National Industrial Action Ballot

[nightcrawler]

If the four pillars agreement was “legally binding” why isn’t this going through the courts, instead of balloting us for strike action?

[postslippete]

I've got to be honest there is a little bit of scaremongering going on by the CWU particularly as regards to RM introducing unworkable delivery methods such as sorting the mail in the street or not wanting to give us the hour off the working week unless we improve productivity by 5%. I'm not saying that is not what Royal Mail want, its a business, and wants to make money anyway it can.

But we need to bullet point the key issues as to what will definitely bring the posties out on strike. For me, its their desire to use the PDAs against us and absorbing one delivering in every six. The runners in my office won't be too enthralled by the idea of AHDC and being paid for the hours that you actually work instead of the concept many have of doing the job and finish at 2pm having also completed 2 extra loops of ghost overtime. What is this Resource Scheduler thing anyway?

Most posties aren't bothered about a SWW unless it means they can leave earlier.

[Cantsayno]

I've got to be honest there is a little bit of scaremongering going on by the CWU particularly as regards to RM introducing unworkable delivery methods such as sorting the mail in the street or not wanting to give us the hour off the working week unless we improve productivity by 5%. I'm not saying that is not what Royal Mail want, its a business, and wants to make money anyway it can.

But we need to bullet point the key issues as to what will definitely bring the posties out on strike. For me, its their desire to use the PDAs against us and absorbing one delivering in every six. The runners in my office won't be too enthralled by the idea of AHDC and being paid for the hours that you actually work instead of the concept many have of doing the job and finish at 2pm having also completed 2 extra loops of ghost overtime. What is this Resource Scheduler thing anyway?

Most posties aren't bothered about a SWW unless it means they can leave earlier.

What does ghost overtime mean?

[Brandy]

Is there any other job out there that has to go through this every few years , it’s ridiculous , constant change all the time.

Thats what I have said countless times,when I was a postie and I was for a good number of years I have never known a company chop and change working practices as much as what RM did,and it seems nothing changes. The trouble is a lot of these changes are thought up by someone who has no idea what a posties job is really like,it just looks good on paper. Perhaps if they listened to the postie,but then they wont will they?

[Celgar]

All very good stuff looking after our backs, but what happened to the TW postcode part timers pay increase from October 2018 when the one hour reduction came into force?
It still hasn't been resolved after 10.5 months, nothing paid as yet, no back pay.
Same area TW, it took several months for the one hour time reduction minutes off to be agreed by the union with thousands of free hours worked until it was finally implemented.

What hope is there if it takes this long to resolve what should have been a simple issue.
How many permutations are there to losing 60 minutes a week?
I worry that the union team are not skilled enough to reach an agreement and we will go the way the miners went many years ago.

The delays in implementation were due to some area reps trying to get the twelve minutes per day from the hour of SWW taken off the end of the duty instead of making start times twelve minutes later. The RM wasn't willing to accept this and as far as I know all offices have taken the SWW from the start of duty time.

[Celgar]

I've got to be honest there is a little bit of scaremongering going on by the CWU particularly as regards to RM introducing unworkable delivery methods such as sorting the mail in the street or not wanting to give us the hour off the working week unless we improve productivity by 5%. I'm not saying that is not what Royal Mail want, its a business, and wants to make money anyway it can.

But we need to bullet point the key issues as to what will definitely bring the posties out on strike. For me, its their desire to use the PDAs against us and absorbing one delivering in every six. The runners in my office won't be too enthralled by the idea of AHDC and being paid for the hours that you actually work instead of the concept many have of doing the job and finish at 2pm having also completed 2 extra loops of ghost overtime. What is this Resource Scheduler thing anyway?

Most posties aren't bothered about a SWW unless it means they can leave earlier.

What does ghost overtime mean?

Ghost overtime is when you are still being paid for your duty time but you have completed all your work then agree to do some more work on overtime. So in effect you are being paid twice. This happens because there are so many variables and if there are staff shortages or sickness the DOMs need to find volunteers to clear the remaining work. I would imagine Rico has his eye on eliminating this as much as possible by sending any posties who arrive back early with more work to do. If posties don't come back early though then RM would likely end up with no one to complete the spare work. In short I don't think RM can stop ghost overtime unless they fill all job vacancies and maybe cut or eliminate short term sick pay. Given all the other stuff they want to do I think the idea of no sick pay for the first week will be implemented. It wasn't in Martin's list though but bench merging was which was one of the stupid ideas from the last pay review.
If most of even some of changes get implemented I can see a vast contingent of posties just telling RM to **** off and just resign immediately. RM will have lost all the knowledge and goodwill then and will have to employ economic migrants like the other courier companies. RM really are signing their own death warrant with these changes.

