October 22, 200915 yr I don't suppose these riff-raff will be considering, the knock on effect to, the businesses who depend on the post, nor the jobs their actions could cost? "Riff Raff".... Are you serious mate....? Is that what you call workers who have the "nerve" to fight for a PUBLIC SERVICE to actually remain Public.... Listen sonny, I was working for Royal Mail almost 12 years ago and worked there for five years, and, as a Part-Timer, I was paid £6.50 an hour, which went up to £7.25 when I was made up to full-time.... The Corporation (I refuse to call this bad joke a "Public Service" anymore) is going to be paying their scab workforce barely above the rate of National Minimum wage, (something like £5.85 per hour I believe....) I mean WTF???? Are these c/unts taking the P!SS....????? <_< How the fukk can the same company hire people on WORSE pay and condtions than 12 FUKKIN' YEARS AGO........ Well, it's simple really innit, they're not the same company... I worked for a Public Service, NOT a practically Privatised Corporation..... You also fail to completely miss the point of a Strike anyway... The only recourse that a worker has when faced with unfair conditions, pay and work practices IS to withdraw their labour in an organised manner.... This takes the form of INDUSTRIAL ACTION, and this has actually been voted on by the way and in 3 to 1 favour of strike action, which is a damn sight more of a convincing ballot result than Labour in the last General Election and the Tories for their last TWO terms of office at least :rolleyes:... Yes, it's an inconvienience... Which is kind of the point really...... :rolleyes:
October 22, 200915 yr My post just arrived :o Shows this strike is not a big success :yahoo: :yahoo: I think it's happening in different areas on different days.... Your attitude sucks mate.. You're "yahooing" the workers getting fukked over and for the Privatisation of what should be a Public Service..... <_<
October 22, 200915 yr I think it's happening in different areas on different days.... Your attitude sucks mate.. You're "yahooing" the workers getting fukked over and for the Privatisation of what should be a Public Service..... <_< The Royal Mail management offered to go to ACAS if the CWU agreed and the CWU have not accepted that offer The CWU despite their protestations of talking to management have been determined to have a strike it is 70's style muscle flexing and blackmailing, even if the Royal Mail agreed to the CWU terms the CWU would move the goalposts I am in favour of a complete ban on strikes in essential public services like transport, rail, tube, airline staff, post, nuclear plants, police, fire, ambulance, nurses and so on
October 22, 200915 yr I don't suppose these riff-raff will be considering, the knock on effect to, the businesses who depend on the post, nor the jobs their actions could cost? Sorry but have to break my Perspectives silence to speak on this issue. Of course they won't. They'll only realise what idiots they've been following the bigger idiot Bob Crowe when they're made redundant after business move their custom elsewhere!! As B.A. says too, all strikes in any public service including Royal Mail should be made illegal. Hey posties why not have off now until January and no get money from now until New Year? Bring temps or the army in to deliver letters. Can someone please remind Crowe that Royal Mail no longer has a monopoly. The more they strike the more customers will use their competitors and some will never return. Oh but Crowe will still get his hefty salary won't he? :angry: He's nothing but a Militant out for confrontation with the Government like Scargill was in the 80's but look where it got him!!! Oh and Scott I read yesterday that only 40% actually voted in the ballot. Hardly a ringing endorsement for strike action is it? Edited October 22, 200915 yr by Crazy Chris
October 22, 200915 yr Sorry but have to break my Perspectives silence to speak on this issue. Of course they won't. They'll only realise what idiots they've been following the bigger idiot Bob Crowe when they're made redundant after business move their custom elsewhere!! As B.A. says too, all strikes in any public service including Royal Mail should be made illegal. Hey posties why not have off now until January and no get money from now until New Year? Bring temps or the army in to deliver letters. Can someone please remind Crowe that Royal Mail no longer has a monopoly. The more they strike the more customers will use their competitors and some will never return. Oh but Crowe will still get his hefty salary won't he? :angry: He's nothing but a Militant out for confrontation with the Government like Scargill was in the 80's but look where it got him!!! Oh and Scott I read yesterday that only 40% actually voted in the ballot. Hardly a ringing endorsement for strike action is it? i dont think you of all people are qualified to pass judgement on workers, how would YOU feel if the company you had worked for for umpteen years was offering you a pay-cut and longer working hours? whilst modernisation of ANY business or public service is inevitable, its the manner in which management has gone about this affair that is wrong. all public utilities/services and all private run enterprises HAVE to modernise, they HAVE to run at a profit ... yes even a totally public service HAS to be cost effective.
