He added that state-owned Royal Mail
Posted on Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 02:19 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link
Royal Mail is heading for a bitter confrontation with postal workers after announcing plans to recruit an army of 30,000 temporary staff in an attempt to crush the national strike that starts this week.
In a move that stunned union leaders and raised tensions between management and workers to new levels, Royal Mail said it had ordered the biggest recruitment drive in its history “to help keep the mail moving during the strikes called by the Communication Workers Union (CWU)”. Sources inside the CWU, which has called national strikes for Thursday and Friday, questioned whether the move was legal and suggested that it could be challenged in the courts.
As householders and businesses braced themselves for massive disruption, business secretary Lord Mandelson said he was “beyond anger” with the union for obstructing change and modernisation. “This is a matter of life and death for the future of the Royal Mail,” Mandelson told the Observer. “This national strike will drive away yet further customers and further business, possibly never to return to the Royal Mail.”
Fears are now growing that the strikes could unleash some of the worst industrial strife since the miners’ strike of 1984-85 with the focus being on possible violence at picket lines.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said that it was closely monitoring the situation and had issued guidance to forces on dealing with large-scale strike action. Each police force is assessing and reviewing the implications for public disorder that might arise from industrial action. An Acpo spokesman said: “It is important that we keep the public safe as well as always preserving the right to pearl jewelry protest.”
On Thursday CWU workers at mail distribution centres across the country will come out on strike. Royal Mail insists there will still be collections and deliveries. On Friday, however, those who actually collect letters and parcels from postboxes and deliver them will strike, meaning there were will be no service to households and businesses across much of the country. Royal Mail is also suspending its “next-day delivery” guarantee, under which customers pay extra to ensure letters and parcels arrive before 1pm on the next working day.
The company normally employs an additional 15,000 staff in the run-up to Christmas. But tonight it said that it had decided to double that number “to help offset the impact on customers of the CWU’s unjustified and irresponsible strikes”.
Those employed on temporary contracts were not being brought in “to do our postmen’s work when they are out on strike, but to make sure that we have people to help clear any backlogs between strikes, as well as to help, as happens every year, with the seasonal build-up of mail in the run-up to Christmas,” the company said. It added that the move was “fully in line with all employment law”.
Royal Mail group chief executive Adam Crozier said: “We are continuing to urge the union to halt its appalling and unjustified attack on customers. At the same time, we are absolutely determined to do everything we can to minimise delays to customers’ mail.
“Every year, Royal Mail recruits thousands of additional, fully vetted, temporary staff as part of the operation that successfully delivers the Christmas mail. This year we’ll have twice as many people on board, and we’ll have them in place much earlier in the autumn.”
A CWU spokesperson said: “We’re disappointed that biwa pearl Royal Mail appears to be more interested in sidelining the views and concerns of its staff than reaching an agreement to bring this dispute to an end.
“Instead of spending vast sums of money on untrained temporary workers we urge the Royal Mail to engage with talks to reach an agreement to get the permanent staff back to work. Royal Mail is planning for failure here instead of addressing the concerns of its staff. Postal workers deserve more than this dismissive attitude. CWU remains available for talks to avoid a strike.”
The union maintains that Royal Mail has tried to force through modernisation and changes to working patterns without proper consultation. The strikes are expected to cause huge problems for both business and domestic customers. There are particular concerns within the NHS that letters due to go out shortly to people regarded as at risk from swine flu, and who would need vaccination, could be held up.
In an interview with the Observer, Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the CWU, also claimed that Royal Mail was planning to scrap 60,000 jobs in the next two years.
Postal workers were in a “battle over the future of the industry… It [the dispute] is on a scale which comes along only every 50 or 60 years,” he warned.
He added that state-owned Royal Mail was the last major industry in Britain not to have undergone a radical restructuring. But he stressed that the CWU was keen to akoya pearl find a solution to the dispute. Ward accepted “there is going to be pain along the way” for its members, adding: “We are determined but we desperately want to find a solution. I would not suggest this [dispute] is like the miners’ strike in terms of bitterness.”
Royal Mail admitted that modernisation plans would inevitably lead to job losses but insisted this weekend that it would abide by its policy of implementing only voluntary, and not compulsory, redundancies. It rejected the CWU’s estimate of 60,000 jobs lost, but could not specify how many would be lost.
Larry Whitty, a former general secretary of the Labour party and now chairman of Consumer Focus, said: “If Royal Mail and the CWU are unable to engage in a positive manner, then it seems appropriate to us that mediation is a necessity and not a luxury.”
