In a joint statement and after almost a year of dispute, Royal Mail Group and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) have reached a negotiators’ agreement, hopefully putting the risk of further industrial action off for the foreseeable future
The union’s postal executive will now meet and consider the negotiators’ agreement on Monday and Tuesday. Should the agreement be endorsed by the executive, the union will put in place a full plan to engage members over the deal. More information on the deal will follow this week.
This is an amazing turnaround from just 10 days ago when talks concluded without an agreement being reached and Royal Mail threatening insolvency if further strike action took place. At the time, both sides said progress had been made but Royal Mail said talks concluded without agreement while the CWU said they were willing to continue negotiations but Royal Mail made themselves unavailable for further discussion. It would appear that discussions continued leading to this weekend’s announcment that a negotiators’ agreement had been reached.
What this means immediately is that online retailers can resume using Royal Mail services without the danger of industrial action suddenly disrupting their operations. However, it’s also true that Royal Mail services have systemically failed to deliver against parts of the Universal Service Obligation and reports suggest that Tracked and Special Delivery items are the only ones upon which any priority have been placed. Standard mail, stamped letters and parcels have been arriving many days after their expected ETA and we hope that the company can pull it’s service back together and start delivering all of the post on time once again.
With the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee calling upon Ofcom to undertake an enforcement investigation the company’s troubles are a long way from over, but the news of a deal with the Union goes a long way to stabilising a service which has been blighted with industrial action for many months.
4 Responses
Not even a hint of an apology from Ward or Thompson for the needless hell they have put customers through over the last year.
So now they expect customers to forgive and forget do they? Dream on.
RM volumes will continue to fall as customers can find cheaper alternatives to almost everything other than airmail.
As Chris correctly points out, their service obligations went in the bin a long time ago and next day for first class is now nothing more than a faint hope.
This customer will NOT be coming back and there will inevitably be job losses at Royal Mail.
But the first two to get their P45 should be Dave Ward and Simon Thompson.
Because they are practically ignoring standard mail WHY would you use them. The behaviour over Christmas towards thousands of small businesses was shocking.
I am glad an agreement has been met and hopefully the work conditions of the employees improves and Thompson gets his P45 from his Czech Owners.
Royal Mail should be booming in this day and age it has just done the opposite.
Every parcel we send now is Evri it is actually easier also as half the Sub Post Offices won’t even accept a bag after 14.00 here these days and the sort centre is far away
Royal mail should dump their post office connection
Our local post office is the jobsworth centre of the world ,dotting i crossing t
And ticking boxes to olympic standards
You take a pre pay parcel into evri drop off its scanned and thats it,
Our Post office measure ,weigh ,and interrogate you to confess its contents
While trying to win the Guinness book of records for largest queue