National Postal Workers Day
The CWU has launched a major campaign: ‘The People’s Post’. The campaign is about protecting and enhancing postal worker’s jobs and postal services – by continuing to look at ways of countering the ongoing threat posed by rigged competition and a fully privatised Royal Mail. These external pressures often lay behind many of the difficult issues you face in your workplace. By campaigning on our views of how the future of the industry should be shaped – we also help address the mounting pressures in your workplace.
The Campaign Objectives The campaign has a number of specific objectives as follows: • New and stronger legislation to safeguard daily deliveries. • A complete overhaul of the regulator’s role and a limit to competition. • An end to insecure employment models across the postal sector – ending Ofcom’s push for a race to the bottom.
• New innovative products and services for customers and enhanced role for postal workers in communities.
• The establishment of a ‘workers’ trust’, giving staff a collective voice to rival private hedge funds and investors.
• The re-nationalisation of Royal Mail (a Labour Party commitment) and reintegration of the Post Office network.
How can you help? We need your support to make this campaign successful and we are asking you to directly engage in the following activities. National Postal Workers Day 14th December – You will have noticed that the reverse of this communication is a poster publicising National Postal Workers’ Day. We are asking you to take pictures with the poster of yourself, your office, customers on your round (particularly any celebrities) or come up with your own innovative ideas to publicise the day, the importance of your role and our services. When you have taken the picture(s) share them on Monday 14th December through either twitter using #peoplespost or the union’s facebook page and facebook pages of Dave Ward and Terry Pullinger. You can also email them to peoplespost@cwu.org. There will be prizes for the best individual, office and the most innovative pictures. Nationally, we have already secured support from high profile figures – we want the membership to do likewise.
The online petition – You can help us reach the 100,000 figure by signing the petition via the link below and sharing it with your colleagues, customers, friends and families via email, text and social media www.supportthepeoplespost.co.uk In the coming weeks and months we are committed to building our campaign with further initiatives and we will let you know these in due course. The Postal Executive are also looking at ways to re-focus the whole union’s efforts on addressing your workplace issues and the Deputy General Secretary (Postal) will be communicating further on this. This union belongs to the members. This is your campaign. Please support the People’s Post.
Deputy General Secretary Terry Pullinger also launched the day by going out on delivery in Kent with rural delivery postman Damon Waghorn from the Medway Valley Delivery Office, and meeting members to talk to them about the workplace issues they face.
Speaking at Medway Valley delivery office, Terry Pullinger said: "Given that we're celebrating National Postal Workers Day, attempting to raise the profile of everything that postal workers across the country do, I thought there was no better way of doing that than to go back to my roots and go out on delivery."
Addressing members in the delivery office's canteen, Terry added: "Next year the postal service will be 500 years old and it seems to me that Royal Mail and the universal service it provides is certainly one of the great inventions of our social history.
"Even today Royal Mail is the only company in this country that can legitimately say it connects every single address in this country six days a week at a uniform cost. The fact is that, in the last year alone, we delivered around 12 billion letters and one and a half billion packets and parcels, so the service we provide is still hugely relevant 500 years on, and people are still massively dependent on what we do."