This is what we should be angry about
Posted on Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 02:18 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link
A massive postal strike is due to start this week. Letters will go undelivered, important bills and cheques will be delayed, packages may be lost forever in dusty back offices. The first question to ask is: how will we know the difference?
But nobody seems to be asking that question. Instead, people seem angry with the postal workers for striking. Everyone is grumbling about the inconvenience, damning the greed and worrying loudly about Christmas deliveries. We hate it when the shops put decorations up in October, yet, somehow, suddenly, now is exactly the right time to start thinking about posting a Nintendo DS to cousin Johnny and complaining that those selfish bastard postmen won’t jam it through the letter box in time.
I can only assume, from the rage, that we think they have nothing to complain about. We must believe the Royal Mail is well managed, with sufficient workers and correctly allocated resources, thus resulting in the strong resemblance between a Swiss clock and the current state of the service.
Please. Before we were distracted by the opportunity to complain about postmen, we complained constantly about the post. The whole service has been totally cocked up. There are no longer two deliveries a day, the local post offices have all closed and “first class” now means “three days if you’re lucky”.
Do you know your postman? I used to pearl jewelry know mine. His name was Neil. He was a foot fetishist.
As Neil and I got to know each other, we struck a deal. If I had a parcel, he would bring it at the end of the round, lugging items of occasionally significant weight until the whole shift was over (because I go to bed late and fear a 7am doorbell), on condition that I opened the door and signed for the package barefoot. He didn’t need to touch my feet, nothing like that. It wasn’t weird. He just wanted a quick glimpse of toe, in return for a decent lie-in.
It was a good deal. We were very happy with it. I used to take a Christmas cake to the sorting office every December.
But Neil is long gone. Our post is not just delivered at a different time every day, it’s delivered by a different person. Often a miserable, underpaid temp, who stuffs all the mail for six flats through the door in one torn and crumpled bundle because he or she is so frightened of being penalised by the manager for not meeting a preposterous delivery target that there is no time even to take the rubber bands off.
In beefing the delivery targets to unmanageable sizes per worker, then sacking postmen for failing to meet them, in axing the second post and generally thumping down the iron fist, the Royal Mail managed this year to make a £321m operating profit. They celebrated by imposing an immediate pay freeze on the workers.
So the profit benefited neither the postmen nor we hapless post-receivers – all of whom are, technically, the owners of the Royal Mail. It’s a national company. It’s ours. But we’d have been better off if our business had carried on making a loss. The profit simply inspired further cuts and a worse service. It’s like telling your wife: “I got a juicy £5,000 bonus this year, so we had better cancel that holiday.”
Meanwhile, the world is full of people trying to biwa pearl make a living by asking: “What do customers want? What can I invent, provide or sell that people are looking for?”
The Royal Mail don’t have that problem. They know what people want. We want regular deliveries, a post office in walking distance and a happy postman familiar with the round. And yet they won’t provide that.
It’s as if they, a state company, have looked around at lucrative private businesses and thought: “Hmm… Virgin Media take days to send technical support… Amazon aren’t contactable by phone… Apple computers need to be upgraded every couple of years at enormous expense… maybe we’d better become shit as well.”
In ignoring what they know people want, they are rivalled only by banks. Banks persist in refusing to be contactable by phone, taking the mickey with the small stuff and paying themselves fat bonuses while we get no interest from them – in any sense. I went into Lloyds TSB and queued for 20 minutes because there was only one window open. When I got to the front, the teller, Dot, said: “Hello Miss Coren.”
Hurray! I thought. After 10 years using this branch, they finally know me! They recognise my face and remember my name!
And then they refused to let me take out the cash I needed, because I couldn’t show proof of identity. This from a bank that is currently advertising its “personal touch”.
They put that in the adverts because they know we want a personal touch. But we don’t get it – not from private companies that should be wooing us, nor public companies that we collectively own. Whether as customers or bosses, we are short-changed.
This is what we should be angry about. Aren’t you? I bloody am. We are treated like tossers. When we read that postal workers are going on strike, we should share their fury and frustration rather than turning ours against them, the gutsy naysayers who are walking out against the sharp end of akoya pearl bad management that affects us all.
They are doing the right thing. They are making the protest that we all should and would if we knew how, rather than just rolling our eyes and miserably putting up with it.
