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The cutback in caller's hours is one of the few things that's gone through without anyone batting an eyelid, apart from the customers who want to drop stuff off . Ours is still open for six hours a day Tuesday-Friday but we used to be 10 hours a day and also late Saturdays and Sundays. It hasn't cost any jobs but a couple of people have lost out on S/A overtime and I've been relegated from the Callers to a delivery postie on Saturdays (bah!) but everyone affected has accepted it as, to be honest, there were times when it got boring in there.
Pre-pandemic we always had at least 1000 items waiting for collection or redelivery at any time, a constant queue of people collecting stuff etc. Now that's around 400-450 items on the shelf, and about half of those are surcharges which rarely get collected.
The only thing that doesn't make sense at our office is that we're no longer open on Sundays, despite the fact there's a postie there with nothing else to do so as we do Sunday deliveries and we need someone to act as supervisor and be in the office for any issues. It wouldn't cost the company a penny to reopen the Callers for four hours but we have no say locally these days. Some pen pusher in an office somewhere knows better than those of us in the middle of our communities. Probably the same team that came up with the idea of photographing every Tracked item on delivery and then wondering why productivity on deliveries is down 1.6% since that was brought in. Cos you're slowing us down you fools!
And, as an aside to my last post, bear in mind this is only the collection from your doorstep that's free. If retailers are charging people to return items that's between them and their customers. You can be assured that RM don't let them have postage for free and never have done!
The latest announcement is just another tinkering of prices. When the service first started RM charged 72p an item or 60p if it was an online return. They reduced the price a bit later, then had a period of a couple of months when it was free then put it back up to 72p although I seem to recall Tracked items were still free. Now they're saying free for everything, currently until 31st December.
It makes sense as they've cut Callers Office hours so much that people can't get down there to drop stuff off so they go to the Post Office which of course means the PO getting a cut of the price. If mail is dropped straight into the RM network we get to keep all the money.
Before the Caller Office hours were changed nationally I saw an email regarding the rationale behind it showing how many people per hour were collecting stuff based on our SPS system - it was true in that the number of people collecting items has gone right down as many rebook deliveries online now or notify us of safe places to leave things rather than have us take them back to the office. However, I don't think anyone in the decision making department thought of how many people drop stuff off at Callers Offices as we have no way of counting those. We get more of those than people collecting mail these days.
Maybe having free collections is a reaction to that.
I can only speak for myself. As they say in the corporate world - YMMV.
Hypothetical but I'd say 5-6%
I joined the company in 1994, left in 2015 and rejoined in 2019. I don't know if I still have my old contract and can't remember what it says but my current one states - "your hours of work will be allocated to you by your manager. However these hours may change from time to time after giving you reasonable notice"
and
"It is a condition of your employment that you are liable to work overtime and to attend at varying times on any day (including weekends, Bank and Public Holidays) as the needs of the service demand"
So anyone who's joined since January 2019 at the latest has already agreed to this aspect.
RM is already a 24/7 operation. Even in the Delivery Office I work in there are varying shifts. I'm on 11am to 5pm today as I do the Callers Office on Saturdays. We have a couple of people who start at 2pm, one dealing with collections, one doing what we call LAT's (stands for Later Acceptance Time) which are tracked parcels that RM have collected after standard hours which don't get processed in time for morning deliveries.
And we already have Sunday working. When I rejoined I was specifically asked to do the Callers Office on a Sunday as I had previous experience. Then the pandemic happened and we did deliveries and collections of test kits on Sundays and now we have the Tracked 24 parcels to do. It takes 10 people to do the Sunday parcels and that's for two, fairly large, Delivery Offices (I don't know why we do a neighbouring office's parcels as they're big enough to open themselves on a Sunday but hey ho.
I know everyone has different needs, some need to pick up children after school etc., but we don't struggle to get anyone to fill our non standard delivery hours. I can't see why the company are pushing this as it's already in the contracts, and I don't see why the union are against it as they've already agreed to the wording of the contracts.
There are other aspects in the current dispute but I've not actually read anything official from either side.
The only reason I'll be joining any strikes is the pay offer. As others have said - it is 2%. Possibly 3.5% but we won't be getting this mythical 2% bonus. The company doesn't budget for a loss so, already this year we won't be getting that 2%. Judging by the amount of overtime claimed in my office on a daily basis I doubt we're ever within budget.
Teslo - " be offloaded back to the government at asset value and they can once again subsidize the Dad's Army element of Royal Mai."
