Member Info for OliGarch

Newdealz, "Stretched staff and hard work, the perfect recipe for dividend reinstatement!"

I was thinking more in terms of "not enough staff and service delivery failures, the perfect recipe for another OFCOM fine"..... which would potentially put the kibosh on a prospective dividend payment?

Newdealz, "Just thought it worth mentioning, in the last month ive had lots of my sending orders arriving late, must be busy back at the DO, they all get there just a bit sloooooooooower, that says to me we should be in for a bumper quarter, £3+ by xmas imo".

I don't know if it's a local or national issue but my local DO and postie are having trouble keeping up, not because of the volume of mail but because of the current lack of staff. The ones that are still working are now doing alternate days over two rounds. Perhaps my prophecy of a three day USO is coming to fruition.....lol

TMS, only 12.8%? I didn't realise that it was that low but thanks for the information. You seem to be forgetting that Royal Mail used to be a government run agency and was a nationalised industry. Perhaps the union(s) should have been abolished in October 2013 for the benefit of the shareholders..... you're also forgetting that there is more than one union for the business to deal with?

"There’s a big wide world out there in the real world where people live outside of the Royal Mail bubble"......indeed there is and I'm sure that those who like to work for a non unionised business will gravitate to the 87%. Always remember that you have a choice.....lol

Anyhoo, I will let you have the last word (because you will anyway) because arguing about my career and whether I should have changed employers.....yada yada yada is probably boring the pants off anyone else on here who just wants to talk about IDS.....lololol

TMS, the company policies haven't always aligned with my personal values, however should I give up my career just because of that? There are many more factors to deciding whether to stay with a company, or not and values are just one of them. What about geographic location, whether there is other available work in a similar field locally etc?... and yes I could have moved location but then again you have to take the rest of the family plus long term friendships and commitments into consideration. Life is all about compromise, but you know all of this so it's a bit of a rhetorical question really?

As for my salary and pension? Well Royal Mail certainly wouldn't offer up a generous salary without it being negotiated and the pension scheme wouldn't be anywhere near as good if the union hadn't negotiated a different scheme and pushed for change via Parliament.

In case you hadn't grasped the concept, the whole idea is that the employer offers the bare minimum and the union negotiates improvement..... that's how it works....

TMS, according to me, "Royal Mail has lacked ambition, innovation, foresight"....and I stand by that comment, however as you mentioned the other day, it was a government run business and therefore wasn't obligated to have any of the above?

"Yet you’ve been happily employed by them for what I presume is a very long time and hold company shares?"

Yes, the vast majority of my service took place when it was a government run business (see above), my employment status was good, I enjoyed my work and I was on a decent contract, salary and pension(s). Why should I move to a different employer? It was privatised when I was in my early fifties however this did not change my employment status.

I hold shares in IDS but have never bothered to vote as it doesn't interest me at present..... perhaps I should?

"Has been lead by fools".…. Yes it's true to say that we have had our share of CEOs and Directors that have had an agenda that doesn't align with the general workforce. Fools?... probably not as they've all taken top dollar out of the business, however very few have left it in a better position than when they took control......all in my opinion of course.....lol

TMS, "where I think you’re of the opinion that Royal Mail is, was and always will be a forced labour camp run by evil dictators, hell bent on extortion and corruption and is cursed for ever more. Lol".

I don't believe that I have ever posted anything that would remotely back that viewpoint up but if that's what you believe then crack on.

Only a fool would work for a "forced labour camp run by evil dictators" and only a tool would put that in black and white....lol

What I do believe is that the UK operation is currently in a precarious position. It is being squeezed from all sides, including by the regulator and from the competition, not to mention all the little power struggles from within. If Williams and the BoD get the new CEO appointment correct then that will alleviate the situation. If they get it wrong then who knows?

Financially, don't forget that the bill for last year's cyber attack is still to be settled and the Deloitte bill won't be cheap, the fleet is in serious need of an upgrade (I would estimate a replacement rate of around 6,000 small wheels EVs a year for the next five years) and there are around 400 delivery offices in need of an upgrade. All tax deductible I'm sure but this is ongoing work that should have been taking place year on year and is now backlogged.

TMS, "I think you can say with 99% certainty that H1 is going to make painful reading again this year".

I'm in agreement with you on this and I'm glad that you posted that because if I had posted it then I would have been decried as a doom monger.....

Hounddog, I posted a while back that from a financial perspective, a Monday/Wednesday/Friday letters service should be sufficient and would also negate the need for a first class service which should save a few quid? This would need to be backed up with a seven days a week parcel service incorporated into the USO, however as I have posted many times before, any changes to the USO aren't going to happen overnight as Parliament moves at a woefully glacial pace.

With regards to Evri hiring a further 10,000 staff, I think that this could be them ramping up for Christmas

Broch, I actually thought that was an early April Fools joke when I saw staff using the snow shovels. Apparently the idea came from an engineering apprentice and the new Head of Engineering (ex Jaguar Land Rover) thought that it was fantastic.

TMS, I guess that you are correct with your quote that as the GPO was "a government owned institution that served the UK people and not a commercial enterprise bringing products to market" and as the UK Government of the day took 100% of the GPO profits then the responsible minister was probably happy with whatever profit was made.

