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are the unions doing themselves out of a job with all these strikes, placed an order with amazon today and for first time the order isnt being sent by the royal mail. I think alot of online retailers will be moving to other firms too. with the parcels deliverys gone the royal mail will be left with the less profitable letter and junk mail delieveries. With options now available for moving letters round the big cities will the royal mail be left with letter delievery to the sticks, where there will be no way they can make a profit on deliviering daily without a massive hike in prices.

know a postman who reckons he gets 30K with overtime

and they are doing themselves out of a job

and when they get a new job in the sector which much more compertion there wages will be cut massively so that the companies can cmpete and make money

My postman is Brendan Ormsby :) football fans should know who he is.

In thought one of the main beefs with the workers was they couldnt go home after the mail for the day was done with? their cushy number of having halfdays would end.

yeah one of there beefs is they got paid per hour but if they were fit and active and completed the round in half the allotted time they are not allowed to knock off early. FFS they are paid per hour not per letter.

I received a letter today which was posted on September 25th from Chichester.

Marvellous.

what year ?

Interesting article written by a postie:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/maya01_.html

I think your 100% right iron.

They are commiting career suicide by making a failing mess of a company that is already hated by the public look even worse.

They shouldnt be aloud to use the name Royal.

So the people that do all the work should just accept the shit and be treated like twats?

Oh and not everyone hates the Royal Mail. I certainly don't. If they ever disappear it's time to say hello to every letter you send costing 5 times as much, probably more.

You say Royal as if you're proud of it Stu. lols.

Agree with Evilpie Matthew Russllinho on this one.

Good article,
I fully support the posties in this dispute,i'am positive that every management team in any large business is trying to use the finacial crisis to milk every opportunity to erode pay and conditions for the average working man.

Yup. I know my industry is.

The ECA (Electrical Contractor's Association) has recommended that previously agreed wage increases by the JIB (Sparky's Union) should be witheld until the economy improves. JIB disagrees and says increases must stand. ECA says fuck dat withold it.

If I was an employee I'd be pretty sick about it. To be fair though if we have to give out pay increases there is a very real chance that we won't be here at all in a year's time. I'm certain that other company's who are in better financial shape than mine will use this as a lovely excuse to save a few quid.

The recession works really well for people who are doing ok.

Fucking Costner

Can't blame Costner. He did it all for a slice of bread.

and think about people living where i do we wont get mail more than once a week and still have to pay alot more than we do know to get it

There is nothing wrong with strong Unions supporting the workers when company's take the piss. But there is a fine line between being realistic and moving forward as a company and abusing the workers rights.

I remember working for British Gas as an apprentice, I was 16 and the first thing we did was go for a breakfast each morning. Followed by a few private jobs we had, service boiler etc. Then we would go into the depot and get the days jobs about 10ish. 3-4 jobs each day for servicemen would be about 3hrs work if it went smoothly. This would give us plenty of time to take our time, visit the pub and rattle of the jobs for the day and be home around 4ish. This way of working had been standard for years. For me it was the dream job 1992ish fresh from school, little work, good crack no pressure.

Things were about to change for British Gas, it was sold by the government and the amount of jobs gasman had to do had doubled, we had computers now with us that told out bosses where we was and updated job details. We could still have breakfast, but most of the day was spent working, not much time for private jobs and pub trips lasting hours. I have never seen so many men whine, cry and bitch about the changes, loads of them complaining about how its not fair and striking. It reminds me of the Postal workers, it may be a little harsh on them but you get the drift.  I left as soon as I qualified, thanks British Gas, 150k down the drain and went to Uni. None of the men that whined and complained left...I guess they couldn't find a cushy job to move to.

The thing with heavily unionised public companies is that it's very difficult to sack people for being shit/lazy, so places like Royal Mail get filled with people who would have been sacked from any other job.

Of course they're going to complain about cuts like this because deep down they know they're not going to get a job anywhere else, so you can understand them fighting tooth and nail to keep what they've got.

It's all pretty futile because when the Tories get in one of the first things they'll do will be to privatise the Royal Mail then all these guys will be screwed anyway.

Their is no way they will survive this. Their a company on the edge any way, they make a tiny tiny margin on massive revenue, event's like this will put them back into a loss-making position.
Also a disgrace to expect them to work the hours' their payed. Paying them per delivery round gets the job done faster, people get all arsey on them too when this leads too many items being delivered to the wrong adress. At least they got delivered!