October 22, 200915 yr i dont think you of all people are qualified to pass judgement on workers, how would YOU feel if the company you had worked for for umpteen years was offering you a pay-cut and longer working hours? I'd be thankful to have a job when a lot have lost them in this recession. :rolleyes: Management offered to go to ACAS late last night but the Union refused. Says it all. They wanted the strike to go ahead no matter what. :angry: Edited October 22, 200915 yr by Crazy Chris
October 22, 200915 yr "Riff Raff".... Are you serious mate....? Is that what you call workers who have the "nerve" to fight for a PUBLIC SERVICE to actually remain Public.... Listen sonny, I was working for Royal Mail almost 12 years ago and worked there for five years, and, as a Part-Timer, I was paid £6.50 an hour, which went up to £7.25 when I was made up to full-time.... The Corporation (I refuse to call this bad joke a "Public Service" anymore) is going to be paying their scab workforce barely above the rate of National Minimum wage, (something like £5.85 per hour I believe....) I mean WTF???? Are these c/unts taking the P!SS....????? <_< How the fukk can the same company hire people on WORSE pay and condtions than 12 FUKKIN' YEARS AGO........ Well, it's simple really innit, they're not the same company... I worked for a Public Service, NOT a practically Privatised Corporation..... You also fail to completely miss the point of a Strike anyway... The only recourse that a worker has when faced with unfair conditions, pay and work practices IS to withdraw their labour in an organised manner.... This takes the form of INDUSTRIAL ACTION, and this has actually been voted on by the way and in 3 to 1 favour of strike action, which is a damn sight more of a convincing ballot result than Labour in the last General Election and the Tories for their last TWO terms of office at least :rolleyes:... Yes, it's an inconvienience... Which is kind of the point really...... :rolleyes: The pay and standards of living, for the working and lower middle classes is decreasing. We are heading back to Victorian scales of inequality between the haves and have not’s. I fail to see how these strikes can achieve anything against the tide. At most the strikers can hope for, is a hollow short term appeasement; at the expense of jobs and businesses that depend on reliable post service.
October 22, 200915 yr Sweet Christ Chris, you're a moron... Bob Crowe is the leader of the RMT (transport union), he has nothing to do with this strike! :manson: Furthermore (this one's to you too Craig), banning strikes in every public service just gives the organisations that manage these services free reign to f*** over the workers - thereby reducing intake of workers + demoralising the current workers, giving us worse public services! :rolleyes: And for the record Craig, the CWU DID agree to go to the ACAS for talks which would not come with strings attached, the Royal Mail demanded an end to strike threats before they negotiated...
October 22, 200915 yr Oh, and since when was airline staff an essential public service? :lol: Are not the vast majority of those posts privatised?
October 22, 200915 yr And is it just me, or has Rich gotten far more right-wing/Daily Mail-esque over the past couple of years? :heehee:
October 22, 200915 yr Oh, and since when was airline staff an essential public service? :lol: Are not the vast majority of those posts privatised? They are an essential service, planes being grounded would be very damaging for business in this country not to mention knock on effect of tourism both to and from this country, then there is safety issues too so airline staff are an essential public service privatised or not
October 22, 200915 yr Oh, and since when was airline staff an essential public service? :lol: lol agreed We don't depend on air transport. We ain't Australia. :heehee: We have other methods of importing and exporting. I personally am not for the strike. I don't agree with striking over pay in a recession. I just find it immoral. I have absolutely no problems with strikes normally, but so many people have been laid off this year i just think it's wrong. Yes they may have $h!tty working conditions but have they tried working in retail? Like to see them whine after doing a month in a supermarket. [especially Tesco who insist on moving their stores around every 3 minutes] I know i may get torn apart for that, bring it on. I guarantee i do more work than they do for less pay in worse conditions. And they have no sympathy from me either. They were on strike last year. More f***ing fool them for not sorting everything out at once, that would have been the sensible thing to do. The more they strike, the less effective it becomes. They continue to do this and they'll lose any sympathy they have from the public.
