Royal Mail welcomes common sense result
Royal Mail today said that the rejection of a national strike on the company’s 14.5% pay offer offered everyone in Royal Mail the opportunity to focus on completing the company’s turnaround and continuing to improve customer service.
Chief Executive Adam Crozier said, “This is good news. The great majority of our people, and all of our customers, will feel relief at what is a common sense result. We put 14.5% over 18 months on the table because we believe it gives postmen and women a fair weekly wage and offers customers the best prospects for long-term stability. Our overriding priority is to move forward and get the money into people’s pockets.”
Postmen and women in London have voted in favour of strike action over London weighting. Mr Crozier said, “Fewer than half of our people in London support a strike. We’ve made a fair offer on London Weighting, of a £300 increase with no link to productivity changes, which puts postmen and women in the top third of the London Weighting league table. There simply isn’t any more money to put to the table. The pay offer, which includes the London weighting rise will cost £340 million a year on top of the extra £100 million a year going into our pension scheme.
“We can’t afford any of this without change, and London needs to change more than the rest of the UK. Our service quality isn’t as good as the rest of the country and we’ve not made the same steps towards modernisation. That must change.”
Mr Crozier said that a strike in London would be damaging to customer service and to customer confidence in Royal Mail, but that contingency plans were in place to ensure that mail is kept safely and delays minimised where possible, and that Royal Mail would keep all customers fully updated about likely disruption.
Mr Crozier said that Royal Mail couldn’t afford to become distracted by a strike in one part of the country. “Our focus is on the vast majority of people who are committed to change and to making Royal Mail a success of which we are all proud. There’s only a minority in London who want to strike rather than succeed.”
