Closures Row Reaches Boiling Point

October 2008 Executive Council Report

Pete Keenlyside Postal Executive member gives his Executive Council report:

Royal Mail continue to plough ahead with their piecemeal plans for mail centre closures, ignoring all the arguments and alternatives put forward by the CWU and despite seemingly having no idea where it will all end and what impact it will have on the service. They have sacked their Director of Operations, Ninian Wilson, who said he wanted to work with us, and it now seems that their territorial directors, mini despots all, have the go-ahead to do what they want. They think that they can deal with the closures through existing agreements, particularly MTSF, and that they don’t need a new national framework to cover all aspects of modernisation. On that basis, the Postal Executive decided to call a ballot of all the current mail centres covered by their projects. These are the offices in the North West, Northampton, Coventry, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Swindon and Reading.

We see this ballot as a proportionate response to management’s failure to deal with the Union at national level. It’s aim is to bring them back to the negotiating table to thrash out the agreement we need if we are to deal with modernisation in a way that brings us benefits rather than just being offered up as sacrifices in the race to the bottom. The ballot will run during November and gaining as well as losing offices are included. This is because without a national agreement, no-one will be able to say what their job, shift, conditions or earnings opportunities will look like in the future. Hopefully, the action will shift management’s current position. If it doesn’t, we will need to consider widening it to beyond those offices immediately affected.

Following on from the national briefing held in Northampton at the beginning of October, the Postal Executive discussed a document from the National Officers on how to move the campaign forward at our last meeting. The bulk of the document dealt with the proposed closure of mail centres and this is reported below. It also dealt with the implications of the appointment of Peter Mandleson as the Minister in charge of business and enterprise and therefore responsible for making the final decisions on our future.

To say his appointment was a surprise would be an understatement but it seems he’s lost none of his old skill in creating chaos all around him. Ignoring the policy of his own Party, reinforced just weeks ago at their Conference, he has expressed the view that part, if not all, Royal Mail should be privatised and had he remained in Government this would have happened years ago. He must be the only one left on the planet who has failed to notice the mess private enterprise has got us into. He has also indicated to us that the Hooper Report will not be published until he is happy with its recommendations. This could see it delayed until after Xmas.

What Mandleson has indicated is that a solution must be found for the pension fund deficit. This is now believed to stand at £4 billion and he believes it could rise to as much as £8 billion by next year. The problem for us is that his solution could come at the expense of privatisation in that the Government might agree to underwrite the deficit in some way on condition of us accepting some form of joint venture or private investment. This would be very hard for us to swallow in that there would be no guarantee that we would get improvements to the current scheme or to anything else. All it would do is remove the risk for any outfit coming in and allow them to take out the profits. The CWU view is that on pensions, the Government needs to accept its responsibility to our members and not to big business.

The document also dealt with stepping up our communications with our members. Over the next month, we intend to send out two individual letters and a Reps’ brief explaining where we are and what we intend doing. We will also produce a four-page pamphlet for all members, which will cover all the issues affecting us. We have also encouraged Branches and Divisions to set up their own comms groups and produce their own local material.

We attended a meeting in October with the managers responsible for Royal Mail’s walk sequencing proposal. They confirmed the rumour that their plans for the main rollout of the compact sequencers has now been put back until January 2010. Could it be that they are waiting to see what comes out of the Hooper Review or have they just run out of money? They also said they were not now in a position to give us a final list of where they want to site the machines as this could still change. Seven machines have now been installed in the Gatwick Mail Centre and these will be used to test the machines in an operational environment and to see what effect they have on deliveries in the surrounding offices. Further machines will also be installed at Brighton and Worthing at some time next year. Four machines have already been put into the old Bristol ECDO. Management say these will only be used for testing but that’s a bit hard to believe. The feeling locally is that they’ll want to use them on live mail as well, but as yet there’s been little or no union involvement in their deployment. Management also told us they intend putting live mail through the machine at Southampton.

The first “intelligent” LSM (ILSM) has arrived and is being assembled at Jubilee Mail Centre. The aim is for the manufacturer, Solystic, to run it until Xmas and then hand it over to RM for testing with live mail. A second machine is due to be installed at Jubilee in May, with the main roll-out starting in September. In the meantime, two further machines are being installed in Edinburgh and Peterborough. Management say these are just for training engineers but we’ll have to see on that one.

We’ve asked management for a national agreement to cover both the trials at Gatwick and the trial of the ILSM at Jubilee that deals with both the potential impact on duties and deliveries. Without that, we’re in the same boat as with the mail centres, with management trying to bring in changes on a drip-by-drip basis. They haven’t said no yet but until we get it there must be a severe limit to what can be agreed at local level.

Vehicle Telemetry

Management have cancelled the last two meetings we were due to have with them. They are also bringing two new people into the discussions, one of whom deals with IR. Whether this represents a change of attitude on their part is hard to say. There are still a number of outstanding issues. We still have no agreement on the issue of the Dallas keys, where these should be kept outside of duty and the process to be employed in case of loss. They have yet to come back to us with their thoughts on our revised RTA procedure or on their approach to how and when drivers would be spoken to regarding their performance and by whom. We are still pushing the idea of drivers’ coaches and a bonus scheme for drivers that takes into account the large amount of savings telemetry could bring. Two further meetings are due in November and I will report further on these.

We are also aware that management in certain areas are approaching Reps for local agreement on initiatives connected with telemetry. It’s vital that until we get an agreement nationally, nothing is done below that level that would lessen our chances of getting it.

Romec Attendance Patterns

The strike action and ban on callouts by Royal Mail engineers, which was extremely well supported, had the desired effect of forcing Romec back to the negotiating table. This resulted in a draft agreement which the Pec agreed to put before the members affected. This dealt with the issue of new duty patterns, allowing for the duties to be populated on a voluntary basis. It included an increase in overtime rates and the introduction of unsocial attendance allowances and overtime payment for all travel to work time over 30 minutes. Staff will also be given the option of more less than 5-day weeks. The draft agreement will go out to ballot following a number of regional briefings and the members will deliver their verdict.

Post Office Limited

The Postal Executive endorsed an agreement in October to raise the 385 members working in Postshops from Retail Sales Consultants grade to Customer Service Consultants (the old counter clerks). This will now do away with the RSC grade and will have the effect of raising their possible maximum pay from £15,000 to over £19,000 per year. All staff will get the necessary training but an assurance has been given that those who don’t want to do this or can’t achieve the necessary standard will be offered redeployment or voluntary redundancy under MTSF terms. The agreement has now gone out to a ballot of the members affected.

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