frustrates me that my colleagues can't see that if we all did the job 100% properly just for a week the figures would be so bad they'd do something about it.

[Basildon Bond]

Without unofficial doorstepping, I'm back up to a dozen P739s a day. I told the managers this would happen and now I'm often failing due to the extra time taken. They don't like this but hey, I'm adhering to RM policy. If everyone did it we'd be failing on the Tracked massively every day. It frustrates me that my colleagues can't see that if we all did the job 100% properly just for a week the figures would be so bad they'd do something about it.

For all the cries that the union should do something, and how we all moan they are powerless and now affectively impotent, I would have thought the CWU would be on a big push for doing the job as per the book - just that. Do your job exactly as described and that's it. If there is one thing the union could bang the drum about it is probably that you must do the job to the letter and not a bit more. Work your hours, following the rules, dot all the i's and cross all the t's. If the van fails a particular check (do the check before loading the van) refuse to take that van out. The union should be telling us all to lay all the problems at the feet of the local manager and ask what they will do to fix it.

However, in reality we are our own worst enemy (and I don't exclude myself from that). Cut corners, hustle-hustle-hustle, if the van's horn doesn't work - who cares!, climb over small walls to save 40 steps, stick a lot of packets behind a bin and call it (on the app) "shed", "outbuilding", whatever - just don't bother manually typing in a description ("it's behind the larger plant pot to the left (that's my left looking at your front door) with the blue-green bands on it and I believe has a nice crop of geraniums in it). We also pretend it's job and knock.

A national CWU campaign of "Let the chips fall where they may". A national arms folding; and an attitude of "it's not my job". See what the truth of the job actually is. Let's stop papering over the cracks and see what the truth of the job is?

AI can buzz you up a picture and marketing material in seconds...

Designer (2).png

...though it's spelling is sh*te and the Union Jack has text that almost looks Russian or close. Artificial intelligence isn't quite there yet but you get the idea hopefully!

The plan is not a "go slow" but doing by the book and throwing all issues back to the manager. RM makes the rules; You just follow them to the letter.

[Smoothbackground]

Have to say, I’m glad some of you lot aren’t in charge!

The future for RM is packets and parcels. In the same way businesses turned off their fax machines, customers are also fast turning off their printers. Yes, individual people will still send letters and cards, but they will be a small minority. The role of postperson is now transitioning to parcelperson. Inescapable fact.

[Pidleypoo]

If commit to deliver was brought in ( it won’t be because it is fundamentally stupid ) then currently I would have to work about 20-25 hours a week above my contracted hours near every week and at Christmas it would approach 40 plus.

That is in no way at all sustainable for me.

Then for example, what’s stopping management in an office of say 30 where they all regularly work over their contracted hours , taking out half the duties ?

Why would they ever recruit any new starters ( also why would anyone take a job with those terms ) because they could simply make existing staff work themselves to death

Every time I see someone mention it,it makes me cringe.