Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Looks as though striking works!

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle7054625.ece

The civil service strike continues also and things will probably only get worse as unions push back on public service cuts.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...militancy.html

Labour policies not only got us in the same kind of financial poop as Greece he got us the same enlarged, militant, laurel cushioned public sector as well. Hail the Socialist Republic of Brownistan :D

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

I'm so glad - I fully expect my 'service' from RM to improve now.... :rolleyes:

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

I'm sure that the cheque is in the post, to the Labour Party.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

" Labour policies not only got us in the same kind of financial poop as Greece he got us the same enlarged, militant public sector as well. Hail the Socialist Republic :D "

Ofcourse, there were never any strikes when maggies gang were in power.
When a worker pays his/her dues there comes with it a right to withdraw labour, whatever the consequences may be in the end.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Those strikes which were caused by the previous Labour government enlarging and empowering a militant public sector you mean?

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Sorry? elaborate please :)

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Of course there were, there were loads. Funnily enough the Union barons didn't like it when Thatcher went to war on their little fiefdoms, and they put up a fight. But after the miners' strike ended, there was a steady decline in days lost to industrial action. Until Labour got in of course, and began laying the foundations for the upswing we are now seeing.

A blinkered, self-serving attitude we fully expect to hear from dyed-in-the-wool trade unionists.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Yeah they'd be the ones... :D

---------- Post added at 10:28 ---------- Previous post was at 10:27 ----------

Yep - to hell with the consequences, however severe. The supreme irony being that, in the long term, those who suffered most were usually the ones who went on strike.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Aye, she did a lot of good that bitch, her main claim to fame was stopping the kids milk.
Conservatives have a known track record with regard relationships with unions, so it is not just simply a problem associated with one particular party.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Heaven forbid that people might take some personal responsibility for their children's nutrition.

There are different problems, depending on your point of view. Thatcherism was a big problem for the unions. She gave them a well-deserved hammering. Meanwhile Gordon Brown is a big problem for everyone else, because he has created the conditions that have allowed more and bigger strikes than we have seen in more than a decade.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

There was i thinking that her main claim to fame was the Falklands War. Must be mistaken I guess....

Anyway, with respect to who stopped school milk, Harold Wilson's Labour government were the original school milk snatchers, scrapping its provision to secondary schools in 1968:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Milk_Act

So Thatcher really can't take all the credit...



---------- Post added at 10:36 ---------- Previous post was at 10:34 ----------

Well if they did that, there'd be mass unemployment within the nanny state. ;)

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Geez!
Try and be happy for them, with their tiny victory (in the big scheme of things).
I doubt any of them will be rushing out to their local Bugatti dealership on receiving the news.

Probably lead to lay-offs somewhere down the line anyway, to compensate for the pay rises, then some more strikes.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Heaven forbid that people might take some personal responsibility full stop these days :(

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Good for the posties I say, it's never exactly been the most highly paid job.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

You'll forgive me if I don't get excited about them getting extra money, extra maternity / paternity leave, instant bonuses and working less hours while the private sector continues to make redundancies and enact pay freezes.

You seem to contradict yourself with your second paragraph. Be happy with them, thanks to them getting what they want this time we'll probably be getting some more strikes later. Yay.

---------- Post added at 14:56 ---------- Previous post was at 14:56 ----------

No-one forced them to do it...

Perhaps I've a strange point of view here but it's one that if you're not happy about how much your job pays you go and find one that suits you more. If you are unable to then it would appear that this is all your skills are worth at this time, so either improve your skills or deal with it.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Glad I don't live in your ideal world then.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Actually I would regard it as the real world rather than this view of having a single job for life and if you're not happy with it strike until you get what you want so that you are happy. That to me is the 'ideal' world that certain people seem to think they are entitled to.

In the horrible real world people have to do things like accept some flexibility in times of strife, be prepared to move on if need be, react to the possibility of redundancy, etc.

That you seem to think this is somehow my 'ideal' world is, well, confusing. It's not an ideal world, it's at times a pretty harsh one, but it's the one most of the private sector live in, it's the one I've always worked in.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Excuse me if I find it hard to be happy for them when their success in this gives off the message that holding the general public to ransom is effective.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Yup.

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/strikes.pdf

Ratio of public:private sector strike rates - 1999: 1.71, 2009: 15.07

In this 10 year span public sector workers went from striking on average 1.71 times more than the private sector to striking 15.07 times more.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

So when private sector Royal Mail workers strike it's proof of the enlarged, militant, laurel cushioned private sector? Hail the Capitalist Republic of Cameronistan?

Is that the way it works?

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Erm, the Royal Mail is a public limited company owned by HMG. Link

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

See above post for details, and the one above that re: private sector striking 1/15th as much as public sector.

There is no such thing as an 'enlarged' private sector, it's the private sector that pays for the public one so under most circumstances the larger it is the better, someone has to pay Gordon's bills for his socialist authoritarian paradise.