October 22, 200915 yr Spoken like a true "Daily Mail" reader..... :rolleyes: I'm betting you probably had "zero sympathy" for the Miners either..... You're a Neo-Thatcherite mate.... Off you pop and kiss Cameron's ring..... <_< What a class act you are. As I've always been told if you need to reply with insults then you lose the argument. Anyway: September 21, 2009 Daily Telegraph.co.uk Class warrior Bob Crow claims that we are all left-wingers now Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester New unions, forget it. Bob Crow is a traditionalist in an open-neck shirt with a medallion. The headquarters of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union are covered with good, old-fashioned memorabilia. There are paintings of steam trains, embroidered banners and a trophy cabinet filled with silver cups from darts competitions. In the boardroom there are individual blotting pads and solid oak chairs. A sign on the door to the general secretary’s office reads: “Working class”. Inside, Mr Crow has a moose’s head, a bust of Lenin and a pair of Alan Minter’s boxing gloves on display. There are tributes to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and a brick from the house of the man who wrote The Red Flag. On the wall hangs a framed newspaper front page headlined: “Last stand of the dinosaurs”. On the table is a copy of The Morning Star. This is the “red menace” of the trade union movement, the shaven-headed Millwall fan whose nickname is “Crow Bar”. But in fact he is polite, courteous and punctual and horrified at being thought of as a bruiser. “I don’t think I’m aggressive, except when it comes to negotiating,” he tells us. His hobby is meteorology — he has two barometers at home. He enjoys cooking curries and roast dinners, although he admits: “I couldn’t come in at 7 o’clock at night and start doing all that lark.” In his spare time he watches sport and reads biographies. “The ballet’s not my cup of tea, although if someone offered me a ticket I would go and have a look at it. I am not into flower arranging, but I do like gardening.” He has a romantic side — when he first spotted his girlfriend 18 years ago, he asked a friend for her number, phoned her and said: “There’s a lamppost under where you live. If you look out of your window and think you’ll be safe with me then come down.” He admires 1940s black and white films. “Greta Garbo once said that the men who think they’re macho aren’t really macho at all,” he says. “That’s true. Some people go around puffing their chest out saying it’s a man’s world. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’m very soft with my daughters, they’re grown up now, but they can always work on my heart.” This is, however, the man who has caused misery to commuters delayed by strikes. The Evening Standard called him “the most hated man in London” and Boris Johnson once said that he was demented. There is no doubt that his politics are as old-fashioned as his office. Mr Crow is still proud to call himself a communist and loves the idea that he might retire to Havana. “You can be a communist and not be a member of the Communist Party just like you [can] go to the British Virgin Islands and not be a virgin,” he says. “I think communism is working well. If you go to Cuba you might not get everything you want in the shops, but if you drop down with a heart attack you will get first-class medical treatment.” The recession, he believes, has made everyone more left-wing: “When people realised the magnitude of what was taking place, it made a huge difference. People started saying ‘how can bankers earn that kind of money when agency nurses are on £6.35 an hour?’.” Unlike some leftwingers, Mr Crow does not think that the Government could control City pay. He does, though, want to create a “socialist society where the main aspirations of people are given: they have a job, a decent wage, a house, healthcare, good education and no wars”. He is convinced that public opinion is moving his way. “People are beginning to say ‘something ain’t right here. There isn’t enough money [for the public services] yet we can find billions of pounds for the bankers just like that’. It demonstrates to me that whoever has muscle at the end of the day gets what they want. It’s a jungle out there. That is why I make no excuses about taking industrial action to look after our members.” As a daily Tube traveller, Mr Crow suffers from his own industrial action. “I know how frustrating it is, but when people come up and