If it does take until Christmas for Royal Mail Group to figure out that the £321m should be ploughed back into securing jobs, increasing wages and making the service better not worse, don’t shoot the messenger. In not delivering, he’s just trying to deliver. Pay your bills online, take the Nintendo round personally and shake hands with a postman on your way.
The Conservatives do not have
Posted on Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 02:18 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link
WHY, NEXT WEEK, will postal workers go on strike? Everyone knows the consequences: deliveries stop, Royal Mail’s reputation is shredded and it sinks deeper into financial disrepair, management and workforce have their worst fears about each other confirmed.
But there is no clear explanation as to why it pearl jewelry must be this way or who is responsible.
There is certainly blame being flung around. Royal Mail managers charge the Communication Workers Union with confrontational Luddism. The company, groaning under the weight of a multibillion-pound pension deficit, is practically insolvent. The business, say managers, needs modernisation otherwise it will collapse. But the workforce rejects efficiency drives obstinately and automatically.
By contrast the union charges the bosses with ruthlessness and dishonesty. The meaning of “modernisation” remains obscure. New technology is part of it, but the real issue is cost controls, which means job losses. Meanwhile, Royal Mail made an operating profit of £321m last year. Chief executive Adam Crozier annually earns at least £1.3m including executive pension and bonuses. Strikes, says the union, are the last resort to protect poorly paid members from redundancy at the hands of managers who have enriched themselves.
Such polarised interpretations leave little room for negotiation. And, since opinion is just as divided in the Labour party, the government has essentially given up on biwa pearl the issue. Lord Mandelson’s plan to sell a stake in Royal Mail to a private sector carrier has been abandoned for fear of backbench rebellion.
The Conservatives do not have a public plan for Royal Mail, but it is safe to assume that, if they have a majority in the next parliament, their MPs will not baulk at privatisation.
In that sense, the union is taking a big risk. The worse the disruption to postal services now, the faster public sympathy with postal workers will drain away and the easier it will eventually be to effect redundancies. But since job losses are all that is on offer before the strike, the union sees no alternative.
The union’s methods and language might sound like a throwback to the 1970s, but their purpose – saving livelihoods – is not just political nostalgia. Managers may be right that modernisation is commercially vital, but that process doesn’t put their jobs on the line.
Beyond the confrontational rhetoric is a akoya pearl clear dilemma. Most people see universal, affordable mail delivery as an important public service. But it is not a profitable business. So whoever is in government must either devise a new publicly subsidised model that works, or tell voters they cannot have the service they want. Managers and unions cannot solve that problem. It is the politicians who must show some courage and choose.
On Tuesday, Owers will publish two
Posted on Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 02:17 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link
Two of Britain’s biggest jails are at the centre of an investigation that threatens the careers of senior Prison Service staff.
The Observer has learned that several high-ranking employees at Wandsworth and Pentonville prisons in London may face disciplinary action for their role in alleged attempts to dupe the chief inspector of prisons, Dame Anne Owers. The Prison Service launched an investigation after Owers said she had received information that the two jails were transferring difficult prisoners before her inspections in an attempt to ensure they received positive reports. Stephen Shaw, the prisons and probation ombudsman, also raised concerns about the alleged transfers.
A Prison Service meeting to discuss bringing charges of gross professional misconduct against several staff was held last Tuesday and further developments are pearl jewelry expected imminently.
Owers is expected to make scathing criticisms of the regimes at the two prisons in separate reports published this week.
In a statement issued yesterday, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, declared it is “neither policy nor acceptable practice temporarily to move prisoners during inspections”. There is speculation that he could be forced to make a statement to the House of Commons about the affair.
Owers first submitted her allegations of suspicious transfers to the director general of the Prison Service, Phil Wheatley, who started the investigation. Straw has stipulated that it must examine “who proposed and authorised the transfers; the rationale for the transfers; and the circumstances of the actual transfers themselves and whether those transfers took place in line with policy requirements relating to the wellbeing of prisoners”.
The inquiry focuses on claims that a small number of biwa pearl the most difficult prisoners were moved between the two category-B men’s jails in May and June. The two prisons – both built in the mid-19th century – have won plaudits for attempting to shake off their Victorian pasts, but overcrowding and budget cuts have led to concerns about any further improvements. With a capacity of more than 1,500, Wandsworth is Britain’s largest prison. Pentonville can hold more than 1,100.
On Tuesday, Owers will publish two reports into conditions and practices at the prisons that are likely to trigger a debate about how the country’s jails respond to inspections, and the support given to the watchdog by the Prison Service.