Nice try at redirection though, made me chuckle :)

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

I thought we had moved on from Victorian work ethics but I must be mistaken. A suppose a lot depends on your view of work, work to live or live to work. I have also worked in the private sector (except when PO telephones was government owned) most of my working life but in recent years I have a seen a steady decline in front line workers conditions, less staff, increased pressure usually resulting in a deteriorating customer experience, but management are not interested in that, only their profit margins. Therefore I am happy for those that can still make a stand against aggressive management, a luxury a few of us have in the private sector. One thing I have learnt is that your are just a statistic whatever your skills.
Right, I'm off to sell my copies of the Morning Star. ;)

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

We have - that's why militant trade unionism is irrelevant now. Perhaps a reminder of where the movement came from would be useful:

You might also be interested in this:

About the only social reform unions are interested in now is trying to get socialism / communism (Bob Crow's words) on us, indeed a union boss recently commented that we should all pay more tax to preserve public sector jobs.

So who pays for the deadweight that Unions protect? Oh that'll be those customers they claim to care about. Companies will make their money somewhere and the unions holding their employer and in turn their customers to ransom is passed onto the consumer.

Unions don't care, at all, for anything besides getting the best deal for their members, regardless of the social or economic consequences. Unions are responsible for rampant inflation in the 70s and would happily do so again. They are, bizarrely, a group that claim to be socialist yet couldn't give two hoots about society.

My point was really quite simple. If you don't like your job you go elsewhere. If you've been in the same job for over 20 years you must like something about it, or you can't get a better deal elsewhere. If union members can't get a better deal elsewhere what makes them so special that they should be paid more and have better benefits than other people doing the same hours in the same job elsewhere?

There's the other issue with unions. They bleat on about equality, workers' rights, etc, but couldn't care less so long as their workers' get more rights and are more equal than everyone else.

Speak for yourself re: being a statistic by the way. I must have been more fortunate with my choice of employer.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

I used to think that at your age. Now I just play them at their own game. Stay until things inevitably go downhill after 3 or 4 years then apply for voluntary redundancy. At least it got my mortgage paid off. You are in the hands of bean counters.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Nope I'm entirely within my own hands, take responsibility completely for myself and always have. I've been fortunate enough that things haven't gone downhill for me to hang around and wait for voluntary redundancy instead I've moved on when I've chosen to to jobs which actually provided higher pay and better conditions, as expected from a jobs market, but thank you for the suggestion.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

There you go again.... bringing those pesky facts into the argument...... :D

No wonder No.10 isn't on your Christmas card list then..... ;)

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

I have described myself more than once as following Libertarianism which is totally at odds with the Authoritarian Socialist crap that No.10 come out with and that the Tories if they get in will likely continue a slightly watered down version of though with, of course, the Authoritarian side intact.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Which is why is used the term No.10 and NOT Gordon Brown... ;)

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

Seems an agreement has been reached.

Re: Royal Mail Workers Pay Rises, Bonuses, Less Hours
 

What killed of strikes in private firms is the now common to employ staff from agencies on temp contracts.

Whilst strike rates may be down in the private sector and this is supposedbly a good thing, to me its an indication the modern private workplace is too imbalanced in favour of the employer.

The vast majority of jobs created now days are temporary and part time jobs, so if you strike whilst you a temp you can be sent packing with ease.

It is a balance that can never be perfect, either we have the modern corp era where workers rights and job security is minimal and as ignition said if you work in the private sector now days, redundancy is probably something to expect at some point in time. Or we have a job envirionment where the unions are too powerful aka the 70's. What thatcher didnt do was not great she just swung the balance the other way. Both sides of the coin have their downsides.

Now here is my own perspective on how things have panned out since 1997. From 1997 to when the recession started about 2007-2008 time most people were getting annual wage increases but they were typically below 'real' inflation. So in a boom wages were dropping behind and individual wealth was shrinking. What is happening now is I feel people still feel they playing catchup with living costs (especially house costs) and need higher wages to do that. If wage increases were more generous during the boom we may not have been in this situation as people would have had more savings and less debt when the recession started. The sad situation is the boom was fuelled by credit so come the recession people dont have the savings and instead have a load of credit that is putting them under pressure to increase earnings. Of course the business's in a recession will only be looking to shrink manpower costs so hence the layoffs and wage freezes.

With the public sector been taxpayer funded, the rules are different of course, eg. the nhs has no immediate danger of going bust. In a way its private vs public, private workers just want to pay less tax, in a era of greed that started since thatcher. Dropping public sector pay can help achieve that for them 'maybe'.

This day was coming tho, I still remember when brown announced the first big NHS budget increase and then finding out a big chunk of it went on pay increases for nurses, and then visiting a hospital soon after to see a shortage of doctors but plenty of nurses standing around idle chatting.