Postal workers in London are to escalate their industrial action, with stoppages continuing throughout the week. Members of the Communication Workers’ Union are set to walk out again today and tomorrow, but it’s now being reported that strikes are to occur in different parts of the capital all week: North London on Thursday, parts of South-East and South-West London on Friday and the West End on Saturday.
The union say that they have offered RM a three month moratorium on industrial action in return for the suspension of changes, but that management have rejected this offer. Royal Mail themselves have said that they are “really disappointed” at the Union’s action.
Lord Mandleson, the Business Secretary, said in response to stoppages earlier this month, “these strikes will exasperate Royal Mail’s customers – the people and businesses who keep the company going. The only purpose they will serve is to accelerate the shift away from post.”
13 Responses
Sabotaging the work of small businesses (who have no realistic alternative to RM) in this already difficult economic environment is hardly constructive or a way to engender public support.
I emailed the CWU about the destructive effects of their actions a few weeks ago – they can’t even be bothered to respond.
They need to get their act together and resolve this dispute once and for all.
I have little time for Royal Mail at the best of times, let it go to the wall…
You really need to look at what Royal Mail management are doing and the way it’s affecting SMEs up and down the country, in my area they have changed the last collection time from 6.30pm to 6.00pm, this is being done to improve customer service and because of an increase in traffic but the only reason I know this is because I found a note about it, left on a bench at work so none of the SMEs in my area know about the cuts to the service.
What is an SME please, Colin?
I’ve just read on another forum that the shopping channel QVC has now stopped using Royal Mail and switched all deliveries to courier (presumably because of the strike action).
Continued strike action will cause more big customers like QVC to leave and will just hurt smaller customers who have no choice – it may be the final straw for some 🙁
All in all less business for Royal Mail in the long run – I fail to see how that can be good for anyone’s cause.
Is that what it means in this context though, Sue?
Of Dear,
More notices in the ebay shops (our’s inluded)…….Becoming a bit like the notes on some small shop doors
” gone to lunch, back in an hour”
“back in 10 minutes”
“Closed for refurb”
“closed for holidays”
The final one:
” closed for good. Postal services ruined the business”
It’s obviously me being very thick (no change there), I just don’t understand the last couple of lines of #3 – it sounded more like it was relating to internal parts of Royal Mail.
I appreciate that there are no doubt many failings on the part of RM management too – but a competition to see who can inflict the most damage on businesses of any size doesn’t really seem to have many winning outcomes :-/
I thought SME was Captain Hooks sidekick?
I use Royal Mail business services and have generally a good experience, except when they decide not to pick my mail up….but these strikers should be grateful of a job in this financial climate. If I was running Royal Mail, I would sack the lot of them and employ people from the dole, who would be grateful of a job.