The government has never subsidized Royal Mail. On the contrary, all they ever did when they owned the company was take money out each year by way of a dividend. It was £313 million at its peak in 1998. That's on top of corporation tax, vehicle tax, fuel duty etc.
A quote from https://www.postalmuseum.org/collections/statistics/
"greatly increased cash demands from the Treasury (‘negative External Financing Limits’) represented a government decision to take advantage of the Post Office’s heightened earning power. Over this entire period, the Government was paid £2.4bn in negative EFLs, effectively a proxy for dividend payments, in addition to £1.4bn in corporation tax."
There's a chart showing the amounts taken by the government between 1976 and 2003 at https://www.postalmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/13_Returns_to_the_Exchequer_from_the_Post_Office_Corporation_1976_2001.pdf
Imagine if this money had stayed in the company and they had been allowed to invest it in modernization. We may not be where we are now.
As an aside, there are other interesting reports on that page showing profit & loss for quite a few years since 1919. Quite interesting. Spoiler, the company's first ever loss was in 1919/20, the worst year was in 2002 with a £940 million loss.
I don't know the answer to Oli's question but I would have thought not as Blackrock will have to go through a broker just like anyone else.
Anger - your hatred of Blackrock and others is a bit much sometimes. They're making money for their shareholders, sure, but they're also making money for their clients. That includes the Royal Mail Pension Plan. For the year ended 31st March 2021 the plan had £8.837 billion of assets managed by Blackrock. You wanting them to fail basically means you're prepared to accept this particular pension scheme to fail thus screwing up the tens of thousands of current and ex-posties that rely on it now or in the future. I have no idea what pensions you have but check who's managing them as there's a chance you have some money under Blackrock's control as well.
And shorting doesn't always make money - remember back in 2020 RM was shorted by nearly 10% in August. The price was lower than £2 a share. Despite the huge amount of shorting the price started going up and kept going for months. The shorters had no impact on the price and they all closed their positions fairly rapidly. Did they all make money? Were there some losses? Only they'll know.
If you go on Betfair Sports it's the same principle. Some will bet on, for example, Nadal to win a tennis match, some will bet on Djokovic. You can pick any side you want and, if you time it right, you can guarantee yourself a profit no matter what the outcome. If you're confident in your choice then why worry that others are betting against you?
Can confirm what Oli says. I used to get the 'leadership allowance' in my old office as I did the callers until 7pm and locked the building up. It's the same in my current office but I'm not the person doing it now. Basically the managers leave at 2pm or thereabouts on Mon- Sat and the office is open as late as 8pm doing collections / callers office etc so one of the (what we used to call PHGs) gets the allowance. We don't get any managers coming in at all on Sundays so one of the three posties that come in gets the allowance to handle the agency staff and callers. It's somewhere in the region of £6 - £7 a shift.
With the managers strike my understanding is all they need to do is have someone in charge for a few hours a day and things can carry on. I don't know if they plan on dropping in non-striking managers to sit in each office every day or what. It'll be fun seeing what happens though. Most of us will probably just get on with our jobs but what about the spares we have to cover absence? I guess they can just come in and choose which walk to cover.
I don't think the managers strike will affect the delivery of mail as much as Unite say, but we'll see. I suppose a lot depends on what happens at the Mail Centres.
It's a PITA for me as my bank doesn't offer that service, despite being a huge, international beast. Where I live now hasn't got any banks (and the fella who runs the local Post Office is rude and arrogant so I ain't going there) so there's no point me changing for the sake of the two cheques a year I receive. Just means they sit around for a few weeks until I go into town. I suppose it would be more accurate to call it a minor irritant rather than a full PITA but, on a broader note, it's an incredible waste of money sending tens of thousands of cheques out when it's perfectly possible to pay direct into a bank. Yet another example of Royal Mail not knowing efficiency if it bit them on the bum.
Blackrock can make money however they like as far as I'm concerned. They manage large amounts of my pension fund so if they make money by shorting or buying I don't mind. It all helps my pension just a little bit.
They get bought on the 15th of each month, or the following day the stock market is open if the 15th is a Saturday or Sunday. The amount they use to buy shares is based on what you have in your account on the last Friday of the previous month.
You can see all your share details on esp-portal.com. Quite an easy site to use.
The only thing I can't work out how to change is why I get dividends from my free shares paid direct to my bank but dividends for my paid shares get paid by cheque. Getting a cheque these days is a PITA but hey ho.
