Moving on from Northampton

September 2008 Executive Council Report

Pete Keenlyside Postal Executive member gives his Executive Council report:

Campaign on Pensions/Liberalisation/Modernisation

For those who weren’t there, five hundred or so senior Reps met in Northampton earlier this week to discuss where we go now on our campaign to impose our agenda on the serious issues that are going to hit us in the coming months. The main debate was around the document issued by the Postal Executive. Copies are available from your Branch or Area Rep but, briefly, this laid out the framework of what we think a modern postal business and a modernisation agreement should look like. It argued that all the issues, pensions, the Hooper Review and Royal Mail’s “modernisation” plans were linked together and any attempt to deal with just one in isolation was unlikely to get the results we want.

General Secretary Billy Hayes also gave a report on the moves taking place on the political scene. Meetings had taken place with politicians, which indicated that the outlook was by no means as gloomy as we had all thought. Whether this will change with Peter Mandleson taking over from John Hutton, only time will tell. Billy and Dave Ward had also had a meeting with the Review team. Their report was due out in the next few weeks. The signs were that they would recommend that something be done on the pension deficit and on regulation, but it was not clear exactly what. He thought they would also have a go at Royal Mail management and the state of industrial relations in the company.  He felt they were unlikely to recommend breaking up the company but wasn’t sure where they would stand on bringing in private finance or on joint ventures.

It’s fair to say that the main debate at Northampton was around the view from London that we needed to up the campaign on pensions, including taking industrial action sooner rather than later. They argued that this was the main priority and that because Royal Mail had, to a certain extent, put modernisation on the back burner, we should do the same. To their credit, London have done a lot of work on this and have produced an excellent pamphlet for their members. Nevertheless, others argued that just having a go at Royal Mail would miss the target. It’s the Government that holds the key to unlocking the pensions row, not the business. There was also a feeling that although management may have taken a step back on modernisation, it would be totally wrong for the Union to do the same. What is certain is that we will all have a clearer idea after the Hooper report comes out.

My view is that we now need to be bold and expand on the document put out at Northampton and put more meat on the bones. We need to spell out in far more detail where we want the business to go over the next few years, what our models are for deliveries, mail centres, distribution and PO counters and what we want for our members in return for delivering this. We should then go to Government with our plan, point out that it is only the Union that’s capable of coming up with any meaningful solution and demand their support, including financial. Realistically, we’ve got around six months at most to do this. After that, it’ll be too late.

Conference Season

I attended both the TUC and the Labour Party Conferences on behalf of the Union. At the TUC GS Billy Hayes moved the motion calling for support for our campaign on pensions and to keep Royal Mail publicly owned and fully integrated. This was carried unanimously. We also held a successful fringe meeting, marred only by Derek Simpson, Joint GS of Unite, who used his slot to call for the CWU to join his Union, partly, in his words, so that we could help him sort out the CMA!

We held two fringe meetings at the Labour Conference. John Hutton, the Cabinet Minister in charge of the Post Office, came along to one. To our surprise, he stated that the Government would have to do something to sort out the pension problem and that regulation wasn’t working as it should and that the deterioration in the service would have to be looked at. Perhaps they should start at Coventry where the delivery service has been turned into a shambles with management caught lying about the amount of failures each day. Whether these words get turned into action remains to be seen. For those not there, we also held a very successful and noisy march. I’m just not sure that chanting “You’re all Tories in disguise” was the wisest thing to do to delegates who came out of the hall to applaud us. On a personal note, I found the Labour Conference weird. They really do live in a world of their own where Gordon Brown is universally popular and where they will win the next election by 150 seats.

Royal Mail have now publicly announced their decisions on both the East Midlands and North West reviews. No surprises there! As they always said they were going to do, Coventry, Milton Keynes, Liverpool, Crewe, Oldham, Stockport and Bolton to close and new Mail Centres at Northampton and Warrington. The needs of the staff, service, customers and communities ignored with the only criteria being finance. We have to call a halt to their crazy scheme which will leave everyone worse off and come up with a different set of criteria for deciding which mail centres we need and where that takes all this into account. There is absolutely no guarantee that any new criteria will leave all our existing mail centres where they are but until management are prepared to sit down with us and start again, we should oppose all the closures announced.

