New Post Office regime led to discontent among workers

New Post Office regime led to discontent among workers
By Chris Gray
24 May 2001
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The wildcat postal strikes that spread across the country with lightning speed yesterday have their roots in festering discontent among staff at fundamental changes to the Post Office.
Made up of the Royal Mail, Post Office Counters and Parcel Force, the Post Office is adapting to more competition and the threat of losing the last vestiges of its monopoly. The most visible sign of the change was the switch in March this year when the Post Office changed its name to Consignia at the same time as it became a Government-owned Plc, with commercial freedom instead of being a public corporation.
The name was changed after £2m worth of brand research and was condemned by the Communication Workers' Union, whose staff were smarting from a below-inflation wage rise at the time.
Adopting Consignia as the corporate name was supposed to symbolise the organisation's transformation into a dynamic company. The image might have changed but the industrial relations were still suffering a hangover from 1970s confrontation. The Post Office is the last state-owned monopoly industry, and critics of the 160,000 uniformed staff, their union representatives and their managers, say they act as if 1980s privatisation never happened.
The commercial freedom that came with Plc status allowed the Post Office to take its own decisions and make acquisitions. However, it came at a price as the new regulator, the Postal Services Commission (PostComm), has the power to impose fines if targets are not met and to introduce greater competition. The Royal Mail lost its monopoly on mail costing more than £1 but has kept it for cheaper letters. That could be removed by the regulator if it is dissatisfied with the service provided.
The threat from the regulator has given management more weight in their demand that staff adapt to more flexible working practices, particularly at sorting offices and over shift patterns. Workers have not been accommodating. The last year has seen frequent strikes all over the country. In the year to March, 62,000 days were lost to industrial action, about 40,000 more than the previous year.
Staff in Coventry have gone on strike about shift patterns while those in Glasgow walked out when a manager was not sacked for alleged offensive comments made to a female worker. Service levels are declining: 89 per cent of first-class letters arrive the day after posting, compared with an agreed target of 92 per cent.
The situation came to a head in private meetings between Martin Stanley, the chief executive of PostComm, and union activists. He said that workers and management appeared incapable of change and if staff did not become more adaptable they could find their numbers slashed drastically. Using language that would inevitably infuriate workers, he said customers wanted a service that would not lose their letters and "whose staff will not steal giro books and passports".
At the same time workers at the Watford sorting centre were in a dispute with managers over plans for new hours for night shifts and Saturdays. Local CWU negotiators claim that when they sought to discuss the deal they met with a blank refusal from managers, provoking two official one-day strikes last Friday and Saturday. The Royal Mail invoked its normal procedures and transferred the work to another centre, in this case Liverpool.
Staff in Liverpool announced on Monday that they were halting deliveries and collections to support colleagues in Watford. They were followed on Tuesday by staff in Stockport, Chester and east London, and yesterday by the rest of the country.