To think WTF is going on with Royal Mail?

[WorriedandScared93]

What is the actual point of them anymore? I sent a small parcel 1st class 2 weeks ago and it's still not arrived...

The deification of Dave Ward has me absolutely astounded.

Why do the posties not get a strike payment from the CWU while on strike? Every union I've been a part of has a strike fund which is banked subs for situations like this.

If each postie pays a tenner a month subs to the union, which works out at £120 a year. If 100k posties are union members that's £12 million a year. There's not been any strikes for over 10 years so where's the £120 million?

Why can't the union support its members financially? Or is it because it's been spent on pub gatherings and football season tickets for its senior union reps under the guise of 'hospitality'

I ordered some bits in November for my ds’s 18th birthday. Three things still haven’t turned up. His birthday has come and gone.
I let the small companies know yesterday just to keep them informed and one has already said she will refund me. I’m not going to ask her to because I imagine business is bad enough for her at the moment and I was going to spend the money anyway. But I’m still upset that his birthday wasn’t what I planned.

My point is and has always been, that the staff took the job with certain hours and conditions, do you understand that?

This worked round their shift pattern and meant that they had childcare needs met within the family or specific childcare arrangements.

By now saying they have to work different hours, they now will need additional childcare, which to people that do not want their children left with "colleagues" as you are happy to do, comes at a great extra cost, when added to the cost of living crisis, the under inflation pay rise, is not feasible.

There is lots wrong with leaving your children with "colleagues", I am sure I do not need to spell those out to you?

It's like you think that "oh well, you're a low skilled worker, your children are not as important as skilled workers children, a colleague will be good enough to offer childcare".

And obviously, it is not my employers problem to arrange childcare, that's why I chose a job with hours that I could manage. But hey if my employer changes those, then I will just accept that....... no, I won't I will fight for what is right.

Again, I will reiterate that these problems never were an issue for us, but it is the ones that will be left behind that will suffer and my DH is standing up for them, I am proud of that.

Hours "convenient to them", do you mean the contracted hours that were agreed when they were employed?

I think that is what you mean?

Which incidentally have changed significantly already.

My DH used to start at 4.00am, it is not 6.15am, so don't tell me they haven't already changed hours significantly.

I don't know how long your DH has worked for RM but do you not think it reasonable to expect employees to change their hours as the needs and requirements of the business change? If customers want their deliveries to be later in the day when they are at home, do you not think a business needs to adjust when they do deliveries in order to satisfy customer demand, or should the business just say "tough, this is how we've always done it, lump it or leave it"?

You’re correct that childcare isn’t your employer’s responsibility but surely you can understand that if you were doing deliveries for the last 20 years starting at 6:15 and finishing in time to pick up the children from school or be home for when they get in and you turn up to work to find out they want you to start 2 hours later and therefore creating an additional expense that you didn’t have before it would piss you off. Quite a lot of postal workers choose to do it because the hours fit in with family life. My DH does collections starting at 3pm as that’s just after I get home so our dogs aren’t left for any extended period of time. It used to be the children but they’re grown up now.

No, they need to employ new staff on the new contract. Not illegally change existing contracts.

It just doesn't seem to occur to many of you that 'this is the way its always been done' because there is an entire infrastructure that enables people to go to work. childcare, roads, public transport.

And one of the reasons for the industrial action is that the new contract would mean no sick pay for the first 12 months of employment. The strikers are not just thinking of themselves but future colleagues too.

It's not a bad profit!

They've got a massive hole in their pension pot though! No wonder they want to make their employees self-employed.

Maybe that's because delivering letters is uneconomic?

Pretty much every other service industry has changed with the times. You can't run a business with staff working hours that might have fit in with business needs 20 years ago but don't work now.

Thats great if you employ robots. Actual humans need an infrastructure in place to get them to work. Stop using platitudes and stop and think about the logistics.

How do you run a business where the customers want deliveries made in the afternoon, but your staff want to work in the morning?

How does everyone else who works in the afternoon and evening get to work?

Pretty much similar happened to me afee weeks ago. Post lady lied though her teeth about knocking (in a way I admire her front).

So my sympathy is very very limited

How does everyone else who works in the afternoon and evening get to work?

