Managers will do delivery jobs to break UK postal strike
Senior Royal Mail executives have been trained to deliver mail, drive security vans and work in post offices in readiness for the 24-hour postal strike in London.
The managers, who earn up to £80,000, will be doing the jobs of staff who earn less than £200 a week.
They have been trained to give out pensions and deal with bonds and tax discs.
Managers will also distribute special delivery letters and parcels.
Regular first and second class letters will be left undelivered until the strike by 30,000 members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) ends.
Other executives have been given security training to man cash vans, delivering hundreds of thousands of pounds to post offices.
A senior source at the Royal Mail said: “Training has been under way for a few weeks and we have been taught everything about working behind a counter in a post office.
“The training lasts for about a day and has been taking place in classrooms up and down the country and includes some very senior managers and executives who will soon find themselves dealing with queues of old ladies rather than board members.”
Industrial action is confined to London after workers last week voted against a national strike. But managers from across the country will cover for workers next Wednesday.
Postal workers want an extra Pounds 4,000 for working in London and up to 140 post offices in London could be affected. The strike will coincide with Labour’s annual conference in Bournemouth and will cause huge embarrassment to the Government.
Dave Ward, the deputy general-secretary of the CWU, said: “We suspected they may do something like this, but we did not know it was happening. I wonder if they are going to work for the same take-home pay of Pounds 180 a week as our workers.
“I don’t know how they think they are going to run any sort of service when 30,000 staff are on strike, but I imagine they will do much better in a junior role than an executive one.
“One or two days’ training is not enough time to learn how to deal with the public and do everything that our workers do behind the counter but maybe they will appreciate how hard our people have to work and realise our people deserve a pay rise.”
A spokeswoman for Post Office Ltd confirmed that senior executives had received training. She said: “The senior managers and executives are not CWU members. They are a higher grade so will not be out on strike.
“We have robust plans and managers are trained up to help out in any contingency.
As a business we would have prepared ourselves for a national strike and the managers and executives will help out and do frontline jobs behind the post office counters.
“They will also make sure special delivery parcels and letters, for which people pay Pounds 3.75, are delivered.
“If it is in rural areas they will be in vans, but for urban areas the senior managers will be walking the street like postmen. Unfortunately, because of the sheer volume of normal letters it will be impossible to deliver them.
“We know some people will not turn up for work and we do not want the customers inconvenienced, so managers that usually work in administration or at HQ have been trained to work at the post offices.
“All parts of the business are covered, including the driving of the cash vans. The people trained for that will be given appropriate security training.”