[Celgar]

I've got to be honest there is a little bit of scaremongering going on by the CWU particularly as regards to RM introducing unworkable delivery methods such as sorting the mail in the street or not wanting to give us the hour off the working week unless we improve productivity by 5%. I'm not saying that is not what Royal Mail want, its a business, and wants to make money anyway it can.

But we need to bullet point the key issues as to what will definitely bring the posties out on strike. For me, its their desire to use the PDAs against us and absorbing one delivering in every six. The runners in my office won't be too enthralled by the idea of AHDC and being paid for the hours that you actually work instead of the concept many have of doing the job and finish at 2pm having also completed 2 extra loops of ghost overtime. What is this Resource Scheduler thing anyway?

Most posties aren't bothered about a SWW unless it means they can leave earlier.

As I see it measuring the length of the walks with the PDA, providing you have it with you at all times, is the only way to measure every step we walk to every letterbox or delivery point. This is better and more accurate information than RM currently has on file and would be more accurate than using data from the emergency services which I thought was their current plan.
Personally nearly every day, even on most Tuesdays, I end up going over duty time by variable amounts. For example twice this week I have gone over duty time by more than forty minutes when according to RM we have less work to do and are able to do additional absorption. So for me if I was paid for every minute I worked I would receive several thousand pounds more per year in wages. I get that walks in some offices are shorter or some posties can 'kill' any walk they are put on so they would get an effective pay cut. I think we do need a signing system that cannot be 'worked' so that we can prove we have worked all our duty time - or more than our duty time - and that all that work should be paid for in full by RM. Our last new recruit left the job mainly because they were not being paid for all the work they were doing. I realise I go on about this subject a lot but neither the union or RM is doing anything about it.

[norris9]

So they want 5% more out of us, so they want us to be around 20 minutes faster each day. Well I am sure they get plenty of time free out of us as I am sure most Posties start early. When I say early, it could just be 5 or 10 minutes early, so they already get that for free out of us.

I can't tell you the situation nationwide, ie. if there are a lot of Posties with easy rounds who always finish early and go home early, but....

Time is wasted queuing for specials, time is wasted moving vans out the way that are blocking you in, time is wasted finding satchel bags, time is wasted being asked 3 times to do lapsing. These things can possibly be improved by management.

Again - encourage the public to get parcel boxes installed. Time is wasted trying to get things through people's tiny letterboxes, writing out dockets, knocking on people's doors to hand them birthday cards because they don't fit though their 1920's sized letter boxes.

[Woody Guthrie]

hopefully it would mean the runners and early starters and no-breakers end up being given more work.

As I've said before Royal Mail do not allocate work to individuals, they allocate it to duties, duties that tend to get abandoned by the 'runners, early starters and no-breakers' the minute the extra work gets allocated to them.

[daveyeff]

well I posted in another post about it, but I have to say, since this new DOM has said we either owe them time back for finishing sharp, or go back out and do loops left in. or run up D2Ds and do kill offs, there is NOBODY skipping their bait times, or coming in soon, and most importantly no more runners. it has been effectively nipped in the bud. glad to see it.

[daveyeff]

on another note, about this 'pending' industrial action, the way our area rep is talking, it will be in our best interests to carry out the threat of strike action. he was at ours yesterday and he reckons Rico Back has made it abundantly clear to Terry Pullinger of his intentions. Terry is quoted as saying Rico said blatantly ''im the CEO of this company, I will do what I want''!! if that is true then we are in for a right scrap.

[Woody Guthrie]

He'll do what the shareholders want or he'll be Rico Back Ex-C EO of Royal Mail.

Shareholders don't want a strike, they're typically short term investors not interested in protracted labour relation battles that could weaken the company further and change a 5 year plan into a 10 year fight for survival.

He's betting his money on the union lacking the support to carry out its threats. It's all a f***ing game of who can piss the highest with these muppets, meanwhile we're left worrying about the mortgage and the kids.

[clashcityrocker]

So they want 5% more out of us, so they want us to be around 20 minutes faster each day.

Or:
If you were currently expected to prep 1300 items/hour, a 5% increase in efficiency would mean you prepping 1365/hour.
A whole extra letter/minute.
Bastards!

[Woody Guthrie]

To be honest you could increase the efficiency in my office by about 20% simply by locking the managers in the office when the first van arrives and letting them back out when we're done.

Everything they touch from the daily work plan to the weekly rota turns to s**t.

[Marshamp11]

The issue that we should be more concerned about is the potential to make different parts of RMG seperate Ltd Companies same as they wish to do with Parcelforce in October. It cannot be a coincidence that they wish to remove all the large profit making parcels away from DO's and therefore leaving the DO's with the loss making letters/small packets. If then the DO's were a Ltd company in its own right they could the sell that side of RMG and be left with the profit making Cherries without having to subsidise the non profit letter side.