
Originally Posted by
blackbirds
From what I can gather, the problem's that London has a massively inefficient system, and something in the order of 35,000 employees when it really doesn't need anything like that. The Royal Mail needs to cut excessive spending, and it wants to do that by bringing in vaguely modern equipment and modern practises that will make various people redundant. The union is against this, as ever. Thus, they deal with it by whining like a load of pansies, and then when they don't get their way, declare "BWAAA. BWAAAA. IM NOT TALKING TO U, I HATE U!!!!1!!", and hold nationwide strikes. Of course, they don't at any point consider that the reason for this downsizing is that business is diminishing, and that by pulling more of these strikes, they serve only to alienate more customers and push everyone to their rival networks. They just don't understand that there's a choice in the marketplace these days.
They just don't understand the extent of the damage they're doing. I work at the Edinburgh mail centre on a part-time basis (I'm also self-employed, but I'd get bored and fat if I didn't have something else to do, and RM pays a ridiculously high figure for part-time unskilled work), and at my place, we've had something like a 50% decline in stamped and Meter/PPI mail, and a 3x increase in DSA mail over the course of the past 12 months. Processing costs vary, but we get 34p for a 1st class meter or PPI letter, and 13p for a DSA letter. The meter, PPI and stamped mail is stuff that's handled 100% by the RM, the DSA is the stuff where the RM only handles the final yard of the delivery, and the rival mail company (be it TNT, Citylink, or whoever) deals with picking it up and distributing it through the country. To put it into figures, meter's down from about 450,000 items a day to around 220,000, and DSA is up from around 300,000 to 1,000,000. You can probably do the maths on how much loss that is, and it's all because of the union ruining everything. If you see a CWU member (they can usually be identified by not being at work, and being visibly underdeveloped freaks who've miraculously overcome colossal odds of natural selection), do punch him for me, thanks.