The next strikes are on:

Friday 6 November – 24 hours from 3am – all functions (Mail Centres, Network, Delivery Offices)

Monday 9 November – 2 hours from 3am – all functions (Mail Centres, Network, Delivery Offices)

Visit our Next Strikes page for details on how to find your local picket line and when to go!

Who delivered the first Pegasus* walk revision in London without CWU or  local involvement?  You did.

Who started using collection staff to perform delivery work?  You did.

Who delivered changes through executive action?  You did.

Who introduced less than part time working? You did.

Trevor ends by saying that thanks go from him and the Directors – showing that this determination to impose changes without any sort of negotiation is an attitude that goes right to the top.  Let’s hope the public realise as soon as possible that Royal Mail workers aren’t striking because they want to: but because Crozier and pals are leaving no other option.

* Pegasus is software designed to calculate what routes delivery walks should take, and consequently how many of those routes there should be, how long they should take and how heavy bags should be.  We understand that Royal Mail uses Pegasus selectively: ignoring it when it gives a result with more, shorter routes that there are at present, only paying attention to its results when it means more money for them, and more work for posties!

Q. So what’s this all about then? Posties are just lazy aren’t they? And that’s why Royal Mail want to sort them out?

A. No! A Postman/woman’s job is one of the hardest jobs in the country – fact. No joke! Ten years ago your postie had 2 bags of mail to deliver each day, now your postie struggles to deliver 6-8 bags per day in the same hours. This is no exaggeration – work load has more than tripled in recent years. And believe it or not 60,000 jobs have been cut in the past 5 years at Royal Mail with the remaining staff (many now part-time) absorbing the resulting massive increase in workload.

Q. Oh come on – so why is the company saying you’re all lazy and have all these ‘Spanish Practices’ where you don’t do what you’re told or get loads of overtime money for doing nothing?

A. There are infact no so-called ‘Spanish’ practices (apologies to the Spanish) and there haven’t been any for years. When they did exist they did so with the blessing of management and some like the biggest, ‘job and finish’, were introduced by national management to encourage us to walk faster! The latest agreement with the union (2007 Pay and Modernisation) abolished “job and finish” as per company wishes. So this issue is simply propaganda to make us look bad and get the public on the company’s side. The managers in Royal Mail call the shots full stop and in fact they regularly threaten posties with the sack if they say they can’t cope and have too much work to do. All overtime has to be signed off by managers, as you’d expect, and many offices have an overtime-ban meaning it simply is not paid under any circumstances. This is a modern highly structured UK company here, they have a tight reign on all goings on and far from being lazy, posties regularly work-on for nothing – often against their will, slogging their guts out because managers have them fearing for their job.

Q. You’re joking right?! The Managers aren’t that bad?

A. No! Royal Mail managers rule with a rod-of-iron and have been bullying and threatening staff for years. Multiple cases have been officially reported in every office and some complaints upheld, but the threats continue. In a typical large delivery office of say 100 posties up to ¼ (usually the part-timers) will be routinely threatened into working past their hours – for nothing.  The rest will rush rounds as quick as they can to avoid confrontations with managers or having to beg to be paid for overtime. It’s very common for overtime payments to never appear in wage packets even after repeated reminders.

Q. I just can’t believe this. You’re saying postmen don’t swan about doing whatever they want telling managers where to go?

A. Absolutely not, on my mother’s life. The opposite, is in fact, the case. Postmen fear for their jobs daily and rush round doing more work than 3 postmen did 10 years ago – and now the managers want even more. That’s what this is all about. We are treated like dirt, threatened daily, work for nothing, we’re given enough mail to kill a donkey and still the company wants’ to make more cuts.  When postmen have accidents at work due to rushing round or by tripping while looking at the bundle of mail when walking, (instead of stopping to check it which we no longer have time for) we are actually reprimanded and put on a warning process that in 3 steps leads to the sack. Threatened with the sack for trying to get the job done in unrealistic time spans! A postie works harder than you would believe; otherwise he/she has pay suspended or is sacked or bullied into giving up the job.

Q. OK so if that’s true, why do I get everyone’s mail except my own?! Posties these days couldn’t care less and throw letters in any old door.

A. Well the answer is simple – with 3 times the workload of your old-fashioned postman the modern postie doesn’t have the time to check the mail properly. Simple as that. Your postie is expected to do 4 to 5hours of delivery work in 3 1/2 hours. That’s all they are given and as a result corners have to be cut. So not all the letters can be checked, packets are dumped on doorsteps, hedges and walls are jumped over, lawns are run across and vaguely addressed mail that the postman used to be able to deliver by asking around is now regularly destroyed or sold off by the company! And not only is there more mail than ever now but rounds have been made bigger for many, many posties in the past 18months – going up from 500 to 7-800 houses for each postie and this increase in round size is being rolled out nationally. It’s a result of the Pegasus computer program which is being unfairly programmed to walk speeds of up to 5 miles an hour.