Anger - RM have been delivering for Pharmacy2U for a while now. This just looks like an extension of that. I remember about a year ago a piece where someone who works for an online pharmacy was saying RM would never be able to compete with Amazon who offer a similar service, or will be soon. It did make me laugh as, although RM may not be able to compete on price, we can actually deliver things to the correct houses. Virtually every delivery postie must have seen things from Amazon (and other carriers) left on the wrong doorstep - their refusal to actually put anything through a letterbox makes their mistakes easier to spot. I deliver to a rural area and, last week, there was a parcel left at a farm entrance for days which had an address two miles away on it. It was meant for a new build estate which clearly isn't on Amazon's sat navs yet as loads of residents on my delivery ask me what they should do with the parcels Amazon have left on their doorsteps that are meant for the new estate. One lady actually printed a map out to give to drivers showing where they should go as she got so many Amazon parcels, and she's not even an Amazon customer.
When Amazon and Royal Mail were competing for the Covid test kit contract who got it? Not based on price but based on delivering the things correctly. If Amazon are to go around leaving prescription pills on people's doorsteps that could lead to all sorts of fun.
But yes, an interesting development that can only be a good thing for RM.
From the annual report - the 50th percentile (same as median) salary of all RM's UK employees in 21-22 was £23,884.
The 50th percentile total pay and benefits which includes allowances, overtime, shift payments and pension
arrangements was £32,465.
This is the problem we face. RM are a private company, why can't we charge companies whatever we like, especially competitors? BT had the same problems. Spend decades and millions building up a system then you have to allow other companies to access it on the cheap. If Whistl / Amazon Logistics / anyone else want to deliver stuff then let them do it but they'll need to spend millions building up their networks. At least Amazon Logistics have given it a go but they still rely on other carriers as they send out so much cheap rubbish they can't cope. We don't deliver stuff for FedEx / UPS / Evri etc as they've built up their own networks and don't need us. That's a fair and level playing field with healthy competition. The others are just piggybacking and cherry picking.
You're right Mike, it is actually quite low for a FTSE100 CEO. The average is £2.7 million. From Monday we'll be in the FTSE250 where the average CEO pay is £1.3 million so still relatively low. What I found interesting about his pay is that his basic has gone up by 3.6%. Now, if that was RM's offer to CWU grades it would be more justified.
As for timing, last year's report was released on Friday 18th June so I wouldn't read anything into that.
Quote - "2% payrise, i cant see how anyone can argue against that, in the current climate most will be lucky to get a pay rise of any sorts"
The latest ONS figures show average pay rises including bonuses are currently at 6.8%, excluding bonuses it's 4.2%. They also point out that, in the private sector, pay rises are at 8%.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/june2022
I know plenty of people in loads of different jobs. Of those who've told me, none have received lower than 5% this year.
My old office was one of the first to get the machines that could sort letters into delivery order. I said at the time they're a waste of money. Must cost over £1 million apiece and we were told they would save each postie 15 minutes prep time. In an office with 70 rounds that's 1050 minutes a day saved. How long to recoup that million pound investment? And that doesn't include running costs, maintenance etc. It was technology for technology's sake, besides, an experienced postie can throw their walk off very quickly, walk sorting only really benefits those who are new to a round.
In a wise move they worked out the machines could sort mail for other offices as well, problem was getting it to the offices in time and still, nowhere near enough cost savings. After a few years they moved the machines out and sent them elsewhere, probably to a Mail Centre where their presence actually makes sense as they can run all night.
The problem of us being considered a parcels business is that many Delivery Offices weren't built with today's mail needs in mind. Just down the road from me there's a DO in an old Victorian building that has five floors, three floors aren't used as there's no need for them. There are some DO's where mail has to be transported by a lift as the sorting frames are on two floors - half hour waits for the lift are standard. It'll take billions of investment to get every DO up to a modern spec . To be blunt many should be sold off and new ones built but where? And at what cost?
I know RM are looking to change the DO structure where they can. My old office recently had a feasibility study to see if a smaller office nearby could fit in the same building. Problem is, the office isn't big enough for what already needs to happen so, needless to say, the smaller office is staying put.
In other news, the latest waste of tens of millions of pounds has hit the streets. The new uniform. It actually looks good and people say it's comfy but, instead of phasing it in with people getting new uniform when the old stuff wears out, we were all told last year to order everything and it'll all come in one go. The old uniform is being sent away for whatever they're going to do with it - recycling / repurposing I hope rather than being dumped in a landfill, but who knows?
Good luck with them finding 40,000 agency workers to cover the railway strikes, especially those who are trained to drive trains, and 100,000 to cover any potential Royal Mail strikes.