Tag: Europe

Royal Mail strikes deal with managers

Posted by | Oct 5, 2007 | |

Royal Mail has reached an agreement with its managerial staff on pensions and pay, although the battle with postal workers, which will disrupt postal services well into next week, is still dragging on.

The deal, which was secured by the Unite union on behalf of its 12,000 members and covers a 27-month period, gives managerial staff a 2.5 pct pay rise, backdated to April.

Under the agreement, Royal Mail’s existing pension scheme will be closed to new members from 31 January 2008 and replaced by a defined contribution scheme for subsequent joiners. The retirement age will increase from 60 to 65 from April 1 2010.

Paul Reuter, Unite’s national officer, said: “Unite has secured a deal with Royal Mail which we believe will protect GBP 1.5bn worth of pension benefits for Royal Mail staff. We now have a pension package that we can take to our members.”

A Royal Mail spokesman said the 2.5 pct basic pay rise recognized “the positive role that managers will play in the modernization of Royal Mail, essential to enable the company to compete in a market open to full competition”.

Managers’ bonuses – which range from 5 pct-9 pct of their annual salaries – will also become pensionable, a detail that helped persuade Unite to accept the terms.

While Royal Mail managed to avert strike action by Unite, postal workers continued to form picket lines in the second day of a 48-hour postal strike.

They are protesting against pension cuts, pay and a modernization program that the Communication Workers Union believes could cut up to 40,000 jobs.

The Royal Mail said in a statement that there were 50 pct more people working today than during previous national strikes, indicating “support for the CWU strike amongst its members [was] weakening”.

A second wave of strikes is scheduled to begin on Monday and last until Wednesday. The CWU has pledged a rolling series of strikes starting October 15 if they fail to reach an agreement with Royal Mail.

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Will strikes signal last post for the Royal Mail?

Posted by | Oct 5, 2007 | |

The postal strike which will freeze all mail delivery until next Thursday is “potentially disastrous”, Welsh business leaders warned last night.

Members of the Communication Workers Union walked out on a 48-hour strike at noon yesterday in an escalation of a bitter dispute with Royal Mail over pay, jobs and pensions, saying another UK-wide two-day strike would follow from 3am on Monday.

Firms were warned there will be no deliveries until late next week and it is estimated the row will cost industry millions of pounds.

The Federation of Small Businesses Wales last night warned of the potentially serious damage to businesses while the Confederation of British Industry Wales said the strike would have “a far greater impact than previous ones”.

But both groups added that the advent of e-commerce meant the strikes would be less damaging than they would have been 20 years ago, and that the more likely effect would be to hasten the demise of Royal Mail as companies looked to bypass its services.

The first signs of this were evident last night, when Royal Mail lost a GBP 100,000 contract with Warranty Direct, which said it would stop using the postal organization to deliver 12,000 letters a month.

A rolling program of strikes will start on October 15 and will continue every week until the dispute is resolved, union leaders warned.

But this could be a case of the union “shooting itself in the foot” as businesses look for alternative ways of doing business, said the FSB and CBI.

David Rosser, director of CBI Wales, said the strike, though disruptive, was still “more annoying than disastrous”.

“Twenty years ago, the impact on business would have been much greater, but the use of e-mail and e-commerce means the effect is much less than it would have been otherwise,” he said.

“The Royal Mail has significant competition in terms of business mail from other businesses and other technologies and a prolonged period without Royal Mail services will encourage companies to look elsewhere.”

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Austrian Post buys 50 natural gas vehicles for deliveries

Posted by | Oct 5, 2007 | |

Austrian Post has bought 50 natural gas-powered vehicles from Volkswagen in a move towards reducing emissions from its delivery fleet.

The first 20 VW Caddy Ecofuel vans are being put into operation in Styria this month, and the remaining 30 will be introduced into service in other regions of the country by the end of the year, the postal group said.

By using the vehicles, the group will reduce its CO2 emissions by 67 tones a year. The move is being supported by the Austrian government’s financial program to encourage companies to operate an environmentally-friendly commercial fleet.

“The new natural gas vans are an important further step by the company in its environmental policy and an important contribution towards optimizing all our logistics activities taking environment and sustainability aspects into account,” commented board member Walter Hitziger.

Austrian Post operates the largest commercial fleet in Austria, with 200 trucks, 6,000 vans and cars, and about 1,200 mopeds.

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Road tech's tachomaster system helps Ceva logistics

Posted by | Oct 5, 2007 | |

CEVA Logistics has been using Road Tech’s revolutionary Tachomaster system since the introduction of the new digital tachographs and the changes in legislation introduced in May 2006. CEVA first introduced Tachomaster in order to ensure compliance with new EU and WTD (Working Time Directive) legislation, but the system’s ability to provide instantly available data and high level management reports has also allowed the company to introduce significant operational efficiencies.

Tachomaster records and analyses tachograph data from digital and analogue sources and gives transport operators a simple, highly effective tool to help them run their business efficiently. The system provides a range of real-time, high resolution management information and reports together with highly secure data storage and safe back-up. Transport companies can use the system simply to compute the driving and rest times of their drivers to ensure legal compliance, or they can employ it as a powerful monitoring and resource planning tool to give complete transparency of operations over a number of sites and help to optimise vehicle usage and driver deployment.

With over 120 sites throughout the UK, over 2000 vehicles and over 3800 drivers, CEVA was looking for a solution that would handle both the new digital tachographs and also the legacy analogue recording system which would take some time to phase out. “What we wanted was a best of breed solution which would merge analogue and digital tachograph data management into one coherent, secure solution,” says Andy Jenkins, CEVA Logistics’ Manager Operations Training. “We looked at a number of systems before making a decision, but Tachomaster was by far the most user-friendly.”

The real time web-based approach used by Tachomaster means that information captured at driver debrief is made available instantly for digital tachos and within hours for analogue data. Tachomaster has developed a digitisation system for analogue charts which removes human error and improves the turnaround from weeks to hours. By integrating accurate mileage information with fuel drawings, drivers’ performance can be managed to maximise fuel efficiency.

Road Tech and CEVA worked together before the legal introduction of the new digitachs and CEVA was able to provide Road Tech with some of the early live data to test pre-implementation phases of the system.

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Statement – Industrial Action Update

Posted by | Oct 5, 2007 | |

Royal Mail said that official payroll figures show that the support for the Communication Workers Union strike amongst its members is weakening with 50 pct more people working than during previous national strike days.

Attendance at sites across the country varied hugely with up to 90 pct of our people working as normal in some offices and with around 35,000 people coming to work as usual during the first 24 hour period of action. This is around a third of the people due to be at work.

Normal service will be resumed from next Wednesday while 14.200 Post Offices are not affected by the strike action and are open as normal for business throughout.

Royal Mail is also pleased for the conclusion of a deal in principle with Unite/CMA, which represents 12,000 of our managers, over pay, modernization and pension reform.

Royal said that over the last few months Royal Mail has concluded agreements with managers in Royal Mail, Parcelforce, and the national network of subpostmasters – all within the 2.5 pct available for pay this year. All of these agreements have been reached without recourse to industrial action.

Royal Mail continues to talk to the CWU to try to agree a deal with them on pay, modernization and pensions that reflects the competitive challenges faced by the company.

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