Q. Hold on, your saying there is MORE mail than ever? Royal Mail say it’s dropping 10% every year as a result of the internet and texting?

A. That’s a complete lie. Nationally, mail volume is measured by counting the number of boxes of mail that arrive at a delivery office. The number of boxes is multiplied by the average number of letters per box to get a total figure. Now here’s the clever part – until recently the number of letters in each box was estimated at around 200. That number was arbitrarily and without consultation with the workforce or union reduced to 150. So overnight mail volumes dropped by 25% – now THAT’S magic. In response, the union had random counts done over a period of weeks and the average number of letters per box was found to be… 256. Other independent counts from individual postmen have found boxes contain from 230-290 letters each. But there’s nothing the union can do to redress the balance, the new figure of 150 still stands and the big lie continues. If you ask any postman about mail volume he/she will say there is significantly now more mail (volume and weight) then ever, compared to 3, 5 or 10 years ago. On top of that the ‘Mail Volume’ figure Royal Mail bang on about totally ignores the number of packets coming into the system from home shopping and the internet. These are very, very profitable for the company meaning postmen now have 3 to 5 times more packets than ever before!

Q. I can’t believe this. OK but doesn’t there need to be staff cuts? Redundancies?  And the union are stopping this modernisation isn’t it?

A. As stated above, there has actually already been a cut of 60,000 staff in the past 5 years at Royal Mail. Yes that’s right, sixty-thousand less staff and in addition to that around 1/4 of the fulltime staff have been made part-time. And this was agreed to by the union! That’s because we recognise the introduction of new machines (which was also fully supported by the union!) reduced the numbers of staff needed. All redundancies were voluntary and cuts were made by not hiring replacement staff. Now, Royal Mail fail to mention this when they talk about ‘the union preventing modernisation’. The union is actively LEADING THE WAY and fully co-operative with realistic modernisation proposals, the implementation of machines and more efficient working that benefits the company and it’s dedicated workers. The problem now is that more and more cuts are being made, but now with no consultation or agreement, and they go way, way too far and benefit neither the customer’s service nor us the staff.

Q. OK, so which parts then of Royal Mail’s modernisation plan is the Union objecting to and how would the changes effect me anyway?

A. Hold on there, it is NOT the union that are making the objections here – it’s us, the employees.  The union do what we, the staff, ask them to do and it’s us Royal Mail workers up and down the land (76%) that are united in saying we’ve had enough. Please don’t see this as ‘another union trying to stuff the management’ issue. The CWU desperately want a successful Royal Mail just like the workers do. OK…Royal Mail’s idea of modernisation, very simply, is to give someone 3 ½ hours to do 4 to 5 hours of delivery work. Royal Mail’s idea of modernisation is going to make us give you a terrible service because we don’t have time to do the job properly – and we hate them for it. We are given 8 bags of mail to deliver when we would still struggle with 5. As a result we have to run around getting rid of mail anyway we can. That’s not good for you and we don’t enjoy it either, it’s an all-out slog and at the end of it you are shattered – and probably 45mins past your shift end with no overtime coming your way. That’s a daily reality for most postmen hence the large majority in the recent vote. What the company wants to do next would frighten you. As well as make rounds even longer (Arghhhhh!) they want to make most posties part-time casual staff on minimum wage. This would mean your postie would change regularly, he/she would not know you, would have no long-term commitment to the job or you the customer. We believe a temporary, transient workforce like this would do a terrible job, would dump mail by the barrel load and would inevitably steal mail. The job is often a very hard one and it needs a dedicated workforce with commitment and crucially, enough time to do the job properly – that’s what were fighting for, a fairer job for us, and a much better service for the customers we know would be the result.

