UK Royal Mail Postal Strike

[Harrison]

What do you all think of the UK Royal Mail Postal Strike taking place this week and possibly for more days in the coming weeks?

Distribution Centres are out on Strike on Thursday and Delivery Offices on Friday this week.

Further Strike action is to be announced closer to the time.

As some of you know I work for Royal Mail week day evenings in one of their main large distribution centres. And I completely disagree with these strikes.

All they will achieve in the end is the downfall of Royal Mail. If the unions continue to ballet for strike action then more business customers will turn away from the company to seek alternative way to distribute and deliver their business mail. And they won't come back once the strikes are over. They already lost some very big contracts such as Amazon after the last strikes took place.

And then the government will have the argument that Royal Mail is losing business customers, which will lead to a fall in revenue and therefore a fall in profits. This will ultimately lead to downsizing the workforce due to less volume of mail, meaning redundances. The main thing the union is telling everyone to go on strike for now to fight against.

So it is all a vicious circle with the unions and its members not being able to see what is and will happen.

And what will happen once this all takes place? The government will be able to renew their argument to sell off Royal Mail. This will allow an opposition mail operator such as TNT to buy the remains of Royal Mail, split it up and keep the best bits, reduce all remaining employees wages down to their own levels, and make everyone not needed redundant.

This could ultimately mean an end to the door to door postal service the UK currently enjoys, which is and has always been the best in the world.

This all saddens me greatly and I just hope some resolution can be reached before it is too late and both sides can reach an agreement.

As for the modernisation argument. This is complete crap. The centre I work at fully updated and modernised their equipment and working practices some time ago. We even installed a lot of brand new machines called Walk Sorting Machines, which sequentially sort the mail into a postman's route, so when the mail is delivered to the post office for delivery the Post Man doesn't even need to sort it into the order of his route as it is all done for him by the machines. Smart stuff.

 

[Firthy2002]

When these strikes started, I said that they were striking themselves out of a job.

We have a choice of private mail handling companies and couriers these days. As RM have already seen, customers can easily take their postal business elsewhere.

With hundreds of millions of items currently stuck in the system from the repeated strikes, I don't think people will forgive and forget anytime soon.

TNT have already said they'd like to deploy their own postpeople door-to-door. I say let them have a go.

 

[Powerpie5000]

I say just fire all the postal workers that go on strike and let Royal Mail employ people who are actually willing to work an easy job for a decent wage :nod: There are people out there who work harder for less than what Royal Mail pay per hour!

 

[Harrison]

You won't know this, but I am involved with Royal Mail, and know how things are going from the inside. I can state that there are no back logs of mail as being reported by the national news. The only offices really effected are London based and this is because they were striking weekly for months before the national strikes took place.

The Union has now put any further strikes on hold until the new year to stop problems over Christmas, so that is some good news for everyone.

The problem regarding taking postal business elsewhere is that no other mail handling company is prepared to go door to door for every address in the UK. TNT have mentioned they might start a door to door service, but this will only ever reach inner city addresses and no one in more rural locations, who are the people who really need a door to door postal service.

Secondly all other postal businesses are only geared up to process parcels. What do you think currently happens to all letters handled by TNT, business post and the other operators? The letters you get though your door with their postal marks on them? Do you think they handle them, sort them and deliver them to your door personally?

Wrong. TNT and the other companies collect these letters from their customers, and deliver them straight to the nearest Royal Mail distribution centre. Royal Mail them tip and sort these letters, run them through their own RM machines alongside the mail posted directly in Royal Mail post boxes. Royal Mail handle the other postal companes letters for the whole of the postal process after the other companies have collected the letters from their customers and delivered them to Royal Mail.

And for this Royal Mail make a loss. For example, if a business customer posts a Franked letter through the standard Royal Mail system as one of its own customers Royal Mail gets 36p for a first class item. All of this money can go towards processing and delivering that letter. In contrast if a letter is delivered to Royal Mail from TNT, then Royal Mail only get 13p from the cost TNT charge for the letter. However Royal Mail still have to process and deliver the letter in exactly the same way as their own letters which they get 36p for.

Not many from the general public know this.

 

[Kin Hell]

Striking in this day & age is just so militant in manner, it's my opinion those actually striking need to be without a job. So far as price structuring goes within Roayl Mail & Parcel Force, it sucks & is very much monopolized. I quoted a package to AndyLandy the other day where insuring up to £100 actually cost more via Parcel Force 48hrs than it did under Parcel Force 24hrs?? - Another instance was using Parcel2go for a 2.1Kg package to New Zealand. Over the post office counters, it was going to cost £55 via Parcel Force Worldwide, yet a parcel2go quote was £33.50. The real funny thing here, was the handling company through Parcel2go was "Parcel Farce Worldwide". :laugh:

So yeah, from where I stand, lets get some more private companies involved with letter & package handling. It's all getting out of hand & someone, somewhere is seriously taking the proverbial. :bs:

Kin

 

[Templar]

I really know about the strikes, BUT why I keep getting new packages from UK then?:shock:

 

[jujasi]

snipety snip snip


And what will happen once this all takes place? The government will be able to renew their argument to sell off Royal Mail. This will allow an opposition mail operator such as TNT to buy the remains of Royal Mail, split it up and keep the best bits, reduce all remaining employees wages down to their own levels, and make everyone not needed redundant.

I work for TNT albeit in their Fashion Group department & I know that they are struggling financially and couldn`t afford to buy parts of the Royal Mail, as for the wages being reduced, the regular joe,warehouse worker earns £9.75 ish per hour plus shift premium so I dont think its a wage to be sniffed at, but anyhoo RM have called off their strikes for now so ..........