We were given a presentation on walk sequencing by the Royal Mail manager in charge of the project at the September Pec. He confirmed that the project as a whole had been put back but was still not in a position to tell us where and when the machines will now be arriving. All we know is that machines are going into Gatwick mail centre at the moment and this is the testing ground as to how they will operate. I attended a meeting of the Reps involved at Redhill DO to see how they are dealing with it. Whilst they are obviously on the ball with what’s happening in their patch, it was clear to all present that a national framework was needed to stop individual areas getting picked off.

What the presentation did tell us was the different effects walk sequencing will have on the different functions. This is because of the different processes involved using the compact sequencers and the existing mail centre kit (legacy) or ILSM’s. The compact sequencers need three passes to sort the mail and each wave of mail has to be done separately. Offices that get their mail from these machines will therefore get it at different times, probably around 05.30 and 09.30. The legacy equipment and ILSM’s only need two passes and all mail from the first pass can be aggregated and put through the second pass at the same time, which will be after all the due inward mail has arrived.. Offices getting their mail from this source will therefore only get one despatch and this might not be until after 09.30. This will certainly have an effect on current distribution runs. Mail centres will, in future, also only be running one pass on both outward and inward mail. This will have an impact on shift patterns.

Vehicle Telemetry

A further meeting on telemetry took place in September. This concentrated mainly on what sort of interventions were necessary if a problem was flagged up concerning a driver’s behaviour, when this would happen and by whom. What was proposed was that initially a letter would be sent from the Fleet Centre direct to the driver concerned, with a further letter if no improvement was achieved. Only after that would the individual be directly approached. We still need to have further discussion on what would trigger these letters and who would speak to the drivers. We are still pushing the idea of drivers’ coaches which management haven’t as yet rejected. We also made the point that driving duties had to be constructed in a way that they could be performed without the driver being forced to sped to get them done. We intend to present management with a form of words to go into any final document that reflects this. We are also waiting for management to come back to us with their response to our draft of a new RTA procedure. A further meeting has been arranged for the end of October and I will report further on this.

Romec Attendance Patterns

Romec management refused to withdraw their un-agreed changes to the engineers attendance patterns and so our members took three days of strike action. This was very well supported but now management have responded by sending letters to individuals advising them of the changes. Our advice is that this is probably not sufficient in law and as a result, the Pec have agreed a further 24-hour strike on 6 October plus a 14-day ban on all callouts from 7 October. We will have to see if this is enough to bring management back to their senses.

Royal Mail announced in September that they were carrying out a review of the future direction of Vehicle Services. This has led to speculation that they may be planning a joint venture or even to outsource it completely. An initial meeting has been held with the Union, where the manager responsible, Phil O’Gorman, stated that nothing was ruled in or out. A further meeting is due to take place in the next couple of weeks, which will go into more detail and a full report has been promised for the November Postal Executive. The Union’s position remains totally opposed to any form of outsourcing or joint venture.

The Pec training and education sub committee have held a further meeting to discuss the specialist training course for delivery Reps. Our preference is for a 5-day course but we still need to work out the exact details of what would be in it as we want to avoid duplication with other courses. We will also need to see if the finances are there to run it. A document will now be put to the Pec on 15 October and if the go-ahead is given the aim is to run a further 7 courses by the end of November in regions that have yet to hold one and then fully roll the course out in the New Year.

Pilots of a 2-day joint Union/management course have also been held at Chorley and at the Teesside Mail Centre. These have yet to be evaluated so it’s not possible to say at the moment if they will be rolled out more widely and in what form.

The cases involving the three members in Bristol sacked as a result of the dispute last year have now been satisfactorily resolved. All three have been returned to work and although this was not at their original office it was at offices that were acceptable to them all. This result was due both to the magnificent campaign mounted by the Bristol Branch and by the support they received from throughout the Union.

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