6 Months To Decide Our Future

Pete Keenlyside Postal Executive member discusses the future for CWU members in Royal Mail

Pensions/Review on Liberalisation

The Postal Executive at its meeting on 28 May carried an emergency motion to go to the Postal Conference on the issues of Pensions and the Government Review on Liberalisation of the postal service. The motion puts the timing of the ballot for industrial action already agreed by the Pec at its discretion as this will be determined by management's response to our demands for urgent negotiations. It also accepts that it may need to be widened to include the threats to mail centres, delivery offices and the Post Office Network contained in Royal Mail's "transformation" plan.

Alongside this, a further emergency motion was agreed by the National Executive on May 29 which will go to our General Conference. This deals with the political side of our campaign and calls on the Government to honour its manifesto commitments and rejects privatisation in any shape or form. It argues for the Government to provide further funding to RM for investment and to call on management to reopen negotiations on pensions. It further agrees that should the Government not accept our demands then we will ballot our members on whether to support Labour at the next election.

What prompted both these motions are the events of the past month. The Review team published their interim report, which accepted that as far as the public and small businesses are concerned, liberalisation has brought no benefits at all. It also stated that the status quo is not an option if Royal Mail is to survive in the future. This has prompted several of the major players to rush forward with their solutions. Our old friends in Postcomm have suggested that the business be split up and either enter into a joint venture with a private company or be sold off altogether. Our own management have suggested that they be given the chance to issue shares in the company on the open market. Obviously Mr Crozier doesn't think that £3 million a year is enough for him.

Two of the three members of the Review Team spoke to the Pec in May. They have not come to any conclusions yet about any solutions and their final report is not due until after the summer. They did drop some hints, though. They seem to be looking closely at an option that involves the delivery side staying as a publicly owned monopoly with everything else thrown wide open. This would be the worst of all worlds for us. It would threaten jobs and conditions for everyone as well as the future of the pension scheme.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, management have also announced that they want to meet the Union straight after Conference to tell us about their plans for the future of the operation. We are not expecting the news to be good. So, the next 4-6 months will be crucial. Decisions will be made that will be near impossible to reverse in future. We won't even be able to hang onto the pension scheme management have forced on us, never mind get improvements. It doesn't have to end in tears, though. We can swing things our way. The one thing we have going for us is that if there ever was a time to move the Government off its current course and more towards our views, it's now. But that means we're all going to have to get stuck into this one.

Pay & Conditions

A meeting has been arranged with management over the issues arising from the first payment of £400. In the main these involve different payments given to AG's and new starters. We will be arguing the principle that as the £400 was given for implementing flexibility, all those involved should be given the same amount as they are all equally involved. In the meantime, staff have also received their 50/50 payments and the second £400. In most cases the 50/50 payments were peanuts although some units got sizeable sums. What target we hit to get the £400 is anyone's guess. Look on it as a straightforward bribe!

The stage three trials are still continuing although to date there have been no meetings at national level to discuss the outcomes. There is, therefore, no agreement to rolling out any initiatives to other offices and this should not be happening. There has also been little or no progress in the phase 4 workshops. In fact, the one dealing with industrial relations hasn't met over the past month. We sent them our thoughts on what a new IR agreement should look like and they haven't got back to us yet.

Romec Pay

The Pec agreed in May to recommend the pay offer to both Romec engineers and cleaners. This involves a 3% increase in basic pay from 1 April 2008 , flowing through to overtime and allowances, a 7.5% increase in London weighting and for cleaners a 0.2% increase in the intermediate rate. Subject to the business achieving quality and revenue targets, there is also the possibility of getting a pro-rata Christmas bonus of £160 and a further 1% increase on basic rates backdated to 1 April 2008 and a further 1% on basic from January 2009, with the 2% then flowing through to overtime and allowances. This offer has now gone out to the members involved.

Vehicle Services Pay

The Vehicle Services pay deal, recommended by the Pec, has now been accepted by the members. The vote was 431 to 216.

