• Royal Mail workers escalated their strike on Fri 30 Sep and Sat 1 Oct over pay and working conditions, with 19 more days of walkouts to follow.
• The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has hit out at Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson, who has imposed a 2% pay deal and further casualisation on the workforce.
• Thompson gets a half-a-million yearly salary from Royal Mail and was a key figure in the disastrous Test and Trace app.
Moneyed Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson has previously lambasted striking workers as “self-centred” for battling to improve their contracts, making clear his stance on his well-unionised workforce.
Postal workers, represented by the Communication Workers Union (CWU), are striking on Friday and Saturday against “Uberisation” of Royal Mail. This will be followed by 19 further days of strike action in the build-up to Christmas.
“Postal workers in this country will not meekly accept having their lives being made worse for the benefit of a wealthy few,” CWU General Secretary Dave Ward said as the union reported 115,000 workers had walked out on Friday. Workers, pushed to their limits, have returned landslide strike ballots in favour of strike action.
Posties were essential workers during the pandemic for good reason – they provide a vital service to millions everyday. But their union says that in return, many are not being treated fairly and has labellled company bosses as an “Incompetent business elite who want to destroy a great institution, worsen working conditions and damage the communities our members serve.”
The CWU triggered industrial action ballots in response to the Cost of Living Crisis affecting their members. Meanwhile, as millions of working class people struggle to pay their energy and food bills, shareholders in the once-publicly owned Royal Mail have taken home £758 million in profits.
But who is the man at the top, insisting that posties must accept low pay and exploitative working conditions?
Simon Thompson, CEO of Royal Mail, has been attached to Royal Mail ever since being given a Non-Executive Director position on their board in November 2017. He was in charge of “workforce engagement” until taking his new position of CEO in January 2021, which would make him appear to be primed for open and honest talks with the union his workers belong to.
This hasn’t been the case. Union leaders have been left in the cold after Thompson has failed to work out a resolution with the CWU to an ongoing dispute over pay and working conditions.
Thompson lives in the lap of luxury collecting a £596,000 salary for his top position, about 26 times more than the average postie earning a hard-fought £11.75 per hour, but continues to exploit the workers who make his profits.
Test and Trace
After stints as an executive for Ocado, Coca-Cola, and HSBC, Thompson decided to get on the government payroll as one of the heads of the NHS Test and Trace response as the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across the nation.
Although Baroness Dido Harding was the main target for ire during the farcical rollout of the Test and Trace app, Thompson also had a pivotal part in the shambles as Managing Director of the project.
Thompson was in hot water over the doomed rollout of a service that experts had high hopes of reducing coronavirus transmission rates, only for it to have such a minor impact that the app would be raked across the coals in the press.
In June 2020 Thompson dodged three questions about when the app would be up and working from members of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, and by that October after the app had been up and running for two weeks nationally only one alert had been sent to app users about an outbreak at a social venue.
The app was supposed to be one of the lynchpins of the Test and Trace response, but the system as a whole was branded as “muddled”, “overstated”, and “eye-wateringly expensive” by the Parliamentary committee overseeing the farce.
Obligations
It’s not just the posties’ pay that is being squeezed. Thompson and his CFO Mike Jeavons went to the industry press in late 2021 to bemoan the conditions of the company’s Universal Service Obligation (USO).
The USO is a set of terms made by regulator Ofcom that ensures customers can send letters to anywhere in mainland Britain on a flat rate, designed to keep the once-public service Royal Mail affordable to every wage bracket.
Part of the Obligation is to provide a six-day-a-week service delivering letters, which has stood in opposition to Thompson and his executives wanting to transition into a parcel-focused delivery service. The move is motivated by wanting to snatch a slice of the profits from competitors like DPD and Hermes by using the company’s vast network of taxpayer-built infrastructure.
Efforts have been made by Royal Mail in recent years to scrap Saturday letter deliveries against the cries from the CWU whose members have fought back to protect the terms of USO.
Massive executive pay, a terrible test and trace track-record, and cutting services to make even more profits. Thompson and his management ethos is at odds with the working men and women who provide for the CEO’s family.
The CWU and their members are fighting back against the Cost of Living Crisis in the way that’ll hurt those in charge the most – showing the power of their labour by taking it back.
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