6 Day Postal Strike Starts Thursday

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More doom and gloom...brilliant :what:

Courtesy of The Telegraph
Chaos expected during 'six-day' postal strike
Last Updated: 1:57am BST 01/10/2007

Millions of homes and small businesses which rely on the post are being warned that they face chaos next week, as the largest postal strike for four years begins.

The the Communication Workers Union plans to hold a strike every week until the dispute is settled

The Communication Workers Union plans to shut down the postal system from lunchtime on Thursday for 48 hours, and then restart the strike in the early hours of Monday, Oct 8, for a further 48 hours.

Because the strike straddles the weekend, there will almost certainly be no post for six days in a row.

Not only is the action longer than any of the previous strikes called this year, it will cover deliveries, sorting and collections whereas earlier strikes have only affected part of the network.

Andy Frewin, of the consumer body Postwatch, said: "It's going to cause all sorts of problems. The advice we'd give is just because your credit card bill has not arrived, it does not mean you don't have to pay it."

The strikes come after lengthy talks between the unions and Royal Mail managers failed to bring agreement last week.

The union has rejected a 2.5 per cent pay offer and the Royal Mail's modernisation plans, which the union claimed would cost 40,000 jobs.
 
Lazy feckers. Postmen have an easy life - they only work half the day yet get paid a reasonably good, full time wage. Not only that, a large majority of them have so much free time on their hands they either get a second job in addition or set up businesses. I knew several postmen - all of whom rake the money in. Of all the ones I've known over the years several run gardening/painting and decorating/window cleaning etc businesses or teach people to drive or do something else to supplement their income. So, they start early in the morning - so do many people. Postmen tend to finish by mid to late morning however. I have no sympathy with them - we could all throw our toys out of the pram and strike every time we're pissed off if we really wanted to but we're not all shysters. Someone has to carry on working or everything would grind to a halt.
 
Ordinarily I don't have a problem with postmen Colin - indeed, as I said, I know several. Striking for 6 days is more than a pain in the arse though - it's out of order. How much disruption do they want to cause? I'm waiting for some important things to come through in the post & it will cause mass disruption throughout the country - I don't see why I [and the rest of the country] should have everything put back by more than a week (which it will be once the backlog amasses) just because postmen are the latest to be wooed by the strike culture. I loathe and detest striking unless it is absolutely necessary, which in this case it is not - it is merely another case of throwing toys out of a pram to try & get more money. It stinks.
 
I was speaking to a postman a couple of months back, when they had the one-day strikes, and his opinion then was that there wouldn't be lot of grass-root support for a prolonged strike.

He and his workmates were quite happy with the money they were taking home after they had their share of overtime.

It doesn't seem as if he had his finger on the pulse.

I would agree that strike action should be the very last resort.

ps. seeing this next to the Goffs' sale thread strikes me as being a touch ironic.
 
Actually Colin, I'd beg to differ. I'd tend to agree with your friend and believe that it probably is the case that a lot of postmen themselves don't want to strike - it's the bloody unions that tend to speak for them & make them do so by making their lives unpleasant if they don't join in.

As you say, the ones I know are quite happy taking home their not ungenerous overtime, finishing before noon & going out of an afternoon to earn more money doing something else!
 
I have no idea but I believe that it wasn't far off the £20k/yr mark over ten years ago. That may have been inclusive of OT but again, it's not a shabby wage when you bear in mind that it is over the average wage mark, you have the OTE more money in the afternoons and you need no skills or qualifications in the first place.
 
Basic Pay
As a guide, new employees aged 18 and over will receive basic pay of around £256 a week for full-time hours rising to £285 - £311 after 1 year. This rate will be on a pro-rata basis for part-time hours. Higher rates are paid in Inner and Outer London and in some parts of the South East.

Quite poor pay really, I say they should be paid lots more for being an essential service.
 
Originally posted by ovverbruv@Oct 3 2007, 09:20 PM


Quite poor pay really, I say they should be paid lots more for being an essential service.
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Essential it may be, but like SL said it requires no real skill to post a letter and so it`s hard to say they are under paid.
 