If you run a business in a place where there's no public transport and you are having trouble recruiting you can;
Pay people enough that they can afford their own private transport.
Provide parking.
Oranise a car pool.

This is 'logistics' and 'infrastructure'. People don't appear on your doorstep and disappear when they leave your business.

My deliveries from most courier companies are fast and reliable too. We have a regular Evrii courier who is great and knows whom to leave parcels with if addressee is out.
However I'm lucky to live in a populated area where it is worth their while to deliver every day. I think that rural areas in particular are less profitable for couriers as they have more mileage per delivery.
The major problem with RM here is that they have closed the local sorting office. I don't even know where our office is now, it certainly isn't local. We live on a large estate where postmen find it difficult to locate addresses until they've worked here for a while, but we often seem to get new postmen so a lot of wrongly delivered mail.

They take the job knowing the hours, I used to work afternoon and evening work as my DH worked mornings?

So........ let me explain.......

If his hours had changed, I would no longer be able to do that, because we would have had childcare issues.........

Therefore, we would have lost a lot of money......

We therefore thought about his hours, my hours, the childcare that needed to be provided and worked around that.

We could not keep chopping and changing that, as the RM decided to change hours, because my employer would not have accepted that.

Can you really not see that it is not that easy to deal with changing hours?

Are you being deliberately obtuse and blinkered?

Can you not see how it is not easy for a business to deal with employees who refuse to change their hours, when the nature of the business changes, and the customers want things done at different times?

If you were running Royal Mail, how would you deal with this?

I'd abide by contract law for starters.
Next I'd investigate if the new shifts are actually needed. I'd be really radical and ask the people who actually do the job how to rearrange the tasks and the shift patterns.

If you want to change the shift patterns, you can recruit new staff to work the new shifts, and gradually replace the old staff as they leave.
You can look at whether the entire task needs to be completed within the new shift time.

What I would not do is impose a top down ruling and expect everyone to just go along with it, for all the reasons I've listed before which you are unable to grasp.

Firstly, as i have previously said and you somehow cannot read (I am assuming you have comprehension issues), they have changed their hours, have you now read and understood that? They used to start at 4am, now start at 6.15am.

Secondly, I would start off dealing with it by sacking the £750k CEO who is useless, get someone in that can actually deal with the situation.

ST refusing to discuss is losing more and more money for RM.

And you think they are talking themselves out of a job?

It's 2022. You can't run a business like that in this day and age. Businesses need to be able to pivot immediately to meet the changing needs of customers. You can't keep paying people for 20, 30, 40, 50 years based on the needs of the business on the day they started work. The Royal Mail now is suffering because they had a monopoly on delivery for so long and the staff got used to doing things a certain way and the customer had no choice because there was no competition.

the staff got used to doing things a certain way 😆 PMSL.
You talk like someone who has never run a business, employed staff, had a job or signed a contract.

The Royal Mail now is suffering because they made a cock up and tried to run the business the way you would have tried to run it.

After two years of covid disruption the strikers have done themselves no favours. I’ve saved about £300 this week which would have been for a staff Xmas party and some lovely Etsy Xmas gifts all money I have been saving up for Xmas over the year. All money that would have gone to small businesses. Trains and post meant that money will now go to Amazon and the other will be saved. I have no sympathy for any of them. Horrible knock on effects. Also I think this will be the last year a lot of people bother with Xmas cards as they were already dying out.

Hi Dave,

Anyone with half a brain who has any kind of understanding of the issue can see that the USO for 6 day letters deliveries is now an utterly pointless, inefficient and irrelevant anachronism.

The amount of letters mail that now NEEDS to be delivered the next day is a vanishingly small part of overall letters mail volumes and if it really is that important most senders even under the current USO still send it Registered Delivery or Tracked24 to offer some guarantee of next day delivery.
Even most posties accept the 6 day letters USO is a pointless encumbrance and hugely inefficient way of working.

RM would still be operating a 7 day service for parcels under my scenario so there's still the opportunity to deliver any important letters mail on a next day basis... it's just the bulk of the junk mail and other non-essential letters mail that could be condensed into a 3 day delivery operation.