Q. So what else does Royal Mail want to do that will effect the post? Don’t they want a quality service too?

A. That’s actually unlikely. Their actions prove that quality of service is NOT their main priority, far from it. Can you remember how many small Post Offices were closed recently by Royal Mail? 7,000 over the past few years? While admittedly society has changed and some were not self financing and needed to go, this massive closure program has not improved the public service Royal Mail is supposed to provide us with! Royal Mail want you to wait 48hrs before you can pick up the packet that they didn’t give to the postman to deliver to you! Well that WILL save the company a bit of money as they wont need as many packet delivery drivers and won’t need to employ ‘Dave’ that extra guy in the office who used to sort and label the packets the same day for customers to pick up. But who loses big-time there? All of us! Why should you have to wait 48hrs for your packets or get a ‘sorry you were out’ note when you were actually in waiting?! Why should you trek halfway across town to find the collection office opening hours have been cut and you can’t get your packet till next week. Why should you get your mail delivered to the wrong street never mind the wrong number? Surely a sign or an overworked postie?! Why do you need to join a queue 20 people deep on a Saturday to collect your packet? So that the company can make 500Million instead of 400Million pounds profit each year? Isn’t this public service, as vital to people’s lives and UK business as it is, important enough to warrant sufficient staff numbers?!?!  Does the UK need a better postal service, or is higher profits for the managers and private investors to share round more important? It’s your service, you decide. And there’s more! Have you recently been charged £1 handling fee on a letter (AND had to go collect it!) just because the postage was 1 or 2p short?!! That’s a result of the new and confusing ‘pricing in proportion’ rules.  We don’t understand the various price ranges either! It’s basically a scam to catch people out and make many thousands of £1 handling fee charges everyday. The same applies with international handling charges which have just doubled to £8 – por que? Again, profit is the driving force here NOT service. In terms of a future delivery force, as outlined above, Royal Mail management’s long-term aim is easily hired & fired part-time casual staff and students being the majority of the delivery workforce. This would lead to an amateurish, ill-informed (in terms of local knowledge), ever-changing group of unchecked workers losing your mail or worse, stealing it to supplement their terrible minimum-wage wages! Such staff need no pension provision which is convenient as the company are desperately trying to close the pension scheme to new staff. As we posties all say to ourselves regularly – ‘the public think the service is bad now, they ‘aint seen nuthin’ yet’.

Q. So Royal Mail want to cut and cut, what is their ultimate aim here for the postal service and why should I care?

A. OK we’re not stupid, we know the current management at Royal Mail were put in place to ‘costcut’ the company and ready it for privatisation. To some this is the ultimate way to make the service ‘better’. Well, ‘better’ for the public and ‘better’ for the board of directors at Royal Mail and private investors are almost certainly mutually exclusive concepts. You may be shocked to hear that the CEO of Royal Mail, Adam Crozier, is the highest remunerated civil servant in the UK.  Yes, that actually IS true. In an apparently ‘failing company’ the guy at the top gets around 3-4million pounds a year in wages and bonuses. And his mates on the board get plenty too with massive pension pots recently set up by them, for them. But the thing is, the company IS NOT FAILING. This year profits were announced of…321Million pounds for Royal Mail Plc. Now if posties WERE swanning around doing not much then that would be a great advert for swanning about not doing much! But infact the story is MUCH brighter than that. Last year the company had to pay 850Million pounds into their pension fund black-hole. Yes, so before that ‘unique’ cost the company made over a BILLION pounds profit. Actually, lets be precise here, 1BILLION 171MILLION pounds profit – in one year. Keep on swanning posties! And before you pick your jaw up off the ground, during the past few years there have been huge one-off investments in new machinery meaning profits will be even higher in the future. All this, the company and the government wants to hand over to private investors via privatisation. They certainly want to privatise the company wholly but in more publicly acceptable stages. And if this happens your service will steadily disintegrate while all the profits will be taken away by Dutch Post aka TNT or some other organisation. You should care about this because your service is likely to get much, much worse in terms of reliability, timeliness and security.

You’re still reading this? Well done! Long isn’t it?

Q. So the company is actually creating vast amounts of profit? Then why is this strike happening?!?

A. Two answers – the pension-fund black hole and ‘down-stream access’. The pension-fund black hole varies but stands at around 3-10Billion pounds on current forecasts. This massive shortfall in the fund was cased by a 13year ‘pension holiday’ that Royal Mail took from 1990-2003. During this period postal staff still made THEIR pension contributions but the company didn’t pay their share into the pension fund. This was allowed by a change in pension law – introduced by Margaret Thatcher – and the result is a massive black-hole that, as shown above, absorbs most of Royal Mails profit each and every year. So the black-hole is a result of mismanagement (and poor legislation) and we believe therefore that Royal Mail’s owner – the UK government – is directly responsible for allowing it to grow to such a devastating level and should pay it off. If it did so Royal Mail would be one of the most truly-profitable companies in the UK – that’s because it’s workforce are efficient and extremely hard-working. (Currently the government ARE stating they will pay off the black-hole but only if the company is privatised. This means the tax payer pays off the deficit but then private investors reap the huge future rewards while we are cut to a part-time workforce on minimum wages! And this from a ‘Socialist’ government! In the not so distant past the government made massive revenues from Royal Mail and that should be the case again – private companies should not be taking the profits of this public service once it gets back into being a great institution.) And secondly, ‘down-stream access’ (introduced by Labour Party liberalisation of the postal market!) allows companied like TNT and UK Mail to strip massive amounts of revenue from Royal Mail. Before liberalisation of the postal market a letter may have made Royal Mail 10p profit, now delivering TNT’s own processed mail may make the company 3p or even make a 2p loss! These companies have been allowed to ‘asset-strip’ the postal service as they take the most profitable parts of the delivery network and Royal Mail are left with the less profitable parts – i.e. delivering to the Outer Hebrides, quiet housing estates or collecting from rural post boxes. Despite these two massive wedges squeezing Royal Mail the staff are so efficient and hardworking they STILL made a 321Million pound profit last year. How can this be done by lazy postmen swanning around doing no work?! Incredible!! It isn’t possible is it? The fact is, postmen work hard, harder than most other workers in the UK and the balance sheet proves it.