Well Andrew i'am surprised at your massive generalisation and stereotyping.I agree that many public and recently sold off public companies have several "spanish practice's" built in which need to be addressed however the sheer glee and gusto that the management of these companies are trying to squeeze the fella on the shop floor under the banner of finacial crisis leaves me cold and bitter.
The recent news of bank bonus's turns my stomach.

As this is a poker forum, and we're talking about the Royal Mail strike, I thought Vicky Coren's comments in the Guardian might be relevant:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/18/victoria-coren-royal-mail

yep, pretty relevant.

What a load of crap though. lol. What's she trying to say?

Privatise the whole thing, give the shares to the pension fund, and take away the govt gtee of the fund, that would force the workforce to have their interests in line with the companies.

Not sure what your point is here - in its last set of financial results the Royal Mail made profits of just 1.7% of turnover, turnover which is going to fall as fewer people are sending letters anyway, and the strike will hasten many companies to stop using Royal Mail, hurting it even further. Of course management are going to look to make changes.

Would you rather everything is kept as it is, so tax payers can subsidise the posties who want to knock off early for the day?

And yeah, the bank bonuses to people whose banks are still going because of tax payer's money is also bad, but I don't see the relevance, unless it's 'if the bankers can abuse taxpayer's money then so can the posties'?

As a tax payer, I'm not too keen on either.

Standing up for rights is a good thing but sadly those that do often lack common sense.

Dundee was so heavily unionised that it played a big part in the oil companies decision to go to Aberdeen instead. I doubt many of those people are to happy with how prosperous Aberdeen as a city has been. Dundee has lost most of what it had.


Sandy

I admit to being naive about unions, maybe it's an age thing, but unions to me just stand for a group of people who have somehow managed to gain massive leverage to protect what are often jobs that have low barriers. The fact that some jobs with unions require unions says everything, protecting cushy numbers. Things having always been a certain way doesn't excuse what in some cases is just pure fraud. It seems like we've slipped back a few decades recently with strikes, or strike threats, all over the place. I wonder how many business failures it will take until employees realise they need to keep their companies alive for the next year or so and come back to the table when the company makes some money.

Breath.

It goes like that. Unions get power then govt tries to take the power back and the worker has no rights. There should be a balanced position in the middle but each side always tries to get the strongest hand and nobody has rights or it strikes.

Sandy

I was only disagreeing with your point that people in public sector being shit/lazy and couldn't get a job anywhere else in my personal experiece this doesn't hold true.Maybe i'am just lucky.
FWIW if a postman decides to trot round on his route agreed by management and union i have no problem with him knocking off early.

and yes i did go off on a tangent which wasn't aimed at you just at the general business situation at present.

Fuck em all, I hate it.
If you dont like it then fuck off and work somewhere else.
Unions and bullshit laws stop you being able to get rid of the useless idiots you have had the misfortune to employ.

Can we cancel the mimimum wage to? I have a list of names that prove that some people are not worth a fiver an hour.

Thanks

Im not proud of it at all, you know that.
I couldnt care less about the Royals etc but in my crazy world it makes me think they should be like the police and not aloud to strike.

Don't know why, but I expected to read something very different when I clicked on this. Good article imo.

tbf, I did think this was going to be an Ironside post about Prince Charles.

The Royal Mail is not working .... I wonder why ?

If I post Iron a letter it gets picked up by a bloke in a van and ends up a day or 2 later in the outer fkin Hebrides and then some fella gets in his van or on his bike and pops it through Irons door... and the cheeky buggers want 32pence to do that !!

my mail rarely takes more than 48 hours from cornwall in fact post in on a tuesday its often here on the wednesday from anywhere in the UK
but yeah 32p is a little too much +EV at about 28.2p imho

yeah and whn was the last time you sent me a letter kev

ffs i feel loved

POTM

That postie writes about how the parts of the mail service that have been 'opened up to competition' are the bits in the middle of the process, the bits that can be profitable.  Meanwhile it's the Royal Mail that has to do the ugly stuff that doesn't offer the profit opportunities. 

Hardly a fair, competitive market?

+1

Quit the whinging people. The royal mail as a company may need looking at but the service they provide to ordinary people is unbelievable for the price they charge for it.

If it wasn't for all the legislation hampering them maybe they could run a more profitable business. Let's face it their infrastructure is second to none. They should be able to undercut every company in the country delivering any package anywhere. Unfortunately that isn't allowed because it wouldn't be fair to let a big national company succeed so they are throttled in to submission by rules that don't allow them to make money.

it pissed me off where i used to live when they just stopped delivering and didnt tell anyone, the whole area about 200 gaffs and they just stopped then everyone had to go to the postoffice and get mail boxes