Royal Mail Industrial Action

Twenty four hour strikes by Royal Mail Staff will begin on 22nd October when mail centre drivers and staff will strike. On 23rd October, delivery and collection staff will strike.
A document leaked to BBC Newsnight said that Royal Mail will deliver the changes it considers necessary "with or without union engagement".
What are these strikes about? The CWU represents 121,000 postal workers and says the dispute is over pay and work schedules at Royal Mail. The CWU wants to see the Royal Mail business plan for the whole planned transformation programme. They want Royal Mail to agree that "change will be introduced by agreement". They want new job security arrangements, a rewards package for delivering success. They want Royal Mail to agree with the union on what constitutes a fair day's work. They are claiming bullying and harassment of postal workers and a resolution to pension issues.
The damage to on line businesses will be immeasurable. This is the run up to Christmas. It should be the businest time of the year for thousands of businesses selling on line. Many businesses are struggling, anyway , because of the recession and this will be the last straw. Larger businesses such as Amazon or Argos have been able to put together contingency plans but small businesses do not have that option.
Charities fear they will lose millions of pounds as a result of the strike as it will hit fundraising and Christmas Card sales.
A postman writing on an on-line forum gave his point of view. He said that older people do not have the option of email and still write letters. Peter Mandelson went on TV in May to press for part privatisation saying that, because of email and technology fewer people were sending letters.
The postman on the forum says he objects to having to work longer hours without extra pay because "figures are down" and that this phrase has become a joke. Workers are only supposed to carry 16 kilos maximum in each of their bags but he overloads the bags rather than carrying up to 10 bags of mail a day.
He says he is paid 1.67 pence for each item of unaddressed mail over and above his wages and he objects to the fact that he can't claim overtime if, because of such items, he works longer than his usual hours. He objects to the fact he cannot refuse to deliver them and he objects to what he sees as his "personal contributuion to global warming" even though he admits this advertisng material is very profitable for Royal Mail.
He maintains that people have never really sent many letters apart from greetings cards and that bills and bank staements and such like are sill sent by post. In addition there are packages from the likes of Ebay and Amazon and the small firms which in his words "clutter up the internet".
Royal Mail's figures show that mail volume went down by 5.5% last year and is predicted to fall by 10% this year because of the growth of electronic communication and the recession. He believes these figures to be false because his round now takes over 4 hours and sometimes he works for 5 hours with no tea break. He wonders why he has a bad back (something to do with overloading his bags, maybe?)
He points out that private mail companies may bid for Royal Mail contracts and that companies such as UK Mail, TNT or City Post undercut Royal Mail in city to city trade. They pick up the mail, sort it, transport it to mail centres and sort it again and then Royal Mail delivers it. In his view Royal Mail does the work but these companies take the profit. They are not obliged, like Royal Mail, to deliver to every house in the land.
In his view volume of mail has risen, even if figures have not. Staff levels, he says, are down by 30%. There are now workers who work six hour shifts and those who work for four hours. The former prepare their own frame of streets and numbers after the mail has already been sorted. They also prepare the post for the 4 hour shift workers. He says only the full-time staff have old fashioned contracts with pension rights whilst the part-timers do not. There is a pension deficit.
The strike in 2007 led to a national agreement of pay and modernisation but he maintains that more and more pressure has been put on full-timers including the sharing of rounds during quiet periods or when volumes fall. He believes this to be provocation and resents the fact that Royal Mail is trying to become a profit making business rather than a public service.
I would be very interested to see what you think of his arguments.