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Plans by Royal Mail management to slash around 40,000 jobs over
the next five years have been leaked. Clearly the plan is to make the
company an 'attractive option' for buyers following privatisation. In
reality this will turn RM into just another courier service - offering
poor service for high prices.
Already, over the last decade (with 65,000 jobs gone also),
we have seen post prices shoot up and up with new rates based on
envellope sizes only adding to the cost. Deliveries have been curtailed
(second post is a thing of the past now) and it won't be long before the
daily delivery is dropped. Losing a quarter of your (already reduced) workforce can only
have one effect - Royal Mail become Right Royal Rippoff!
The
postal workers union, UCW, has already held a ballot of its members in
London over proposed action to stop the closures of the East London and
Nine Elms mail centres and the Rathbone Place sorting office. The
majority for action was 4 to 1.
In the current issue of Socialist Appeal
we publish an interview with Presley Antoine, political officer for the
London West End AMAL CWU branch, on the current situation. The interviw
took place before the ballot result was known:
What is the current state of play so far as the union is concerned in London?
Royal Mail want to shut two Mail Centres – East London and Nine Elms –
and one sorting office, which is Rathbone Place where I work. This is
probably the largest sorting office in the country and covers a large
part of Central London including the W1 and WC post areas. Management
want to transfer Rathbone Place staff to the Mount Pleasant site and in
turn send some of their workers to a place called Langley, a processing
office out in West London. Of course, many workers will then be faced
with a very long journey, compared to what they have been used to, right
out almost to Heathrow. It’s hard enough now getting to Central London
first thing in the morning (tubes don’t run that early, remember)
without having to try and get all the way to the new site. We think this
is wrong.
What will happen to Rathbone Place?
The word is that the building will be sold. We think that it may be
worth as much as £140 million pounds. They could make a killing on this –
at our expense!
What about the two Mail Centres?
Shutting these simply doesn’t make sense. The buildings are leased up to
2022, so they will have to keep paying for them even if they are empty.
We think this is just an attempt to break the industrial power of our
union in London. They also want to tear up the Business and
Transformation Agreement of 2009, negotiated between the union and the
employers after the last dispute.
I, myself was not happy with that agreement – I felt it was just as
open-ended as the 2007 agreement. We were promised some bonus share
payments in lieu of proper pay rises but this year we were told Royal
Mail didn’t have the money to pay it.
Members are now very angry since they are seeing no cash and their jobs
under threat. This is why I think there will be a positive vote for
action. They told us we should be grateful we have jobs, now even that
is not rue anymore!
Up until now we have never had forced redundancies in Royal Mail. Any
job losses were dealt with through voluntary redundancy arrangements.
With these sites going, there will have to be compulsory redundancies –
we think at least 800 people will be affected in this way.
London is likely to act first but closures are planned for elsewhere in
the UK, so they won’t be far behind in balloting too. We know that both
parties in the government coalition support privatisation and will be
behind the Royal Mail bosses in this. Getting rid of the last agreement
is just one step further towards making Royal Mail ready for
privatisation, with all that will mean for services, jobs and pay. The
privatisation plans are almost through parliament, now they want to make
it into a lucrative option for potential buyers.
The union needs to link up with other public sector unions to fight on a
united front against these attacks on our public services, which
include the mail.
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