I joined Royal Mail in 2003. My plan was to do the job for a year, get my fitness up then apply to be a fireman. A year went by and I decided to stay as I enjoyed the job. It wasn’t great pay, it still isn’t but I loved it. When I had children it was even better as I was able to pick my children up from school everyday.
Next year (if I make it) will be my 20th year at Royal Mail. I’ve met some great people along the way (posties and members of the public). But I’m writing this as I’m worried.
As many of you know posties have voted to strike in abundance. The reason being all of our futures are at a massive risk.
Royal Mail made £758 million in profit last year.
They gave £400 million to shareholders.
The two CEOs and finance officer took over £2 million in bonuses.  That was because we the posties were out there working our arses off during covid…making millions for those at the top.
Coming out of covid and entering into are recession me and my colleagues thought we would be looked after with a decent pay rise to match inflation (currentlv estimated to be around 10%). As mentioned above we don’t earn a lot as it is. I’m 40 and my salary is around 25k a year (the UK average for someone between 40-49 is £44,439). I’ve always put happiness above money and most of the time I’m happy doing the job I do because it gives me a great work/family balance.
Anyway back to that expected pay rise. We had a 2% pay rise forced upon us without negotiation by our CEO Simon Thompson.
We’ve been told we can have another 1.5% if we rip up our terms and conditions.
Simon wants us to…
Reduce our sick pay.
Reduce pay for new starters.
Force us to work Sundays on a flat rate (most posties work Saturdays so Sunday is the only full day we get to spend with our families).
He wants us to start and finish around 3 hours later.so starting around 9am and finishing around 5pm (1000s of posties like myself do the job so we can pick up our children from school).
They also want us to “bank hours” so if there is not much mail in the summer they can take an hour or two off your finish time and add on to your days in the winter meaning you could be working 10 hour days in the winter.
All this for a 1.5% increase.
They’ve also offered a £500 lump sum payment for meeting productivity targets.
When asked what those targets would be they didn’t know yet…I know ridiculous right. In the coming weeks if a deal isn’t sorted we’ll be striking. We don’t want to as we don’t get paid when we strike.
Unfortunately our hand has been forced, our futures are at risk and we have to fight back.
Our CEO Simon Thompson doesn’t care about us or Royal Mail. He cares about his salary, pension, shares and bonuses. He jumps from corporation to corporation doing this kind of thing regularly. I’m here to ask you the public to please be on our side. We can’t win this alone. You’ll see lies in the media put out by Royal Mail like “we’re losing 1 million a day” this isn’t true. The old “losing £1 million a day” line is a lie Royal Mail have used in the past when trying to cut costs.
Anyway if you’ve made it this far, thank you for taking time out and reading all of this.
Again please support your postie. If anyone would like to share this then please do it would be much appreciated.
Tom the Postman
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Great British Postie
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Update 22/9/22:
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