complain about delays I say — ‘I don’t run the Tube, I only represent the workers’.” Big sporting events, such as the Olympics, should not, he insists, be protected from strikes. Nor will his union give Gordon Brown a break in the run-up to the general election. “We used to batten down the hatches before an election but, because Labour have not done anything for us, if something happens right up to polling day we are going to look after our members.” The RMT no longer helps to fund Labour. There are, Mr Crow said very few of his members who back the party any more. He is scathing about the Prime Minister. “Labour, Tory, Lib Dems are all the same under their suits. They all support privatisations and anti-union laws. The political debate now is all about who is going to cut more from public spending. Brown and Blair just masqueraded as Labour and then put the knife into the unions.” Jon Cruddas and Harriet Harman are, in his view, the best of a bad bunch. “It’s not about coming over all smiley, but having policies that are in tune with working people. Political parties represent classes of people and if you stop representing your class and they feel under-represented, they will start going somewhere else. Where they are drifting at the moment is to the BNP.” Now Mr Crow is planning a new challenge to the political elite. The unions, he says, are planning to set up an alliance to stand candidates at the next general election. The RMT has already had six meetings in the past three months with representatives from other unions, pensioners groups, student bodies and green campaigners. “If we don’t believe that any of the candidates are good, there may be an alliance that comes together. We would be putting up policies that we believe people want. What our members vote for is their democratic right, but certainly we can’t just sit back and say vote Labour.” He cannot lead the alliance himself — “my rules restrict me from standing at a general election,” he says — but he can help with the manifesto and fundraising, while his preferred policies are clear. “I would like to see taxes go up massively for the rich, I’d abolish all private education and all private medical care. I would do away with the Royal Family — that’s not to say they’d be executed but why should those people have a privileged place in society?” Mr Crow is proud to be a class warrior. He thinks John Prescott, the former RMT man who once rented a flat from the union, sold out when he said that everyone was middle class. “He doesn’t represent the workers, he came here on the eve of the Iraq war with two armed bodyguards and said ‘Bob can you sort out my bath at home it’s leaking?’. What does middle class mean? At the end of the day you are a worker or you are an employer. Either you own the production, or you work the production.” This self-appointed champion of the workers has no Old Etonian friends. “People with titles don’t often mix with my company,” he says. “I don’t mind them, though. One thing I can’t stand is snobbery and snobbery works both ways — rich looking down at poor and poor looking up at rich saying ‘he speaks a bit different’. It doesn’t bother me if they have a privileged background. Tony Benn is one of my heroes. Fidel Castro was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.” Life and times Name Bob Crow Born Wapping, East London, June 13, 1961 Family Father a London docker. Crow lives in Woodford, East London, with his partner, Nicola, and their teenage daughter. Nicola has a son and a daughter from a previous relationship. Crow also has a daughter from a previous relationship. Education Kingswood High, Hainault Career 1978 Joins London Underground as a track worker and makes tea; 1979 Joins National Union of Railwaymen (NUR); 1980 NUR scholarship to Labour Party Summer School; 1984 NUR Youth Award winner; 1993-2002 secretary, London Underground branch; 1992 elected assistant general secretary of RMT; 1997 leaves the Communist Party; 2001 is attacked in his home by two men with an iron bar — he blames the attack on “hired employer muscle”; 2002 elected general secretary of RMT Quick fire Pork pies or pasties? Both Bull dog or Labrador? I’ve got a Staffordshire bull terrier Hurricanes or tornados? I suppose a hurricane’s better Scotland or Spain? If it’s the Western Isles of Scotland that’s better than Spain Churchill or Lenin? Lenin Mars or Venus? Mars is a lot more tempting Jane Austen or Charles Dickens? Dickens ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh