dirtydog said:
Considering what completely unskilled work it is, that is a good wage.
You can earn much more than that!
I work at Royal Mail (processing in the mail centre) and it's not uncommon for Posties to earn around £24k but they mainly work nights.
Lorry drivers earn up to around £30k, again working nights.
I'm 19 and for a part time job it pays very well! I normally earn around £200 a week for about 20 hours work spread across evenings and Saturday.
Even i am not 100% sure of the strike timings but it is definitely going to be held on Friday 29th May and will be a 24 hour strike. So far i have heard 3 different times it will be held but basically it will take around a week for Royal Mail to recover from the strike as Friday is one of the busiest days.
The following is a mish-mash of what ive heard and think of Royal Mail, be warned it is a long post!
The problem is that Royal Mail staff are too set in their ways, far too laid back and used the fact they were the one and only national postal service against the public. As other postal services such as TNT turn up and become bigger, Royal Mail has to be competitive and save money. These savings will mostly likely be made through job cuts (de-layering the management system and introducing a team leader, equal pay system).
Royal Mail is also cutting down full time hours to part time hours. This will ensure there are only people working when the work is there! I myself work during peak periods. There is also talk of cutting the 3 shift working day (Earlies, Lates and Nights) to a single 12 hour shift being 10am till 10pm. All the mail will be processed in this
NO SWEARING from business letters to packets including mail collections and distribution. This is still very much in the planning stages and could well be withdrawn but that is what i've heard on the grape-vine.
Royal Mail the other week lost a massive contract with an only retailer that sounds like a Jungle and sells books. This again highlights how bad the competition is getting, Royal Mail has lost around 40% of its business to competition. The funny thing is that all mail from competition is being processed and delivered by Royal Mail (excluding parcels) through something called 'Downstream Access'. This arrives at the mail centre in bags on 'yorks'. These have to be cut, tipped and segregated by processing workers. Royal Mail charge competitors such as TNT around 16/17p per every letter delivered. It is a fact that it costs much more than this to process and deliver, whoever came up with the figures should be shot in the face.
Having such a loss making aspect to business especially with dealing with competitors mail is just plain stupid! However, 95% of Downstream Access mail is 'clean' and already barcoded so can be put straight through a machine and sorted quickly and easily.
Once competitors come up with a full postal infrastucture to deliver mail themselves they will most probably concentrate on inner cities where a lot of mail can be delivered easily. Royal Mail has to cover the whole of the country and so in some places has to send out postmen/women in vans to deliver just a couple of letters to a rural farm in the middle of no where!
In conclusion, Royal Mail took advantage of the fact that they were the only national postal system and this shot them in the foot many years later. It now has to run as a profitable business to survive, this will lead to saving money and modernising to move to a more capital intensive processing system.
Royal Mail is trying to save money but the chief executive earns £16k per week! Talk about saving money! Cut that mans' pay! lol
If anyone has any questions about Royal Mail or general queries, feel free to ask!
xcessive