They will also focus on the “ghosting” of prisoners – moving inmates between prisons, which some staff say is an effective way to manage disruptive prisoners and help others to make a fresh start. The technique had been used for decades before falling out of favour in recent years. But claims that it has been used to remove problem prisoners ahead of inspections now threaten to plunge the akoya pearl Prison Service into crisis, especially if they trigger further allegations that the practice is widespread.
Straw’s statement said: “The chief inspector will make her own judgments in her inspection reports on the prisons, due for release shortly, but it is neither policy nor acceptable practice temporarily to move prisoners during inspections.”
Prison staff say they are under increasing pressure to meet government targets and ensure they obtain positive inspection reports.
Authorities cancelled all police leave and members
Posted on Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 02:17 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link
Two weeks after Rio de Janeiro celebrated winning the 2016 Olympic Games, the Brazilian city was tonight bracing itself for a further night of violence after an intense gun battle erupted in one of the city’s favelas and a police helicopter was shot down, killing two officers.
The violence, intense even by Rio’s standards, began in the Morro dos Macacos, a hillside area in northern Rio. The shanty town, controlled by the Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends) drug faction, one of three heavily-armed cocaine gangs that control many of Rio’s 1,000-odd slums, was reportedly invaded in the early hours of Saturday morning by members of a rival gang, the Red Command. Police say traffickers from the Red Command were attempting to seize control of the local cocaine trade.
Deafening volleys of automatic gunfire were captured on pearl jewelry amateur video, filmed from apartment blocks surrounding the slum. One local newspaper declared it a “War in Rio” on its website.
“We were terrified,” Cristina Soares, a 17-year-old resident, told the Rio tabloid newspaper Extra as she fled the area yesterday. “The children were so scared they wanted to leave the house in the middle of all the shooting. Later on things are going to get even worse.”
Mario Vilson, another resident of the Morro dos Macacos, told the news website Terra that he had been woken up by the sound of shooting. “This war has been going on for 20 years and will never end,” he said. “It’s very sad. I just don’t know when we will have peace.”
Hundreds of police officers descended on the area following the invasion. By Saturday night the death toll, including the two dead police officers, stood at 12 according to Rio’s security secretary José Mariano Beltrame. Five other officers had been shot and two slum residents injured, police said.
Favela residents were gathering their belongings and fleeing their homes while at least 10 buses were set on fire across town, causing close to £1m in damage according to biwa pearl one company.
“I saw two bodies lying in the street, surrounded by people,” said Douglas Engle, a photographer who was at the Morro dos Macacos. “Then a third body was brought down from the slum by police, wrapped in a hammock. People were standing around crying.”
In the most high-profile incident, the pilot of a military police helicopter was shot in the leg as he flew over the favela and the helicopter exploded in flames as it crash-landed on a nearby football pitch. Two of those on board were killed. It was the first time a police helicopter had been shot down in Rio.
Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, said it was “inadmissible that Rio be confronted by delinquents in this way” and threw his weight behind police attempts to control the violence.
The head of the military police, Mario Sérgio Duarte, said the drug traffickers would “be the victims of their own choices”. “We have lost two professionals who dedicated themselves to the defence of the population. But we will not be motivated by revenge,” he added.
Oderlei Santos, spokesman for Rio’s military police, said: “Our operations will only cease when these criminals are captured, arrested or are killed in combat.”
Authorities cancelled all police leave and members of Rio’s civil police gathered at the police HQ in central Rio this afternoon. They were expected to occupy a number of favelas around the city. Tonight, military police were seen entering at least one slum controlled by the Red Command in Rio’s southern beach district.
The latest round of violence underlines the challenges local authorities face as they attempt to improve security before the city hosts the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Rio’s government has spent the past year expelling drug gangs and vigilantes from four slums and setting up “pacification” projects by which the slums are permanently occupied by police.
But the majority of the city’s favelas are still controlled by members of three drug factions, which possess an increasingly sophisticated arsenal, including anti-aircraft guns and automatic rifles, often sourced from inventory intended for the Bolivian and Argentinian armies and akoya pearl smuggled into Rio.
Faced with an increasingly well-armed enemy, Rio’s police are also investing heavily in military equipment. They now have a bulletproof helicopter, while local journalists wear bulletproof vests when working in the slums. Each year, Rio’s police kill around 1,000 people “resisting arrest”. Nearly 90 officers have been killed this year.
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