and for the record this George Orweillan Social Democrat (although it is a bit like being asked by the SAW's John Kramer how I would like to be killed) I'd rather support the utterly repugnant BNP's Nick Griffin than this Commie bast*rd (if he said he was a Marxist I would have a greater degree of sympathy), because at least his hero Winston Churchill was not the instigator of the communist USSR state and their 5 year plans, purges, deportations, state trials, Siberian Gulag Labour Camps and the massive famines as a result of the pig headed Collectivisation of the Soviet Union agriculture that resulted in the deaths of 48-60 million of its own citizens between 1922 and 1953. I had massive sympathy for the miners because I could see what their cause was about, it was such a shame they had such an idiot leading them (Arthur Scargill) into an abyss via a collision course with the evil Margaret Thatcher, and as a result helped enable Thatcherism via the assistance of Murdoch Inc to rule for 18 years in the UK. But I have much less sympathy for the Postal Workers because there practises quite frankly belong to the days of the Black & White Minstrel Show and Love Thy Neighbour. When many people employed in the private sector are having to undergo net pay cuts (either less money or pay freezes with longer hours) then it is little wonder I'm part of the 89% of the Great British Public who does not support their strike. The world as moved on; Communism was a complete failure. Capitalism is far from perfect, but compared to Crowe's communism, its a no brainer why most of the UK does not support him or their strike action. Bob Crow is no class warrior, he is the enemy of the working class because his policies are so extreme they are used by as a justification by the establishment to enslave the working classes because no sane person can support this "social terrorism" because he makes the Gordon Gecko's of the world seem not so bad. No doubt if he had had his way he would have stopped the sale of council houses in the 80's. He is a Luddite and a self serving trade union leader on £73K (up from £63K two years ago) a year plus expenses of around 18K, he is certainly not serving the long term interests of his members, any more than a certain Arthur Scargill did!! Where is he now?? The same place as Crow is going to end up, in disgrace in more than financially comfortable retirement after marching his members into an abyss like lemmings over the cliff to oblivion. Whilst the British working classes end up picking up the bill. I should add before Scott verbally assaults me again, that I live less than a mile from (one of if not) the biggest sorting office in the South West of the country in terms of post sorting, and a significant number of those employed frequent the same public house I use whom I regularly talk to on first name terms. I can tell you that most of them do not support the strike (most of them abstained rather than vote in favour or against strike action) because their sorting office has been rather more progressive in changing working practises (due to having a decent Management/Union Reps relationship in that office) compared to the South East and North of the country, but unfortunately they seem more aware of what is going on in the rest of the country and how the post is not a monopoly anymore and how this strike action can only destabilise their longer term job employment future. Winston Churchill: "The one thing I've learnt from history is that people learn nothing from history".
October 22, 200915 yr No Rich, Churchill wasn't the instigator of the USSR's crimes, he was just the violent defender of the empire which was responsible for the deaths of far far more than 60 million people... Though of course two wrongs don't make a right. Ever read Marx? Because it really does f*** me off every time someone uses Stalin as an example of communism...communism IS NOT mutually exclusive with authoritarianism. Not that I'm a communist, but still, done properly it is far far preferable to fascism... Oh, and I would say that it was the Falklands that enabled Thatcher's reforms, the miners' strike was just a symptom while the jingoistic popularity the bitch accrued from the war was the cause. And why exactly is Crow getting mentioned so much? :lol: He's a unionist but he has nothing to do with this strike so if anything it just supports the argument that most people don't actually care about the conditions, they're just anti-unions and stuck up Murdoch's ass...