Q. How can you say posties work hard? Give their cushy jobs to the unemployed they would jump at the chance.

A. Quite a few posties are ex-services and many have a wealth of other work-experience. Without fail most of these guys see the job as the hardest but also the most unrewarding job they have ever done. In short, it’s a crap job and has been since the second delivery was abolished. The work-load is too high and the managers bully and harass you regularly. In one delivery office in the South recently 10 new part-timers were taken on after voluntary redundancies of full-time staff. Within 2weeks 8 of these new starters had left. They couldn’t handle the sheer volume of work and preferred to go back to the dole. It’s taken months and many new starters and people leaving to eventually fill the positions and it’s been mostly hard-working Polish nationals who have had the determination to take this tough job on. All those new starters left without managerial harassment, they were actually given encouragement, unlike the regular postie who is berated and bullied sometimes daily. If the job was that cushy would this happen and would we be striking on no-pay? If it was so cushy why, with 1.6% of the UK workforce do Royal Mail postal workers have 10% of the UK’s musculoskeletal work-inflicted injuries?

Q. OK OK I’m getting the idea now. Funny, I thought what the papers were saying was actually true! Anything else you want to moan about then?

A. Yes actually. Our retirement age is being upped to 65 and though that seems to be the norm these days this job involves hard manual labour and it’s not right to tell a 60 year old he/she has to struggle on for another 5 years to get their full pension. If you have a look at a lot of the older guys in the job a high proportion of them have sciatica, dodgy backs, bad knees, limps or bad feet (and wild starring eyes – Ed.). The job takes it’s toll alright and 65 is not realistic, so most guys are being denied their hard-earned full pension because they won’t be capable of working to 65. Not right damn it, not by a long way.

Q. OK so you’ve said what Royal Mail want – now what does the Union want and is it unrealistic? I don’t have all day by the way.

A. No probs, I’ll keep it simple. The union want nothing – except to represent us posties. Believe it or not we employ the CWU to talk and negotiate with Royal Mail on our behalf because we are too busy walking round with overweight bags on our shoulders to do this ourselves! So what do the posties want? Shorter rounds. We want a fair and independently assesed workload so that no longer are we asked – or forced – to take out more heavy bags of mail than it is physically possible to deliver in the 3 1/2 hours we are given. For the sake of our health and wellbeing, and the quality of the service this is essential. In essence, we want an end to being expected to do 5 hours delivery work in 3 1/2 hours. If this single step was introduced – a fair independently assessd workload – every postie in the country would be back at work. That is guaranteed because every postie at Royal Mail is hard working and dedicated to the job – otherwise they would have left a long time ago as many have. Now would that bankrupt the company? No. Profits are massive as said and we work hard and efficiently, and are ready to embrace new indoor sorting machines to ensure the profits remain massive. The company is strong and employing more delivery-only postmen (part-timers) will not make this company fail. In fact it will substantially improve the service and bring residential and business customers back – what we all want! We are not unrealistic, we’re not talking about going back to 2bag deliveries, but 8 bags in 3 1/2 hours, 800 houses, 70-100KG of mail per delivery is simply not sustainable, in fact it’s insane. Hard working staff are being forced by threats of being sacked or seriously disciplined to work-on and deliver past their hours for nothing. That is immoral, it’s everyday at Royal Mail, it’s wrong, illegal, and it must stop. In the mail centres the guys and girls there simply want assurances they wont in large numbers be sacked without warning or consultation. More efficient machines are the way forward, the staff and the union agree, but the answer to their introduction is not to suddenly sack tens of thousands of dedicated long-term staff! A restructuring plan is the solution not executive action which will see massive sackings when staff could be moved around the company into deliveries or take voluntary reduced hours. Simple as that, indoor staff want assurances, job security, respect at work and no more harassment and bullying. That’s the story of this strike. No kidding, that’s it. Unreasonable? We think not. We know the company has a huge potential for a great service AND massive profits and that’s what we want, respect at work, a fair work-load and a successful company.

So in summary if you want Royal Mail’s wonderful service that you rely on daily to get even worse (and it CAN get a lot, lot worse) then support the current Royal Mail management team and their standard-bearer Lord Peter Benjamin Mandelson (aka Baron Mandelson). Who’s laughing at the back there? And, if you want your service to get better (and it CAN as you probably know get a LOT better) then support the guys and girls who know the job, do it everyday and make huge profits for the company by being efficient and hard-working. Vote now! Support a fair work-load for postal workers and your great service will follow. That’s 100% Postie guaranteed!!

Thanks for reading, and we hope your postal service remains that, a service, and not a disservice.

Written by a postie with contributions for accuracy from many, many experienced posties at…

www.RoyalMailChat.co.uk

From the Class Against Class website.

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.