As for a production line, these machines were produced in the UK in their hundreds by a dedicated GPO workforce and distributed to mail centres (there used to be almost sixty) around the UK. I'm sure that scaling up would not have been an issue however by the end of the 1980s the UK in general was looking to ditch any meaningful form of manufacturing in favour of using cheaper Asian labour.

TMS, perhaps do some internet research, it might keep you away from LSE for a while?

RM had developed the Automatic Letter Facing machine and the prototype was trialled at Dock Gate 10 in Southampton Mail Centre in 1957. The multi selection sorting machine was developed shortly afterwards using pinwheel memory and a threaded core translator, way before Europe and the USA had thought about automation although I believe that the Dutch trialled something in the 1930s without much success. RM continued to build and develop it's automation throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s but a lack of foresight and ambition from those who managed the business didn't have the vision....pity...

The first stamps made purely for automation....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_lined_stamp

Graphite stamps were phased out in early 1960, as they were deemed too easy to forge, in favour of phosphor lined stamps which could be read under ultra violet light by the newly developed technology.

Unfortunately, staff were not encouraged to take film footage back then probably due to the Official Secrets Act, however there is a poor quality black and white short film of a GPO parcel machine on YouTube.

TMS, "wow, easy tiger lol. So what year are we talking about here? And what were these market leading products it was going to sell to USA and the rest of Europe?? It must have been something damn good if it was going to lead to western domination?"

When did I say that RM were going to sell automation to Europe and the USA? What I actually posted was "RM had the ability to be able to manufacture and sell their own market leading products to the rest of Europe and potentially the USA" so who's twisting words now?.....lolol

You might want to do some homework before just throwing arbitrary comments out there? If you do then you will find that RM had developed stamp and the relevant automation technology as far back as 1955 for letters and had parcel sorting machines in the mid 1960s.

Perhaps best to wind your neck in while I school you boy.....

TMS, so what exactly is your definition of "downing tools" as it's obviously not the same as others on this forum as they have used that outdated Oxford dictionary definition which I have always believed to be definitive?

TMS, you commented yesterday that "I think this is good news that R&D didn’t go down this route in hindsight or RM would be lumbered with even more outdated machinery".

This is so typical of you to miss the point and promote your own agenda. RM had the ability to be able to manufacture and sell their own market leading products to the rest of Europe and potentially the USA. It had the infrastructure and means in place but choose to bin the lot and buy from the US (National Presort), Germany (AEG) and currently France (Solystic). The machinery then needs to be adapted to run with our existing technology and upgraded to current UK (and more importantly, Royal Mail) safety specification and none of this comes cheap.

Lack of foresight, ambition and innovation from a business that used to be a market leader.

Redceo, "Oli. Ever heard the term "glutton for punishment" :-))"

Someone has to stoke the ego. It's my turn this weekend?.....lol

Oh dear TMS, you have conveniently omitted the backlash from his "golden hello" payment despite being a longstanding employee.....oh that and the fact that he wanted to run the UK operation from Zurich so that he could presumably keep his finger in the pies......I mean on the pulse.....lol?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/royal-mail-boss-rico-back-pay-deal-mps-demand-answers-rachel-reeves-a8465536.html

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/15/royal-mail-chief-rico-back-quits-with-immediate-effect

TMS, I have an adopted daughter who could be a natural sibling to you. She has, and always will, be keen to get involved in an argument or discussion even if she wasn't involved or invited but hey, this is an open forum so I guess that anything goes and like you she also doesn't like to respond directly to a question (when a simple yes/no would suffice) without deflecting so would probably make an ideal politician. Have you ever thought about a career in politics?

TMS, I'm not having a hard time understanding the simple points that you are making at all however you obviously aren't making them simple enough as when I respond with a comment based on your opinion and simple points you accuse me of twisting your words.

So, are you saying that by downing tools, the militant union are stopping the directors from achieving their vision? If so then surely that would be an admission that "Baldy Dave" holds some power here? Of course you wouldn't want to admit that would you?

By innovation, I mean within RM automation and by contracts, I mean long term contracts that the business have signed up to which are now coming back to haunt them and will cost big bucks to get out of alter.

TMS, "Yes, I would 100% say so. If I was an investigator looking at the situation we’ve got 4 different CEO’s , over almost 20 years, from different nationalities, different backgrounds, different sexes…….and the same Union. So it’s either all 4 CEO’s are argumentative, malicious psychopaths or the (same) union with the same personnel are militant dinosaurs…"

I'm not twisting your words....

You have said that over the last twenty years, the last four CEOs have been unable to progress because of the militant dinosaur union. So who is running the company? Why haven't they been able to push their agenda's through?

"I know that you would very much like that to be the case as you seem to take great pleasure in the fact the ceo’s have been removed? are you afraid of innovation and do you lack ambition?"

Where have I stated that I take pleasure in having a CEO removed? I actually thought that Moya Greene was doing a good job bit she wanted to retire. Lacking ambition.....lol..... this is a business that traditionally makes innovation from within extremely difficult due to its structure and the long term contracts that it has tied itself up in.....lol......of course you wouldn't know that as you have never been an employee.....

"by trying to twist my words and turning it on me you’ve done an excellent job at confirming the point i was making."

You post so many words that it's not difficult really.....lol.....

Tomolo, that's a great breakdown. Are you saying that there won't be a requirement for posties to work more than 35 hours after Christmas when the hours reduce?