Member Info for OliGarch

Well I never thought that I would see the day...

http://unitelive.org/not-prepared-stand/

Things just got a little bit more interesting.

JB, whilst TUPE protects the rights of current employees it also means that new employees could be the subject of completely different employment contracts this creating a two tier workforce. Unfortunately this has already happened to their in house engineers (RoMEC) who bizarrely were TUPE'd out in the 90s and then brought back in house a couple of years ago.

Apologies JB, I didn't read your later post regarding employee holdings.

JB, just out of interest, if institutional investors holdings are 75% and individuals holdings are 17% who owns the remaining 8%?

Sampsun50, I couldn't agree more. You have just described my 1980s and 1990s. We were young and keen and did every scrap of overtime going. We fixed up our old Escorts and Chevettes on the street on Sunday mornings (if we weren't working) to pay our mortgages.
Times and attitudes have changed thought with zero hours contracts and the high cost of property. I certainly wouldn't want to be a youngster starting out in today's world.

Fruitster, I checked my account this morning at 6:30 and there were 2 payments from Royal Mail plc sitting in my bank account.

RoyAlMail, you made me laugh with the "spending the day sweeping up, dusting and painting the walls" comment. When Rico visited our mail centre he saw it in all it's $hyt£ state complete with plaster falling off the walls, ha ha ha!

Arsenal17, your theory about a business that isn't making money needing to be closed down raises a few questions.
What about a particular section of our business that isn't making money, for instance collection mail? Royal Mail loses money on collection mail so if it could offload collection mail to another courier then it could concentrate on the profitable areas such as DSA and small parcels.
Of course that's never going to happen because no other courier would be able to or even want the hassle and I can't see the Government saying 'that's not making any money so stop doing it' can you?

ARSENAL17, Thatcher took on Scargill and the NMU and eventually won but where did that leave our mining industry?

RoyAlMail, in theory, an employer can sack the entire workforce at a whim whether there has been any wrongdoing or not. If 70,000 employees go out on strike and are sacked the law would be on the employees side. The employer would then have to replace the sacked employees (even if they employed casuals on zero hours contracts this would take ages) and the business would have to set up a separate contact with a legal team to deal with the unfair dismissal claims.
The whole process of paying out for unfair dismissal plus employing and managing casuals would be very expensive in the short term and would put a spanner in the works for Rico's 5 year plan (although the next CEO may well reap the benefits).

RoyAlMail, that's a long list but I would argue a couple of points.
Sack strikers for breach of contract -
You can’t be dismissed for industrial action if:
it’s called as a result of a properly organised ballot
it’s about a trade dispute between workers and their employer (eg about your terms and conditions) and a detailed notice about the industrial action (which is legally required) has been given to the employer at least 7 days before it begins.
A lockout -
Management could lock striking employees out at the end of the strike but what would be the point when most offices struggle to clear on a daily basis anyway. Gun-Foot-Shoot?
Ban overtime -
Actually, I quite like this one because it would mean employing more staff.
Cancel lieu day allocation -
Lieu days will have to be taken at some stage.
Stop smoke breaks -
There are now a lot less smokers than smokers and most of the smokers are managers.
Cancel grace breaks -
Not a big issue, you are still entitled to 20mins every 5 hours by law.
Stricter discipline for those breaking the rules -
That would require managers to put in even more effort and result in more grievance cases. Some managers would never get to leave their offices because of the number of cases and the time it takes to process each one.

I haven't heard Alan Leighton's name mentioned for a long time, thankfully.
It was him and John Roberts that came up with the unbelievable plan to change our name to Consignia costing £2bn to restructure and posting a loss of £1.1bn for 2003.

wolvesposty, Rico visited our office the day before the AGM and held a Q&A session. One of the questions that came up was the issue of voluntary redundancy (EVR) and he was absolutely adamant that there will be no VR as the necessary losses would be through 'natural wastage'.

I am hopeful that RMG will issue a statement soon regarding the ballot and that will shed some light on the position.
If RMG deny wishing to separate Parcelforce then the CWU will look a bit foolish.

The last statement that I have from RMG (22/8/19) reads,
STATEMENT FROM ROYAL MAIL

Commenting on the CWU’s Letter to Branches, published today, Shane O’Riordain, Royal Mail, commented:
“We have not received formal notification of a ballot from CWU. We are disappointed that they have set out a ballot timetable while discussions are ongoing.

“We are committed to open and constructive engagement with the CWU. We all want a successful and sustainable company that provides good quality jobs, fairness in workloads, and continues delivering the Universal Service.”

Redceo, at present all the noise is coming from the CWU so they must have some information?
Meanwhile, RM are keeping tight lipped.

I can't see Parcelforce being worth any where near £2bn but if the business was to be split into it's core components (deliveries, processing, fleet, engineering etc) then surely the parts would be worth considerably more than the whole?

Parcelforce has a reasonably small workforce (Wikipedia reports 4,500 employees) and I have no idea how much it would be worth but I wonder what the impact on the RMG share price would be following the creation of a separate company?

ABRoyalMail, I think that the final allocation of free shares was in 2017 so I don't think that there are any more available.
The CWU have sent out communications regarding the ballot and their annoyance that Rico wants to separate Parcelforce from RMG.

RoyAlMail, you are quite correct about the new scheme not being as good as the old scheme, which in turn was not as good as the original final salary scheme.
The original pension proposal from 2018 onwards was a Defined Contribution scheme which is essentially a savings plan so upon retirement age you get a pot of money to invest but not a monthly payment which is fine if you are only going to live for a decade longer but no good if you plan on living until 100.
The new proposal is actually one that the CWU pushed for and has been used in The Netherlands for about 50 years. It splits the liabilities between employer and employee and is far more sustainable. The only issue is that it needs to be ratified by Parliament but Brexit appears to be taking up so much ministerial time that it has been put on the back burner for now. Hopefully it will be dealt with after Halloween.
There are a number of large companies also looking at this scheme including BT and Openreach as they currently have huge pension liabilities.