Workplace activists are equally determined to resist the intolerable impact on their members’ incomes and working lives. In some ways, it’s an irreconcilable impasse between the logic of neo-liberal capitalism and the reality of an industry which can only rationally be run as a public service. As our Divisional Rep puts it, “There’s a War Going On” – and as the workplace rep comments ruefully on the 2007 strike, “We had Royal Mail, and we let it go”.

There’s a war going on…

Mark Palfrey, CWU Divisional Rep (2nd October 2009)

Myself and another divisional officer, Martin Walsh, represent 12,000 CWU members across London. London is most to the forefront in the dispute. There are other areas of the country, Scotland, Bristol, Plymouth, areas of the West country, but predominantly it’s London. The reason for that, we would say, is that our members enjoy the best terms and conditions, have the best agreements, and that’s where Royal Mail (RM) have attacked the hardest.

We’ve been in this dispute now for over 15 weeks. How it started is very complex, but it’s been simplified by the media and RM saying what the dispute is about is our “failure to modernise”. In fact, our last national dispute in 2007 was resolved by an agreement called Pay and Modernisation, and on the back of that agreement we entered into local negotiations which involved the loss of a significant amount of jobs. On the basis of us improving attendances, increasing productivity and reducing costs, what we got out of the agreement was improvements in people’s terms and conditions, particularly people moving onto four-day weeks without loss of pay. That had to go through an audit process guaranteeing that it was cost-effective, it achieved savings, etc. RM signed up to that in October 2007.

But since then RM has made a number of policy changes. One is they will no longer “Pay for Change”. We previously had deals where the staff would share in the savings that RM made, in the form of a bonus – so for instance if they saved £20,000 operationally in a sorting office, RM would receive £10,000 and the staff would get £10,000 between them. It was 50-50. But now they will no longer Pay for Change, as they call it. Basically they decided that they needed to rip out cost on the front line, and London would be the area that they would target. They would revert our members back from any four-day weeks back to a five-day week and reduce earnings and jobs. So we made the decision in London that we weren’t going to have that.

Basically, RM completely went back on an agreement they had made – there’s no other way of putting it. They’ve broken their own agreement. They’ve broken the terms of the existing national agreement, and they’ve broken large numbers of the local agreements our branches have. Since about June of this year they’ve introduced what they call revisions, which are basically job reductions. They’ve done this by what they call executive action, which means without agreement.

Another issue is what they call “absorption”, which came in gradually after we defeated team working in the late 1990s. What that means is you’ve got to take on someone else’s round at no extra pay – if someone can’t do their round for whatever reason, their work is just “absorbed” into yours. What people are being asked to do are unreasonable levels of absorption. If you’ve got the right agreements, protection, you can do that, but that’s another thing RM have just run ahead with.

The dispute is degenerating into unprecedented levels of bullying and intimidation. RM has come up with its own unagreed work standards. They’re unachievable work standards that they’re bringing in, they’re not by agreement. RM and the media would let you believe that our people use “Spanish practices” and all this stuff – but we’ve seen thousands of jobs go, people are working harder and harder. In a typical delivery office a revision of work load will come in and our people are expected to do that work within the same time span, when it’s additional work. When they find out that they can’t, whether it’s a weight issue of carrying the mail or their work load is unmanageable, they are then bullied, intimidated, threatened and in a lot of cases taken off pay. That means they’re not paid for the day and threatened with being disciplined under the conduct code. People are filmed by managers using their mobiles whilst out delivering, and in work there’s a whole range of issues taken up by management in order to try to crush our members. The internal procedures are absolutely useless to deal with it – they’re only used against reps.

What it’s basically about is that each year now the RM budget is reduced by 10%, so each year each function, each office has to reduce its cost by 10%. We used to share in some of the bonus for achieving that, but now the only people who receive a bonus if those targets are achieved are the managers. The whole culture of the industry is based on achieving these targets, from Crozier at the top down – that’s how he earned £3m last year. So we’re a company that’s posted a profit of £25m during one of the worst economic recessions that the world has seen since the 1930s – and then offers its workers a nil per cent pay increase, has seen the closure of its final salary scheme, with no reward for productivity and the loss of 60,000 jobs since 2003, in the words of Adam Crozier himself.

A lot of our members have seen their pay reduced through loss of overtime and other factors by £4-6000. At the same time they have to work 46 days more a year – and work harder when they’re there. RM’s slogan is “It’s a Great Place to Work” – well, it’s no longer that. Workers are being put on jobs that they wouldn’t necessarily sign up for. We used to have what’s called a “re-sign” agreement based on seniority, meaning you can select your job, but now even when we haven’t agreed to it management have allocated jobs in a way that means, in some cases, people who’ve done 20 to 30 years in the job have been given the harder routes – things like that. Rank and file postal workers are very angry, very frustrated – they feel that they’ve been used by the company, not valued, they’ve seen their standard of living drop, no job security, pensions attacked. There’s a lot of anger, particularly anger towards this government.

