Tag: Royal Mail

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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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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Apacs promotes electronic payments amid UK postal strike

Posted by | Oct 5, 2007 | |

Apacs, the UK payments association, is using the current postal strike to promote the wider use of electronic payments as firms suffer from delayed cheques.

Apacs is also encouraging consumers to make wider use of the direct debit scheme for bills.

Sandra Quinn, director of communications at Apacs, said, “The postal strike serves as an effective reminder of the benefit of direct debits. Currently, direct debits are used for 58% of all personal and household bills. They save time and effort and regardless of any external factors you can be confident your bills will be paid on time without any hassle.”

According to Apacs, the number of bill payments made by cheque has fallen by 32% since 2000.

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Business Post extends share of UK postal market

Posted by | Oct 4, 2007 | |

Guy Buswell, chief executive of Business Post, the private parcel and mail delivery group, said the postal strike beginning on Thursday could endanger the future of the mail industry if the dispute was not resolved soon.

During the strike, he said, the 6m to 8m pieces of mail which Business Post’s UK Mail subsidiary collects every night would continue to be delivered into Royal Mail depots and wait there for final delivery once the postmen and women were back at work.

Mr Buswell also said the group’s parcels business had seen a sudden slump in deliveries to consumers in the days following the Northern Rock crisis. He said there had been “a huge reduction in volumes” of parcel deliveries from companies which sell electronic goods, such as computers, over the internet.

He said the business had picked up again since, but that it showed that consumer confidence could be hit by such events.

In a trading update covering the group’s half year to the end of September, the group said the UK Mail business “continues to achieve strong growth with revenues in the period up by some 60 per cent.” The mail market in the UK was fully opened to competition in 2006 and UK Mail now has a 7½ per cent market share.

Group revenues in the half year were affected by the loss of a contract with Federal Express. That contract, worth GBP 20m a year in revenues and GBP 2m in operating profits, ended on April 30 after FedEx acquired a UK parcels business.

Mr Buswell said that the group was having success in winning new contracts, however, the loss of the FedEx contract meant that group revenues had increased in the first half by 9 per cent rather than an underlying 15 per cent.

Revenues from the group’s parcels operation were in-line with the same period of last year, as “good growth” in the business-to-business parcels operation had been offset by a decline in deliveries to consumers.

The group’s shares, which have fallen from around 480p in recent weeks ahead of the postal strike, slipped another 6p to 394p in morning trading.

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