Talks failing and Christmas strikes loom
Postal workers have accused Royal Mail bosses of “gross mismanagement” as talks aimed at resolving the ongoing national dispute have not yet been successful and strikes in the Christmas build-up look set to go ahead.
CWU General Secretary Dave Ward has accused the Royal Mail Group CEO Simon Thompson and the Board of creating deep financial problems by continually engaging in “dramatic errors of judgement” and the union, which represents postal workers, will now continue strikes planned for Thursday 24, Friday 25, Wednesday 30 November and Thursday 1 December.
While the union said it recognises progress has been made on some issues in recent negotiations, Royal Mail management failed to put any commitments into writing.
With Royal Mail now reporting an expected annual loss of £350-400m despite huge profits up to May, Ward said:
No business making record profits of £758 million in May this year should be losing over £1 million a day in a matter of weeks without gross mismanagement.
The truth is that the current senior leadership of Royal Mail have been treating employees, union representatives or future investors with a lack of integrity and transparency.
Dramatic errors of judgement have been made, like announcing 10,000 job losses to threaten striking workers, abandoning previous agreements and handing over £567 million to shareholders while neglecting the pay of employees who generated that profit.
Many things remain unexplained, like giving up Royal Mail’s household name in favour of ‘International Distributions Services’, refusing the union’s offer to escalate negotiations and ignoring the unrivalled network of Royal Mail Group to create new financial opportunities.
We firmly believe these reckless decisions have been informed by power struggles in the boardroom, in the full knowledge of a potential future takeover bid – backed up by the government’s green-lighting of VESA to increase their shareholding.
Postal workers need a deal that works for them, the communities they love and the industry they loyally serve, not one that covers up for CEO and boardroom failures.
The CWU – or this country – will never accept Royal Mail becoming another Uber-style gig economy courier. 32 million households and countless small businesses are relying on this dispute to be over for the Christmas period. The pattern of behaviour displayed by Royal Mail top brass suggests they couldn’t care less about resolving any of this.
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Tricky campaign for the CWU to run. Very believable that R Mail managers are idiots but with email and so many other delivery firms it may be too easy for customers to go elsewhere.
The Achiles’s heel for the Royal Mail would be it the CWU launches a campaign encouraging customers not to pay for postage, while at the same time promising that postal workers at the sorting offices will carry on sorting letters/parcels, and the postmen/women would still carry out the deliveries in time.
In this way, the customers would not be affected but the company will stand to lose millions very quickly and would be forced to settle.
Great idea, Maria! I hope they’re readers of Skwawkbox…
I fully support our brothers and sisters working in Royal Mail. It is an absolute disgrace that many people working there have to have their wages subsidised by Universal Credit because they aren’t paid enough to keep a roof over their heads or food on the table.
I have no doubt that the BBC and MSM will wheel out people who didn’t receive their post or parcels on time and much will be made of the upset this caused. However they will neglect to put it in the context of previously massive profits, incompetent management by senior staff on huge salaries and staff on the breadline.
Solidarity with our brothers and sisters.
Royal Mail losing one million pounds per day because of letter delivery on Saturdays…….dominant simaltaneous narrative of each & every MSM organisation. There is something seriously wrong with the 4th Estate that even SteveH can’t deny.