You also have to take into account the staggering amounts of overtime that these guys earn on a near daily basis and the fact that they work very short hours.

At the sorting office near me they were earning nearly £20k/yr over ten years ago, as I said.
 
i dont care what point theyve got to prove, im only interested in how it affects me. we have just completed our sales invoices for september & cheques should be arriving through the door any day now, but it will be late next week if not the week after (by the time the back log has cleared) then theres the five days it takes for the cheques to clear. im looking at 3 plus weeks before september's invoices are banked & cleared, when it should be one week. its a joke.
 
Originally posted by jft2005@Oct 3 2007, 11:00 PM
i dont care what point theyve got to prove, im only interested in how it affects me. we have just completed our sales invoices for september & cheques should be arriving through the door any day now, but it will be late next week if not the week after (by the time the back log has cleared) then theres the five days it takes for the cheques to clear. im looking at 3 plus weeks before september's invoices are banked & cleared, when it should be one week. its a joke.
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The cheque's in the post is the poorest thing in the world. Hello world, welcome to online banking.
 
Originally posted by Shadow Leader@Oct 3 2007, 06:13 PM
I have no idea but I believe that it wasn't far off the £20k/yr mark over ten years ago. That may have been inclusive of OT but again, it's not a shabby wage when you bear in mind that it is over the average wage mark, you have the OTE more money in the afternoons and you need no skills or qualifications in the first place.
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According to the BBC just now, the pay claim is to take them up to about £20k basic (ie. about £5k below the national average) for a 40 hour week. As has been pointed out, many get plenty of overtime although there is less now that there is only 1 delivery per day.
I'd say that the main part of the dispute isn't about pay anyway. It's partly about the proposed closure of the final salary pension scheme and partly about working practices. SL is quite right that, currently, when his round is complete a postie can knock off for the day. Round here, that would probably be about 1 o'clock. I think they start at 5.30 so they've generally done close to a full day anyway. Part of the new deal would be that they start at 6.30 and go back to the office after the round. It may not seem like a big deal but many posties joined in the first place because finishing at lunchtime after an early start suited them and they took lower pay for that reason. Because of that lower basic pay they actually need the other work to live to a decent standard.
Now, many of us will as youngsters have worked on the post at Christmas. It was quite fun at the time particularly if you had the luck to work nights - better pay and mostly indoors. I think though that many of us would have decided that getting up at 4.30 on a January morning wasn't the best start to a working day no matter how much easier it seems in July.

For me there are wrongs on both sides here with union activists trying to bluff over the future of a national service and management who basically don't understand their staff.
 
I hear a large percentage of postmen and women voted to strike because the new working conditions will prevent them from getting their caravans on the road once they've clocked off.
 
Must admit that I was reading this through I was thinking where on earth Dom was getting her facts from? Is she just making them up? or shooting from the hip? Evidentally however, their salaries, the national average, and the reason for the action have been corrected by Archie.

So far as I'm concenred if it stops junk mail and bills coming through for another week, that's fine with me
 
To be fair, Dom did say that the £20k probably included overtime and I'd have thought that, in those days, that sort of mark was possible although maybe slightly overstated for the norm.
 
Originally posted by cricketfan+Oct 3 2007, 10:34 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (cricketfan @ Oct 3 2007, 10:34 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-jft2005@Oct 3 2007, 11:00 PM
i dont care what point theyve got to prove, im only interested in how it affects me. we have just completed our sales invoices for september & cheques should be arriving through the door any day now, but it will be late next week if not the week after (by the time the back log has cleared) then theres the five days it takes for the cheques to clear. im looking at 3 plus weeks before september's invoices are banked & cleared, when it should be one week. its a joke.
Click to expand...
The cheque's in the post is the poorest thing in the world. Hello world, welcome to online banking. [/b][/quote]
ok then clever clogs, what do i say to my customers who dont do online banking then? we wont work with you until you pay by BACS? id be turning away hundreds of thousands of pounds per year. if they got their asses back to work, wed be ok.
 
But surely if they have done 40 hours a week then they are free to do what they want, including having second jobs, I say good luck to them
 
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