 

[Kin Hell]

<snip> the regular joe,warehouse worker earns £9.75 ish per hour plus shift premium <snip>

Not here in Cornwall m8y. NMW down here @ £5.80/hr for those kind of positions. As a skilled Centre Lathe Turner & Fitter down here, if I could get a job paying more than £8/hr, I'd consider myself a wealthy man.

My bro is on £10/hr driving Class 2 HGV in Coventry. oh:

With 2 bedroom houses averaging @ around £130,000.00+, I don't know how they get away with it.

Kin

 

[playgeneration]

I can state that there are no back logs of mail as being reported by the national news. The only offices really effected are London based and this is because they were striking weekly for months before the national strikes took place.

I'm waiting on a bunch of stuff that hasn't been delivered, I was hoping it would turn up and had been stuck in a backlog. Guess its more likely its all been lost or chucked. At least in my area the service from royal mail I get is poor, parcels coming to me seem to go missing all too frequently, so they don't deserve to go on strike as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Kin Hell]

<snip> At least in my area the service from royal mail I get is poor, parcels coming to me seem to go missing all too frequently, so they don't deserve to go on strike as far as I'm concerned.

Is it anything to do with the presentation of the package sent to you? - I'm convinced it says an awful lot with regard to the handling. Area & kind of person employed could pay a part but, packaging like this, obviously a Scanner/Printer

....and this

.... is terribly pi$$ poor. Get those tape lines around the entire crate at least....ffs!

Here's a crate to Italy from the UK made up from 2 x 28" LCD TV boxes.

Linky

Go figure! - Luck has nothing to do with it, trust me. & RE: Chucked:
You actually mean, - "kicked around like a football". Presentation has everything to do with it.

Kin

 

[playgeneration]

Nothing to do with how its packaged, I've even had special delivery insured items worth a couple of hundred £ go missing - one supposedly delivered to address that doesn't even exist!
I'd say about 1 in 10 things either never turn up or get sent back to sender because they didn't leave a we missed you red card. Thats of course the ones I know to expect, so who knows what else I miss. Where does this stuff end up? I saw on some tv programme before a special office where they investigate packages to find the owner, thats clearly not happening for me.

 

[Kin Hell]

With a feedback score on the old AmiBay system of 45-ish & Arnljot's comments therin, I'd say different, but then you're entitled to think how you wanna think.

If it's not kick-proof/Bullet-proof/drop-from-an-airraft proof, it aint worth posting. Hence, it comes to being the Worlds Best. The UK ranks as the Best in the World @ Being Crap. I post things to stand out from the crowd & so far, I'm winning. F'k the worlds worst postal Service. Presentation counts for "Everything" & when it comes to handling, the presentation & Quality of ones package counts every time; - Game over. :mrgreen:

Kin

 

[playgeneration]

When I said 'nothing to do with hows its packaged', I meant stuff sent to me gets lost even when I know for a fact it has been packaged perfectly. It seems to be the things I really want that go walkies

Having said that I have posted a hell of a lot of things myself all over the country ,and world for that matter and never had any problems. Like yourself I package things with the idea in mind that it could be dropped or stepped on. Its just stuff that gets delivered to me, or rather not delivered to me thats the problem.

 

[Kin Hell]

When I said 'nothing to do with hows its packaged', I meant stuff sent to me gets lost even when I know for a fact it has been packaged perfectly. It seems to be the things I really want that go walkies

Having said that I have posted a hell of a lot of things myself all over the country ,and world for that matter and never had any problems. Like yourself I package things with the idea in mind that it could be dropped or stepped on. Its just stuff that gets delivered to me, or rather not delivered to me thats the problem.

So the dick's posting to you are not in the equation then??

Re-think your torrent of replys, at least....Please!! - :thanks:

Kin

 

[Harrison]

The level of service within the Royal Mail is down to one very simple thing. When I originally worked at Royal Mail the majority of staff manning the evening shifts of the distribution centres were full time postmen doing overtime. RM started to phase out overtime for these workers and quickly started to replace them with cheaper part time evening shift workers.

Now normal people don't generally want just an evening shift so the people taking up these jobs quickly started to change and more and more college and university students started to enter these shifts. These people are not working for Royal Mail as their main employer, just for extra money so don't care at all about the work or the mail their are sorting. More and more of these evening shift part time workers now employed are over seas students, and a lot of them can't even speak English very well. They don't care how much work they bother to do, and the line managers are too scared to have racism brought up against them to stand up to these employees to tell them to get on with their jobs. This is why the level of service has dropped so much in the past 5-10 years in Royal Mail. Before Postmen took pride in their jobs, giving the public a service they could be proud of. These are slowly retiring and no one filling the gap behind them cares.

 

[Kin Hell]

@ Harrison

Which really is quality of Service, equalling ZERO.
It's as bad as Tesco wanting to employ part-time workers over full-time workers.

It's gunno bomb itself to bit's, ....gagging for private ownership. State/Government owned business has had it's day....easy as. Maggie said that years ago & yet we're all kidding ourslelves several years on, different because we don't want to appear too blue @ Her frikin' Majestys pleasure! . :bs:The Hype & the media can kiss my frickin' Ass!

/....ooops!.... Kin is getting Political.... - Sorry! :|

Kin

 

[Firthy2002]

I can state that there are no back logs of mail as being reported by the national news.

I know of at least 2 items destined for myself that have been lost in the system somewhere.

 

[Harrison]

Being lost/stolen and being stuck are 2 very different things.

I personally just don't get the volumes of mail that do go missing. There are obvious cases, such as letters and parcels we get where the address label has fallen off. You would be surprised how common that is. And with no return address given there is no way to trace where it came from or went to.

Such lost property goes to a Royal Mail depot in Northern Ireland where it is stored for claiming. If it isn't claimed, or can't be proved who owns it the items are either auctioned off, or incinerated!