As you probably know I work part time for Royal Mail in the UK. There is ongoing strike action over Pay, workers rights, working conditions and workers contracts.

Royal mail is on strike again today and tomorrow, and will be on strike again next week for 2 days and further strike days every week in December. Many I know that work there have mortgages to pay and are getting to the point where they can't support ongoing strike action, so soon the union's strength to negotiate will fall as more cross the picket line to return to work.

Yesterday Royal Mail offered a deal that included the offer of a 9% pay rise over the next 18 months. The CWU union instantly rejected it and said the strike would continue. Personally I think 9% was a very good offer considering the current economic situation globally. Especially as RM workers have had very poor pay rises in recent years such as 1.5%.

The problem the union have is the conditions to accept this pay rise. But the reality is that the logistics and courier markets have changed. There is now a far greater focus on parcels, with the numbers of letters going through the system continuing to fall. It's a bit more complicated then that but that's the main reason for a need for change and a restructure of Royal Mail. I can expand on this if anyone is interested in knowing more.

The union is also weak these days. Many years ago Royal Mail was the only mail service in the UK and enjoyed that position for over 350 years, being the oldest service in the world. But when the UK joined the EU they eventually forced the British government to change this, saying that the nationally owned mail service was a monopoly and the service needs to be opened up to tender. When this happened the alternative courier services cherry picked all the lucrative contracts from Royal Mail by undercutting them, and they had no way to fight this as Royal Mail prices were fixed by a regulator, whereas the independent couriers are not regulated. And because the shipping postagecprices were regulated Royal Mail couldn't adjust them to to losing their biggest revenue customers to competition, so the company started to make a lose, which eventually led to the argument that it was no longer a viable company to keep nationally owned, so it was privatised and sold off.

When it was the only postal service the unions had axlot of power. They striked and the country's postal service ground to a halt. But now if Royal Mail employees strike larger companies such as Amazon just use other courier services in those days, so not that many actually notice. The only real hit is on the company share price.

The other issue Royal Mail as a company have is the universal service agreement. This means the company is required ro deliver mail to every UK address, and ro try and achieve that by the next year, with 3 working days being the limit. And this also means they have to deliver every day of the week and Saturdays. RM are currently trying to remove Saturdays from this agreement, so only all Mail will need to be delivered on week days. With only parcels delivered at weekends.

There are some less welcome changes they are trying to push through in changing workers rights and contracts of employment.

To get rid of paid sick leave, so anyone off sick would not get paid for their first week off, and then only receive statutory sick pay after that (£147 per week). And for there to be no union representation for workers rights when they return to work.

To replace workers overtime with cheaper agency workers. This is already happening where I work. During Christmas they have always offered the ability for all part time staff to go fulltime for the 3 weeks leading up to Christmas. And for anyone to take overtime during the same time. This has been removed this year. There is no overtime being offered and no ability to go full time. Instead they have brought in cheap agency workers who are all very young, lazy and often don't speak very good English. And to make it worse they are being paid more then RM staff.

There is also a rumour that the Christmas bonuses are being removed this year. Nutmeg this is £200 the week before Christmas. Also every employee has always received 50 free 1st class stamps as a part of the christmas bonus. These are worth over £45. It's rumoured they won't be getting those either this year.

There is also a plan to force a change to working hours. With employees having to work 2 hours longer in busier times of the year for no additional money.

Last week there were meetings with the shift makers
Managers where they announced people could apply for voluntary redundany. I have worked for them for 20 years and if I went for this would only get 39 weeks wages plus about £3000 as a redundancy package. For those that have worked far longer, some 40 years, they would get exactly the same. And if they don't get enough volunteers they will start forced redundancies next year. Great!

But talking to managers I dunt think many, if any, redundancies will Geithner when I work in Southampton. They recently installed a new parcel sorting machine so have futureproofed the site. And because of the site location it's needed because of the Isle of Wight, as we process their mail. Other offices on the South coast might close though such as Bournemouth so redundancies there would take place. But this is all rumour at the moment.

Not good though.

And many other job sectors are going on strike, or are already on strike over pay and working conditions. The problem is that in a global recession when the cost of living is going up oxidised fuel and energy prices people need pay rises to afford them, but bring a recession the employers are facing higher bills so have less money to pay higher wages. So it's an impossible situation.