its a free country so not every worker is obliged to go on strike and its illegal to intimidate those who do, so some post may well have got through.

I was surprised to receive a parcel of electronic circuit boards this week via Royal Mail despite the strike – although its even possible it was delivered out of goodwill as they are for important telecoms equipment destined for an old folks home..

still operating as usual in these parts i think GL

There is less post but its not a total shutdown – there wasn’t even a picket at Ipswich sorting office last night. Bear in mind most residential people don’t get that much through the post compared to 10 years ago, as stuff like bank statements etc can be viewed online.

There were a lot of courier drivers in town today looking lost…

there was about 48 thosand on strike today .. 30 thosand of which were covered by casual workers highred in acording to the metro

I think the 30 000 was the casuals that RM was planning to recruit and no way could they get people in that fast even if they dragged people out of the job centre into the sorting office..

TBH I think a lot of businesses made contingency plans for larger packages and these days most letters are not as time-critical as their contents can also be sent electronically – even cheques can be replaced by electronic payments – foreigners laugh at us British still using paper cheques and manual bank deposits.

Where the strike will hit harder is when/if it becomes more prolonged. For all royal mail’s faults its small parcels service was cheapest at the price point and as effective as its competitors, and businesses who want the same level of service will have to pay extra. At the moment many are swallowing the extra costs but they may not all be able to afford this.

@DJCliffy 357915 wrote:

Does anyone know why this strike is actually happening? I know one issue is they (CWU) are against modernisation but how exactly do RM want to modernise the service?

its actually surprisingly hard to tell from either side because they are both being stubborn and not telling the public all the facts!

from what I’ve gleaned over the years monitoring this problem (which has been ongoing for a decade or so), apart from plans (defeated in Parliament) to privatise it, one thing I’ve seen mentioned for some years (which they have already implemented to an extent) is that they want to slim down the amount of large sorting offices and replace them by regional hubs.

For instance Reading sorting office was supposed to be closed with all mail going via Swindon, creating the bizzare situation where posting a letter from Caversham to Henley on Thames (5 miles apart) would mean it travelled 50 miles – hardly environmentally friendly, and with much more chance of the letter getting lost..

And to make the targets they would increase posties hours and reduce the headcount. Some of the modernisation has already been forced through, which is why there are no Sunday collections of post and only one delivery…

what makes it worse though is the present government hasn’t got the balls to accept the Post Office is a public service with a universal service obligation and unlike private couriers profit must be a secondary motive – and the opposition government plans to privatise it anyway – but perhaps thats also the publics fault as people now seem incapable to accept that public services mean spending a bit of taxpayers money and vote for governments what want to privatise everything…

@DaftFader 357925 wrote:

there was pics of cues of temps out side royal mail buildings in the paper … i know it was 30 planned .. dunno how many turned up tho … but there are alot of people looking for work atm

its possible these are the usual christmas casuals (albeit somewhat early) – but I worked for RM twice as casual staff and in my region it took about 1-2 weeks to process the application due to security checks etc. I suppose its possible these have been stood down to speed up the process but that isn’t going to do the reliability of the mail any good.. :yakk:

had a look out of curiosity and it appears your area has already been modernised and the nearest sorting office actually recruiting casuals is now in Stevenage (maybe not particularly local!)

@DJCliffy 357940 wrote:

Probably a good thing, they kicked me out of the local one for being a stoner. Doubt they’d let me back in lol!

yeah to right! .. you might steal my post you bloody druggy!!! …. think i’ll put you on death row .. DIE SCUM!!!

my acurasy on pop lvl’s in certain geog locations might be a bit off … but i am sure the missing posties in Berkhamsted count for a small % of that 30 thou :laugh_at:

@DJCliffy 357961 wrote:

As an Englishman i have my rights. Oh wait no i don’t. Can i at least have a last meal?

as long as it’s the undelivered mail that your eating .. sure you can :wink::laugh_at:

@DJCliffy 357964 wrote:

Cool. Hopefully i’ll find a few undelivered mephe packages and eat that. :crazy_dru

you’ll burn in hell for that ya know!