October 23, 200915 yr ..And yet again Richard confuses Lenin, with STALIN.... :rolleyes: Stalin was the one with the 5 year plans you prat.... :rolleyes: Lenin actually brought in the New Economic Policy, which was an infinitely more sensible economic policy than the one Stalin imposed, Lenin even allowed some Private ventures to continue, Stalin's Five Year Plans and full Collectivisation came in after Lenin's death, his was actually about the first Administration in Europe to decriminalise Homosexuality, a damn sight sooner than the UK did, and he spoke out very openly against Anti-Semitism (funnily enough, those views were then suppressed by STALIN), and he did a lot more for women in Soviet Russia than a lot of other nations did, Stalin censored a lot of what Lenin actually said.... How about you actually GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT SOMETIME...????? As for the Postal workers, read this and stop spouting your rubbish about how things are all nice and hunky dory with the management of Royal Mail.... A letter from a postman tags: UK postal service CWU Royal Mail strikes A Royal Mail worker describes the background to the 2009 national strike vote, including details of how managers have been manipulating the figures to justify cuts. Old people still write letters the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a biro, folding up the letter into an envelope, writing the address on the front before adding the stamp. Mostly they don’t have email, and while they often have a mobile phone – bought by the family ‘just in case’ – they usually have no idea how to send a text. So Peter Mandelson wasn’t referring to them when he went on TV in May to press for the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, saying that figures were down due to competition from emails and texts. I spluttered into my tea when I heard him say that. ‘Figures are down.’ We hear that sentence almost every day at work when management are trying to implement some new initiative which involves postal workers like me working longer hours for no extra pay, carrying more weight, having more duties. It’s the joke at the delivery office. ‘Figures are down,’ we say, and laugh as we pile the fifth or sixth bag of mail onto the scales and write down the weight in the log-book. It’s our daily exercise in fiction-writing. We’re only supposed to carry a maximum of 16 kilos per bag, on a reducing scale: 16 kilos the first bag, 13 kilos the last. If we did that we’d be taking out ten bags a day and wouldn’t be finished till three in the afternoon. ‘Figures are down,’ we chortle mirthlessly, as we load the third batch of door-to-door catalogues onto our frames, adding yet more weight to our bags, and more minutes of unpaid overtime to our clock. We get paid 1.67 pence per item of unaddressed mail, an amount that hasn’t changed in ten years. It is paid separately from our wages, and we can’t claim overtime if we run past our normal hours because of these items. We also can’t refuse to deliver them. This junk mail is one of the Royal Mail’s most profitable sidelines and my personal contribution to global warming: straight through the letterbox and into the bin. ‘Figures are down,’ we say again, but more wearily now, as we pile yet more packages into our panniers, before setting off on our rounds. People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card. According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false. If the figures are down, how come I can’t get my round done in under four hours any more? How come I can work up to five hours at a stretch without time for a sit-down or a tea break? How come my knees nearly give way with the weight I have to carry? How come something snapped in my back as I was climbing out of the shower, so that I fell to the floor and had to take a week off work? So who’s right? Are the figures down or aren’t they? The Royal Mail couldn’t lie, could it? Well no, maybe not. But it can manipulate the figures. And it can avoid telling the whole truth. One thing you probably don’t know, for instance, is that the Royal Mail is already part-privatised. It goes under the euphemism of ‘deregulation’. Deregulation is the result of an EU directive that was meant to be implemented over an extended period to give mail companies time to adjust, but which this government embraced with almost obscene relish, deregulating the UK mail service long before any of its rivals in Europe. It means that any private mail company – or, indeed, any of the state-owned, subsidised European mail companies – is able to bid for Royal Mail contracts. Take a look at your letters next time you pick them up from the doormat. Look at the right-hand corner, the place where the Queen’s head used to be. You’ll see a variety of different franks, representing a number of different mail companies. There’s TNT, UK Mail, Citypost and a number of others. What these companies do is to bid for the profitable bulk mail and city-to-city trade of large corporations, undercutting the Royal Mail, and then have the Royal Mail deliver it for them. TNT has the very lucrative BT contract, for instance. TNT picks up all BT’s mail from its main offices, sorts it into individual walks according to information supplied by the Royal Mail, scoots it to the mail centres in bulk, where it is then sorted again and handed over to us to deliver. Royal Mail does the work. TNT takes the profit. None of these companies