Walk Sequencing

The next batch of walk sequencing machines is due to arrive shortly at Gatwick, Bristol ECPDO and a couple of other locations. The news from Gatwick is not encouraging. According to the AGM there, they are only planning to site machines in three locations and the CWU won't have any role in any final decision on this. This would mean some delivery offices not getting their final despatch until after 10.00 and last letter times being pushed back to 15.00 or 16.00 on rurals. It would also have a devastating effect on full time duties. Obviously, this is something that will need to be dealt with at national level in any talks with the business on the future. It can't be left to the individual divisions to sort out.

The first of the ILSM's is due to arrive at Jubilee Mail Centre in September. This will be used to test what they can actually do in terms of walk sequencing. As previously reported, the intention is to buy around 140 to replace obsolete LSM's etc. An order has now been placed for 76 with the option to buy the rest within the next two years at the same price. Doesn't say much for management's confidence in our future! Tests will be carried out on this machine from September to April 2009 with the aim of rolling it out to other locations after that. What happens at Jubilee will determine what happens in the rest of the country so a close eye will need to be kept on it. The aim is to set up a CWU project group with local, Area, Divisional and national involvement. We also need to get national Terms of Reference for the trial, although no doubt management will be reluctant to agree this.

Management seem to be ploughing ahead regardless with the plan to shut mail centres. Even before the agreed procedure had been exhausted, they announced the closure of Reading and Oxford . A decision is expected soon on Coventry , Northampton and Milton Keynes and a review has started of all the mail centres in the North West with at least 5 threatened with possible closure. What is clear is that this can't be dealt with on an office by office or even on a divisional basis any longer. The Pec have agreed to put an emergency motion to Conference which calls for the business to come clean with their plans for the network as a whole and threatens industrial action if they don't stick to the existing agreement. This may well be overtaken by the one on pensions and liberalisation, but even if it isn't, there are still more issues we need to sort out. Is our policy nationally to defend every existing mail centre? If it isn't, then what is the structure that we're prepared to settle for? And what happens to the people whose mail centres end up closing? Unless we can come up with our own answers to these, knowing management's plans might not be enough.

The Pec also agreed the Phase 2 Flats Automation Deployment Guidelines in May. This deals with the sites chosen for the next batch of 20 TOP2000 flat sorting machines. The guidelines themselves are not a problem and include full CWU involvement and acceptance that both losing and gaining offices must have duties agreed before any transfer takes place. The problem is that this is bound to have implications for the mail centre reviews going on. Once the machines are installed and the mail transferred, the case for keeping certain mail centres open will become that much weaker.

The Union have taken Post Office Limited to an Employment Tribunal over the franchising out of Crown Offices to WH Smith. This is over the attempts by POL to avoid their obligations under TUPE legislation. Anyone transferring from POL to WH Smith should have been able to do so under the same terms and conditions that they enjoyed before. Furthermore, WH Smith would have been compelled to deal with the CWU. In the event, through financial inducements, misinformation and by using loopholes in the legislation, POL managed to avoid this. The Union are arguing that this was a breach of the legislation. If we win, not only will our members involved get up to 13 weeks pay compensation, it will make it far more difficult for POL to franchise offices off in the future.

Bob Gibson reported to the Pec in May that he had met the business over D2D. They have indicated that the quality of service in some areas is now so low that they are considering ceasing the service there. Whilst some members might see this as good news, in terms of the arguments we're putting forward on the future of the business this would cause us problems. One of our strongest points is that we go everywhere. Are we now going to say that's not quite true? We need an agreement that deals with D2D both in money and weight terms but not one that just sees us giving up.

The Pec agreed a document on training and education for Reps in the Postal sector. Although we accepted that there has been much improvement over the past year and that greater numbers have had training at both national and regional level, we felt that more could still be done. The courses currently available, both the skills 1, 2 and 3 and the Postal Agreements and Procedures course do cover many of the issues Reps need to know. We decided, though, that more needed to be done, especially for Reps in Delivery who were often isolated and needed to make decisions on their own. This could include both adapting existing courses where those attending are purely from delivery or putting on specialist courses.

Front Page