Member Info for OliGarch

dazzag, don'y you mean "I heard tickets were £1.75 on the day, ha ha....imho....dyor"?

"Christmas doesn't contribute an overwhelming portion of yearly profits it's just the icing on the cake"
I can't vouch for parcels as I work exclusively for the letters side of the business but in my office December accounted for 31.3% of the 2018 letter volume, up from 29.7% in 2017 so I would disagree and say that Christmas contributes a huge amount to yearly profits.

Falkland - Annoying at times yet unnervingly correct.
A prophet in his own land is never appreciated whereas a profit in your own hand is always appreciated!

Hi Redceo, I noticed that too. It was an article on Boris and his descendants going back to 1922.

Looking at the trades pages, I notice that there are quite a few single digit 'buys' and 'sells'. I could see that someone may want to buy a small amount of shares possibly in order to attend the upcoming AGM, however I'm not sure why anyone would want to sell 2 shares. Surely it's not worth the hassle?

Scamp, it seems that some of our machine operators on the late and night shift have been doing a 4 shift week since the shorter working week came into effect last October but are doing the 5th shift as an SA on overtime so effectively doing what they were doing before but getting paid more.

Scamp, it seems that some of our machine operators on the late and night shift have been doing a 4 shift week since the shorter working week came into effect last October but are doing the 5th shift as an SA on overtime so effectively doing what they were doing before but getting paid more.

Scamp, I am a RM employee with 4 decades of service behind me. Although quite beyond the belief of many non RM employees, this snagging list is quite believable because RM has a long tradition of NOT employing top quality construction companies (who will get things correct at the first attempt) which in the long run actually saves money.
It was the same in 1982 when Nine Elms, SW8 was constructed. The cheapest tender was from Taylor Woodrow but construction fell behind due to the unstable nature of the land (it was previously an old disused coal store for Battersea Power Station) and when the building works were completed it was evident that they had rushed the project as finish quality was very poor.
Fortunately, it was demolished in 2014 to make way for the American Embassy (the one that Donald Trump said was not a good use of American tax dollars).

Red, I am old school too but I like my Managers to manage. It degrades their position if they start pushing furniture around and I am pretty sure that they have more important things to do such as safety tours,conference calls, return to work interviews, grievance procedure paperwork, budget analysis etc..

Well said Red although in my opinion and 40 years in the business there are still too many Managers. We must have the highest Manager to worker/OPG ratio of any current business in the UK but the joke is that many Managers actually perform a lot of OPG work but at a higher pay rate. If I had a quid for every time I spotted a Manager pushing a York from A to B then I could have retired years ago!

wolvesposty, yesterday you wrote "holiday pay is based on contracted hours regardless I am contracted 25hrs but average @ 6hrs p/w o/t and get paid for 25 when on leave"
As of April 2019 the situation has changed. If you are averaging 6 hours per week overtime then you should be getting this in your pay when you are on leave (for the first 20 days in the leave year). Royal Mail are disputing this but it has been EU law since November 2014 and ACAS ant the CWU are assisting with claims.
The CWU and RMG are meeting today to discuss a collective agreement.

RoyAlMail, the 2003 working time directive says that the minimum is 1 day in a 7 day period or 2 days in a 14 day period with a minimum break of 11 hours between shifts. As I have the weekends off at the beginning and the end of this work period then that covers off the minimum requirements.

Scampthedog and wolvesposty, my post was probably a bit misleading. I quoted 2 weeks out of my 5 week rotate which is spread across all four shifts (earliy, late, night and weekend) so I get 3 weekends off out of every 5 weeks and some off days during the week on the other 3 weeks. I only work 12 hours overtime in 5 weeks but due to my contract this is mandatory. My point was that working 8.75 hours a day 4 days a week with 3 days off a week sounds like sweet bliss to me, however the work that I do does no allow for this.

Scamp,
"And think on this: if you were disallowed from working your overtime on your day off...would you want to put another 2 hours a day on top of a shift already 9.25 hour long? Answer: "I very much doubt it"."
I am already contracted to work shifts with lengths as short as 8.25 hours and as long as 12.5 hours at the weekend. There are weeks on my rota where I work 12 consecutive days including a 12.5 hour scheduled Saturday attendance and a 12 hour scheduled Sunday attendance. I truly cherish my 'off days'.
If this notion of a 4 day week, no overtime, the correct number of staff employed to work without the need for agency staff or zero hours contract staff becomes a reality I would be a very happy chap......And then Christmas comes around and the headless chicken managers start to panic and phone everyone up to come in and perform overtime on a "business needs" basis because they are in the $hit and have more much mail than they had planned for.