Another major issue is the pension. The new chairman who’s been brought in, Donald Bryden, has already said that if the deficit is higher than previously posted, which it will be, anywhere between £10 and £15 billion, they will close the current scheme, so we are going to be in an even worse situation. That isn’t even the final salary scheme, that’s the replacement scheme – so that’s the end of it, finished, there will be no pension scheme.
The deficit is now £10-15bn, because RM had a 13-year holiday from contributions. But the assets of the current pension scheme are over £25bn – bigger than some economies in the Third World – so you can understand why the government would like to get its hands on it. And that would not cost the taxpayer one penny – we’re not asking the taxpayer to pay anything – we’re asking the government to underwrite our pensions, and that’s no more no less than they owe the company.

What happened a number of years ago was that RM were forced by PostCom to pay the current deficit back within 20 years – and in order to do that they have to pay £300m a year on top of their contributions. So that’s 30p of every pound in revenue that they get – that’s why they’re bankrupt. So RM management aren’t just nasty people – they’re running an industry that has been milked by government and placed under unfair competition by government.

That’s what is really hurting the business – the competition. The government has creamed off the mail to private companies and then put it back into our system for us to deliver at 13 pence a go, which means that you’ve got volume up and revenue down. None of these private companies would ever want to take over the running of the mail. What they’ve got is called Downstream Access where RM will actually post the mail, for 13p. It’s called the “Final Mile”. If you look at your letter that comes through your front door now, not many times will you see RM in the corner. I’m talking about average mail that’s generated from councils or gas and utilities – these companies now do our mail. So what we’ve got is unfair regulation where we’re subsidising the competition – it’s not a level playing field. These companies don’t want to deliver to council estates – they want the network, they want the mail centres, they want all the lucrative bits.
Now unless the government deal with that issue and make RM able to perform on a level playing field then we are just going to degenerate into this process where the end state is that the public see a later and later service. Less and less jobs, worse and worse service.

But RM top management buys into all this. What they’d like to do is to copy what’s called the Dutch model used by TNT, who run the Dutch post office – basically it’s a predominantly part-time workforce, mail is delivered at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, 87% of the people employed in Holland in the Post Office there are on 16-hour or less contracts. And that’s no way to run an industry. This is what the British public is set to suffer under “modernisation”. You used to get two deliveries a day. RM and the government then said that they were doing away with the second delivery. Well, they did away with the first delivery – you don’t get your mail at 8.30 am. They want to deliver that mail later, because the later they deliver the mail the more stuff they can put through the machines.

In RM, because it’s a 24-hr service, you have to have some form of plan and structure. But what RM have got is chaos management, where instead of sitting down and saying we need to plan deliveries, and the delivery time is going to be from 9 o’clock to 2 o’clock or whatever, so how do we then ensure that the work arrives in order to meet that schedule? But what we’ve got at the moment is just cost-driven, the business is looking to reduce costs, that’s what it’s always about.

Unions are often accused of surrounding themselves by militants – what Adam Crozier, the highest-paid public servant in the UK, has done is surrounded himself with hawks. You’ve got a situation where anyone who’s a bit pragmatic on the Board is seen as being “weak”. So we haven’t even got hawks and doves, we’ve got all hawks. And these people aren’t in it for the duration, they’re in it for five years, six years, eight years, and they move on. They don’t build anything, they don’t create anything, they just destroy what’s in front of them – the British Post Office, which for 350 years was the envy of the world. The bottom line dictates – there’s no looking at the service.
I’m not saying that the people we were dealing with 10, 15, 20 years ago were benevolent, but they came from a RM background. Some of them, their fathers had been postmen, they had been postmen, and they actually cared about the industry. I don’t believe these people care. They only care whether their targets have been achieved. If their targets are so far diluted that they can achieve them, then there’s millions of pounds to be earned for them. And that’s the way industry’s been created – in the health service, everywhere – everything’s based on targets. Budgets and targets are the mantra.

All the “Total Quality Management” values are there, they’re enshrined in the boardroom. In TQM everything’s against cost. If anything interferes with the bottom line, whatever you’re providing in your sorting office, if it “isn’t necessary” or it can be delayed. It’s what’s known as lean production – it’s come in from manufacturing industry to service industries like the Post Office. Part of it is supposed to be about “worker empowerment” – RM often go on about “empowerment”. But I’ve worked for RM since 1979, and I have never seen such a centrally controlled RM. From the top to the bottom, there is no deviation – if you deviate from their line you’re removed. The Iron Curtain may have been removed but it’s alive and well in RM and its name’s the RM board. And that’s how they operate

There are a lot of issues the public doesn’t realise. I haven’t got sympathy for RM, but I understand the problem – without government intervention there is no solution to the problems we’ve got. What we’ve got is unfair competition, introduced and sustained by the government since 2003, when regulation was brought in, then since 2006 when this government liberalised the UK postal market.