has a universal delivery obligation, unlike the Royal Mail. In fact they have no delivery obligation at all. They aren’t rival mail companies in a free market, as the propaganda would have you believe. None of them delivers any mail. All they do is ride on the back of the system created and developed by the Royal Mail, and extract profit from it. The process is called ‘downstream access’. Downstream access means that private mail companies have access to any point in the Royal Mail delivery network which will yield a profit, after which they will leave the poor old postman to carry the mail to your door. So if ‘figures are down’ that doesn’t mean that volume is down. Volume, at least over that last few miles from the office to your door, is decidedly up. But even assuming that Mandelson was telling the truth, that volume really is down by 10 per cent, the fact is that staff levels are down even more, by 30 per cent. That still means each postman is doing a whole lot more work. There are more part-time staff now. No one is taken on on a full-time basis any more. There are two grades of part-time workers: those working six-hour shifts and those working four hours. The six-hour staff prepare their own frame – their workstation, divided into roads and then numbers, with a slot for each address – but they don’t do any ‘internal sorting’ (this is the initial sorting done when the mail comes into the office). The four-hour part-timers come in and – in theory at least – pick up their pre-packed bags and go straight out. They are hardly in the office at all. This means that the full-timers have to pick up the slack. They are supposed to prepare the frames, sort out the redirections, bundle up the mail and put it into the sacks for the part-timers to take out, as well as doing all the internal sorting, and preparing their own frames: all in the three hours or so before they go out on their rounds. When I first started working at the Royal Mail every postman prepared his own round. These days maybe a third of the staff are part-time. It’s the full-timers who are on the old-fashioned, water-tight contracts, with full pension entitlement, the ones whose pension fund is such a nightmare for the Royal Mail’s finances. As well as being invariably part-time, new staff are on flexible contracts without pension rights. The pension fund deficit was £5.9 billion last year and is predicted to rise to £8 or £9 billion next year. The deficit is the main reason various people in positions of authority within the government and the Royal Mail were suggesting the partial sell-off earlier in the year. These people included Adam Crozier, the chief executive, and Jane Newell, the chair of the pension fund trustees, as well as the business secretary, Peter Mandelson. But a partial sale of the Royal Mail wouldn’t get rid of the pension deficit. No private investor would take it on. Which means that, whether the Royal Mail remains in public hands or is partly or fully privatised in the future, the pension deficit will always remain the tax-payer’s obligation. Meanwhile there is increasing tension in Royal Mail offices up and down the country. There was a strike in 2007, and a national agreement on ‘pay and modernisation’, but this year has seen management constantly implementing new practices, putting more and more pressure on the steadily dwindling ranks of full-timers. The latest innovation being forced on an unwilling workforce is the collapsing of frames. Let me explain what this means. Each frame represents a round or a walk. Letters are sorted on the frame, and then bundled up to take out onto the walk. But mail delivery is a seasonal business. Traffic varies throughout the year. Around Christmas it is at its highest. In the summer months, when the kids are out of school, the volume drops. This is known as ‘the summer lull’. So a national agreement was reached between the union and the management to reduce the number of man-hours in each office during the summer months. And the way this was done was to collapse one of the frames. One frame in the office would no longer have a specific postman assigned to it, but would be taken out by all the postmen in the office on a rotating basis. This meant an average of ten or 15 minutes extra work every day for every postman in the office. This agreement was meant to apply to only one frame and for the summer period only. Now this has changed. There is increasing pressure to collapse more and more frames – that is, to get the same number of postmen to do larger amounts of work – and not just in the summer months but over the whole year. Management are becoming noticeably more belligerent. For some weeks now the managers have been bullying and cajoling everyone in our office, saying that a second frame would have to be collapsed – ‘figures are down’ – and that the workforce would have to decide which frame that would be. Everyone refused. Collapsing a frame would mean that one person would have to move frames, while another person on a ‘flexible’ contract would lose his job altogether. No one wanted to be responsible for making that kind of decision. No one wanted to shaft their workmates. And then last week it was announced, on the heaviest day of the week, and without notice, that a second frame was going to be collapsed anyway, regardless of our opinion. When the shop steward put in a written objection it was ignored. Such was the resentment and the chaos in the office that a lot of mail didn’t get delivered that day, and what was delivered was late. If a postman fails to deliver a letter, it is called ‘deliberate withholding of mail’ and is a sackable offence. When management are responsible, it is considered merely expedient. There’s a feeling that we are being provoked, and that this isn’t coming from the managers in our office – who aren’t all that bright, and who don’t have all that much power – but from somewhere higher up. Everyone is gearing up for a strike. The truth is that the figures aren’t down at all. We have proof of this. The Royal Mail have been fiddling the figures. This is how it is being done. Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes. These are a standard size, big enough to carry a few hundred letters. The mail is sorted from these boxes, put into pigeon-holes representing the separate walks, and from there carried over to the frames. This is what is called ‘internal sorting’ and it is the job of the full-timers, who come into work early to do it. In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains, decided on by national agreement between the management and the union. That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150. This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide. Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. Our office was one of them. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail. This, then, explains how the Royal Mail can say that the figures are down, although every postman knows that volume is up. The figures are down all right, but only because they have been manipulated. Like many businesses, the Royal Mail has a pet name for its customers. The name is ‘Granny Smith’. It’s a deeply affectionate term. Granny Smith is everyone, but particularly every old lady who lives alone and for whom the mail service is a lifeline. When an old lady gives me a Christmas card with a fiver slipped in with it and writes, ‘Thank you for thinking of me every day,’ she means it. I might be the only person in the world who thinks about her every day, even if it’s only for long enough to read her name on an envelope and then put it through her letterbox. There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service. For most of the Royal Mail management – who rarely, if ever, come across the public – it is the first. To the delivery officer – to me, and people like me, the postmen who bring the mail to your door – it is more than likely the second. We had a meeting a while back at which all the proposed changes to the business were laid out. Changes in our hours and working practices. Changes to our priorities. Changes that have led to the current chaos. We were told that the emphasis these days should be on the corporate customer. It was what the corporations wanted that mattered. We were effectively being told that quality of service to the average customer was less important than satisfying the requirements of the big businesses. Someone piped up in the middle of it. ‘What about Granny Smith?’ he said. He’s an old-fashioned sort of postman, the kind who cares about these things. ‘Granny Smith is not important,’ was the reply. ‘Granny Smith doesn’t matter any more.’ So now you know. Roy Mayall, a pseudonym (obviously), has worked as a postman for the last five years. This article originally appeared as a letter in the London Review of Books, 8 October 2009. Pretty much sums up a lot of what I'm being told by my friends who are working for Royal Mail... And so bloody what if you're drinking in a pub with a few people from ONE particular sorting office.... Big deal.... The views of one sorting office dont represent the views of the organisation as a whole do they....? The facts remain that the Strike was voted for by a margin of 3 to 1, who, exactly, voted for Her Royal Highness "Lord" fukkin' Mandelson to go around tinkering with the service...?? In fact, has Mandelson EVER been voted into Public Office...??? He's certainly been disgraced on MORE THAN ONE occasion. Say what you like about Bob Crow, his Union Membership actually VOTED for him to represent them, and continue to do so, and it's the same for those in charge of the CWU.... This strike is DEMOCRATIC, which is more than can be said for Mandelson's "mandate"..... My friends work in several DIFFERENT Offices around the country, a few in London, one or two in the North, and I still stay in contact with a few of my former work colleagues in Dundee, so, covering a pretty wide area really, they all say the same thing, and they're all completely fukkin' fed up with this sh!t from Management and the Government....
October 23, 200915 yr And is it just me, or has Rich gotten far more right-wing/Daily Mail-esque over the past couple of years? :heehee: Nope it's not just you.... :lol:
October 23, 200915 yr No Rich, Churchill wasn't the instigator of the USSR's crimes, he was just the violent defender of the empire which was responsible for the deaths of far far more than 60 million people... Spot on... I cant defend Churchill's crimes against humanity in defence of "King and Empire" anymore than I can defend Hitler's "Third Reich".... Churchill gets credit for leading us in a war against the Nazis, but, at the end of the day, without a war, he was a LOUSY leader.... If WW2 had never happened, then Churchill would've gone down as one of the worst leaders this country ever had....
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