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To quote a pointy eared chap "The needs of the many outway the needs of the few"

And on the other hand.  The company said they would pay you £x for x hours and deduct £x towards a pension and pay you £x when you reach retirement age.
So 40 years down the line of working and having £x deducted for pension, they decide that they are no longer going to pay you £x pension and that you will not be employed in the job on your contract for the contracted hours because there is only 50% of the staff left due to compulsory redundancy and you are now doing two mens work all because management has made a total testicles up.

It would be ok to change the terms and conditions for new employees, but those who have worked all their live and made plans for retirement which they will now not be able to enjoy lose out because they are having their agreed contract change without consultation or agreement.

Yes it will affect us all, but I do have sympathy with them.

Last edited by Bengie (18-09-2009 12:04:56)

It was a typically short sighted British agreement assuming that no change would every occur enough to make it non-viable. Not their fault but the strike action won't cause enough disruption to matter any-more as most if not all of the important deliveries were pensions and giro cheques which are all direct transfer now.  The service they provide just isn't essential and TBH a few weeks of no junk mail would be more of a blessing than an inconvenience.

The company should have diversified and moved more towards parcel delivery or even branched out into emerging technologies thus better securing their future.

I always wondered about a business email service with a focus on security and spam/virus filtering as if it could be done correctly then it would save a lot of companies the hassle of setting up servers themselves.  Maybe a Post Office mail server with staff dedicated to watching for potential security risks 24/7 rather than trying to do it yourself could be a boon for companies.

They picked up the company loyalty thing from the Japanese without the fact that the idea was it cut both ways and a 'salaryman' was loyal because he knew it would be repaid in harder times by redundancies being at the bottom of the list of measures rather than the top.

I notice that a lot of online sellers are simply saying it won't matter as they use people like City-Link and DHL anyway although IIRC Play.com do use the PO.

Actually a lot of pension funds are badly managed and the ones my mother receives illustrate it quite well.  Some are frankly not worth the paper to send a notice out for but certain ones have been very well invested over the years.  Not surprisingly one that the late Queen mum took patronage of has done the best.

I've always felt personally pensions were a waste of money for me as I'll never live long enough to collect one so why bother? I'm 42 and I figure I have about 8 or 9 more years left absolute tops during which I intend to drop not one penny in the coffers of a fund that some dishonest scumbag of a chancellor would just find a way to raid anyway.

TBH I can see the idea of saving for retirement vanishing altogether unless there are some severe social changes in this country.

I feel for the members but the recent statement from their leader shows that he just isn't being reasonable.

More powerful than Arthur Scargill is going to get the response of 'who?' these days.

Apparently the PO say they are hiring people to break the strike and bearing in mind the current unemployment rate I can't see them having a hard time doing it.

Old people use the regular mail from habit but if there's a strike they will have to switch just like with the post office closures and direct pension payments.  They hate change but when it's forced upon they aren't going back and I see a great many of them with mobile phones these days.  Add to that the deliveries from mail order companies switching to other couriers and all this strike will do is kill the postal service off.

As for increased volumes of mail, simply no.  Increased volumes of junk mail delivered by the post office, yes.

The christmas card thing is actually a positive thing for me as I hope it will greatly reduce this rather pointless yearly ritual.

This is the sad part as even now there's a lot of damage been done and I just don't see what they expect to gain other than a rather grand gesture.

Well it seems that an agreement has been reached now although I'd be surprised if the companies that have switched will go back.  No actual details of the deal but it seems the all out strike is off although as I said there were was interruption in my area at all.