RM keeps claiming that the problem is a reduction in volume – there is a reduction, but not to the degree they’re saying. Are people using the Internet more? Using texts? Yes, of course they are. Are people sending emails? Yes, of course they are. But what’s equally generated out of all that is – there’s a jargon name for it now – Fulfilment. They call it Fulfilment where basically you go on Amazon, and we get a package. So we get the benefit. The profile of the mail is changing – it goes to packages and different types of advertisements and things.

We’re in a major recession. So of course revenue’s dropped, volume’s dropped. But if you look at the history of RM, you will see that it survives those dips, and as soon as the economy picks up people start advertising again. Whether or not it’ll ever go back to what it was previously I don’t know, but the problem is everything’s about short-termism. Nothing’s built to look at the future. It’s all aimed at downsizing and selling off the silverware, selling off the premises and relocating in some industrial estate in the middle of nowhere.

It was in response to all these problems that the London Division balloted our members in late June and got a 91% yes vote for strike action. Since then we’ve staged or will have staged fifteen 24-hour strikes. Even RM has admitted to our national negotiators that the strikes are still being supported by 95% of our members. That figure shows the level of support that we have had and continue to have. Some have taken more action, depending on what’s going on in each locality. Basically RM has declared war on its workforce and particularly the postal workers in London.

The members’ resolve has strengthened and hardened over the few last weeks. We saw a slight bit of drift after June, when the strike started, because the work tends to be lighter during the summer, but now the members are supporting the strikes just as much as they did in the outset, and those you speak to in the meetings are adamant. They’ve now lost over £1000 in wages, but they’re adamant that they’re going to see it out to the bitter end, and that’s before we even get into the national ballot declared on 8th October – we’re confident of getting a big Yes vote nationally on that. So our members’ resolve is magnificent, their support has been magnificent, and they understand the issues, that’s why they’re so strong.

Because of the privatisation issue that was going on last year, we passed an emergency motion at the 2009 CWU general conference that should privatisation go in we would cease to fund the Labour Party. That’s still on the stocks. However, because of all that’s gone on during the dispute, London postal workers have demanded that they be balloted on that issue. Under the rules we can only do that on a consultative basis, but we have, and the results are that overwhelmingly people blame the government. We don’t want to lose our political voice, but we feel that we should not be funding the Labour Party or “New Labour”. And that has come from the ordinary postal workers. It isn’t a political initiative from anyone, it isn’t being driven by what I would call the usual suspects, it’s come from the picket lines, it’s come from the sorting offices, and it’s come from their experience of what this government has done to our industry. It’s one of their main frustrations. Speak to any postal worker about what they think of RM, about the government, and they’ll tell you quite clearly.

There’s been a lot of public opposition to this dispute, helped along by the media. The notion is that postal workers are acting deliberately just to be disruptive. I know how false that is, because I have to deal with some of the hardships – terrible hardships people are going through. Some of our part-time members who only work 20 hours a week – when they take a day’s strike it’s a quarter of their pay gone. But they’re still solid, because of the issues. The struggle is not that we want to destroy this industry. We want to see a growing RM, but what the British public don’t realise is liberalisation was brought in to reduce the cost to big business.
How these top 50 companies – I’m talking about outfits like HSBC, massive, multi-multi-millionaire companies – were able to cut their costs in half…That wasn’t some European thing dreamt up by some bureaucrat in Brussels, it was worked up by big business – they went to our government. As a result of their so-called “liberalisation”, requested by big business, granted by this government, we’ve lost tens of thousands of jobs. Britain now, in my opinion – you tell me who’s got a good job? We ain’t all going to be nurses, we ain’t all going to be trained – you used to be able to go into gas, this that and the other – the only industry that’s still left for most what I’d call working class kids is something like the Post Office. Once you kill that, where do those people go?

There’s a war going on…We’re in a war with Royal Mail, a war that we must win.

“We Had Royal Mail – and Then We Let It Go”

By a North London rep.

Our office in North London is one of the “better” ones – we’ve hit our targets and saved Royal Mail (RM) significant amounts of money – right now with RM saving is the name of the game. But this year they came in and wanted more savings, and they’re cutting duties, so of course there was disagreement.

What used to happen is the company and the reps would discuss any change and the response would usually be a compromise, and if there’s no agreement it goes through stages – first stage agreement, second stage, the third stage is where the big boys come in, the full-time union reps and district managers, and they come to some arrangement. Very, very rarely they use Executive Action, which is when they just put in what they want.

Then they cut our overtime from 7 hours to 6 hours with no discussion – it was Executive Action. They came in – bypassed the union – just said “On this day we will do this” – just brought it in. So of course that angered the staff. Not only did they cut the overtime, they also cut down the rest day, which usually gets full pay, to 6 hours as well. Again, Executive Action. Didn’t speak to the union.