JB, it is true that some OPGs are in receipt of an enhanced holiday payment to cover their SAs up to 4 times a year (the first 20 days) however this has not been extended to all CWU grades especially those who perform regular but not contracted overtime.
The ACAS website quotes;
On 4 November 2018, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) ruled that holiday pay should reflect non-guaranteed overtime. The Government set up a task force to consider the possible impact of the EAT's ruling on holiday pay. Regulations have been laid to limit claims for unlawful deductions from wages to two years. The rules apply to Employment Tribunal claims made on or after 1 July 2015.
http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=5126
Recent court decisions have indicated that all overtime worked should be included when calculating a worker's statutory holiday pay entitlement. The only exception to this is overtime that is worked on a genuinely occasional and infrequent basis.
http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=4249#compvol

Following a post last week, I have been 'doing my own research' (where have I heard that before?) on annual leave holiday pay.
https://www.cwu.org/ltb/ltb-344-19-royal-mail-group-holiday-pay/ and. https://www.cwu.org/ltb/ltb-372-19-royal-mail-group-holiday-pay/ are the latest 'Letters To Branches' on this and it would seem that there is a meeting between RMG and the CWU tomorrow. If a collective agreement is reached then this would be the cheaper option for RMG as they currently employ around 18 full time members of staff at RMGHQ just to deal with the amount of claims coming in every week.The standard response from RMG is to deny that employees have a claim and then it goes back to ACAS for referral. Since April, RMGHQ have been bombarded with claims and there is even a 4 minute Youtube tutorial done by CWU Leeds No1 branch going through the process step by step. It seems that this is also an issue in the prisons service and the NHS.
All in all it's gonna be expensive $$$$$

Scampthedog, I can't find anything on the CWU website relating to this (or anywhere on t'interweb) and it certainly hasn't been communicated in my office! I agree with Defroster66 that it would be a nice move as I am coming up to take my NRA60 soon so a 4 day week would be brilliant (although as a child in the 1970s my Geography teacher predicted a 3 day week - teachers huh....what do they know?) .
In effect this means working 4 x 8.75 hour shifts but there will always be people waning to work overtime (especially youngsters with families and mortgages) so they will probably sign up for an extra duty on the 5th day and still have 2 days off. We have OPGs in our office who seem to live in the work place and the Managers love them because they are always hungry for overtime.
As a company that has always relied heavily on overtime I can't see massive savings here as it is cheaper to let an existing employee perform overtime than actually employ the correct number of staff in the first place.

I don't know if this has already been covered but I have trawled back through the last week of posts and can't see a thread.
Yesterday, my manager mentioned that the manager's annual bonus (due to be paid at the end of June) had been cancelled despite targets being met according to manager's appraisals. Apparently Rico triggered a clause that the bonus could be cancelled as operating profits had not reached the required level. This is the first time that this clause has been triggered to my knowledge.
I understand that the Manager's bonus scheme offers between 8% and 15% of salary (possibly more for senior managers) so a manager on £50k would be in line for a minimum of £4k, however a blanket payment of £1k to all managers has been offered.
Some investors will say that this is a good thing as it will save a small fortune but there could be a nasty downside here and this could be a counter productive move by Rico. The bonus was cancelled less than 3 weeks before the due payment date and almost certainly many managers would have 'spent' this payment in advance.
This has translated into 'quiet dissent' in my office with many managers now simply ignoring previous 'bonus worthy' targets and just concentrating on the bare minimum to get to the end of their shift. They are also going home on time whereas before many would work beyond their time to complete paperwork etc. Many managers will justify the bonus as a payment for the extra unpaid hours that they had worked over the year.
If the manager's heads have gone down how will this translate regarding productivity? I don't know the answer so we will have to wait and see!
By the way, I am a CWU grade and CWU member so have no axe to grind here - just reporting.

RoyAlMail, many thanks for your post
"Annual leave average pay is UK law, everyone who works and does overtime should get it."
I have been doing some digging around on Google and the Gov.UK website and I stand corrected.
The ACAS website states that "If you regularly get paid overtime, commission or bonuses, your employer must include these payments in at least 4 weeks of your paid holiday. ... This is because judges in holiday pay cases use the EU Working Time Directive, which is 4 weeks' leave. The UK Working Time Regulations is 5.6 weeks."
The Gov.UK website has calculated that I am entitled to an extra 10 hours and 28 minutes annual leave per year on my basic hours without adding the 6 hours a week that I average in overtime over a 52 week period.
I have looked on PSP and accessed all my payslips back to May 2012. I have only had 2 payslips without overtime in the last 7 years. I think that an email to my CWU rep is now in order.

Falkland, we obviously have polarised opinions on this. You are confident that the price will fall to £1.75 and I am confident that the price will rise to near £3.30. You currently have the bragging rights having predicted that the share price would fall below £2 so it will be interesting to see if you continue to be correct.
As for private investors buying for the dividend, well a divi is always nice but (as we have just seen) should not be taken as a given.
I see this as a long term investment and am buoyed by the fact that my recent small 15k investment averaging £2.21 is much lower than Rico's average.