It means a deduction in our members’ pay. They were saying because it’s the summer months, there’s less work, we don’t need to do an hour’s sorting in the morning when we come in, or work your rest day or overtime, they take that away. You must come in at 8.00am for the overtime, instead of 6.00, and then just take the mail out. Because you’re coming in at 8.00, the walk should be sorted on the frame so all you have to do is wait for the mis-sort run – letters that get sorted wrongly. But of course the plan never works the way it should work.
Members are angry – all round London this is going on and even in some places worse than ours – and of course there’s a pay freeze as well. In October 2007, after the strike, we got a pay rise and bonus, then in 2009 a pay freeze. And what you’ve got to remember is RM is making record profits – the whole of RM is in the black for the first time. And of course the pensions are another thing as well. So when you add it all together I think people are really angry.

Even before the strikes started we decided to stop using our cars. People come in early because they want to finish early, and also they use their cars because that way they don’t have to wait for the vans to bring the mail out. You go into the sorting office, get the delivery, put it in your car. People stopped doing that and that caused uproar – it caused a substantial meltdown in the office. When they stopped using their own cars, our office didn’t have the facilities, i.e. the vans, to get the people out on time.

We call it “Do the Job Properly”. At the end of the day, it’s how the job ought to be done. It’s not even work-to-rule. We’re not going against what RM is saying – we’re having our breaks at the right time, not using our cars, coming in at six. But that caused big problems in our office. For a while people stopped doing any overtime, and of course there were times when duties were left over, not touched for one or two days. On the frames, not delivered. They called in the casuals but there was no way they could deliver it, so it was left in the office. If the postmen did that there would be instant dismissal. If I left work in the office, didn’t get it out, they’d call it “wilful delay” and I’d be sacked. But more than once, on a few occasions, duties were left in the office untouched for one or two days. We questioned management about the work, about the customers, and they said they couldn’t get it covered, so…They could not get it covered, so that was it.

Then we had the strikes – but in between that, they brought in what they called “absorption”. During the summer the volume of letters goes down, so they can collapse the duty, split it up between 5-8 people to take out before their own duties. So some workers have to do other workers’ work. They just say OK, you’re here, we’ll collapse it – you guys, you do that duty, 5-8 of you, and you go out, do that duty, come back to the office and take your own duty out.
You can imagine the workers’ reaction. They did it, but it caused big problems because the duty that is absorbed never gets done, so by the time they all came back to do their own duties they could not finish their duties in the time allotted. So work either did not go out, or they went out with the work and a lot of the work came back to the office.

So you could say all this stuff about mail being held up and all that being blamed on the postal workers was also due to absorption. It was. Absorption had a big effect, but of course RM wasn’t going to say that. It was going in conjunction with the strikes, but at the time absorption was hitting RM harder than any of the strikes.

But I don’t think that in particular was the one issue causing the most anger. I don’t think it’s just one thing. I think it’s their attitude. RM don’t want to talk to the union, they don’t care what you say, we’re bringing this in – Executive Action. There’s a set way of talking to the union which they’ve totally ignored.

But with the strikes, our daily work is a bit different than it was before. Now people come in and see all their work and I wouldn’t say they’re happy, but they see the amount of ways it’s really messed up RM and they’re quite jovial.

Of course, there’s also the issue of whether the union should go on funding Labour, the way the government have behaved. With the consultative ballot that the CWU in London has carried out, the general feeling is that we’ve been paying this money to Labour since they’ve been in power, 12 years now, and they’ve done nothing whatsoever for the postal service. It would have been better if that money was saved and put in a fund for strikes like this – then we’d have maybe some money to give to our workers.

In 1996, 1997, we had a strike over team working, and I think Mr Blair at the time told us to go back to work – he would not discuss it. We won that dispute, and team working went away, but since then it’s been a constant attack on the unions plus the pensions deficit, when RM went on a pensions holiday with the government knowing – and they were making profits all during that time. Maybe even record profits. So the question you ask is Why. No one’s ever explained it to us, no one’s really questioned why they did it. All they’ve said is It’s happened, that’s it, and we’ve got to pay for it, but no one’s said Well why did it happen?

60,000 jobs have gone in five years and still they’re seeking “change”. The 2007 strike was never fully finished. We had RM, and we let it go. We should have sorted it all out then. The union leaders caved in – the things we were fighting against then never went away – now we’re fighting again. Absorption, cuts in overtime, pensions.

The things we’re fighting against are the things they’ll say have got to stay in – that’s our biggest fear. That’s where it gets into an impasse, because the top management insist that what we won’t stand for is what has to go through. Even though the junior management know what’s going to work, the senior management won’t listen to them. We’ve got to win this next strike, we’ve got to get what we’re asking for, or this will never be resolved.

The site has been set up by a few strike supporters living in London, but we want it to become a resource for the movement: so send us updates and information.  Equally, if you’re a postal worker or an active supporter and want to help edit the site or write stories, let us know!