Why are we striking?
An open letter from your local St Albans postman…
“I joined Royal Mail in 2003. My plan was to do the job for a year, get my fitness up then apply to be a fireman. A year went by and I decided to stay as I enjoyed the job. It wasn’t great pay, but I loved it. When I had children, it was even better as I was able to pick them up from school every day.
“As many of you know posties have voted to strike in abundance. The reason being all of our futures are at a massive risk.
“Royal Mail made £758 million in profit last year. They gave £400 million to shareholders and the two CEOs and finance officer took over £2 million in bonuses.
“Coming out of covid and entering into a recession me and my colleagues thought we would be looked after with a decent pay rise to match inflation.
“We had a 2% pay rise forced upon us without negotiation by our CEO Simon Thompson. We’ve been told we can have another 1.5% if we rip up our terms and conditions.
“Simon wants us to reduce our sick pay, force us to work Sundays on a flat rate, and start and finish around 3 hours later.
“They also want us to “bank hours” so if there is not much mail in the summer they take and add on to your days later, meaning you could be working 10-hour days in the winter.
“All this for a 1.5% increase.
“Our CEO Simon Thompson doesn’t care about us or Royal Mail. He cares about his salary, pension, shares and bonuses.
“Our last strike day (Friday 9th) was called off because of the Queen’s death. I believe it was the right decision. We still have honour, dignity and respect, even if those at the top of Royal Mail don’t.
“We are Royal Mail, we wear the crown on our chest.
“I’m here to ask you the public to please be on our side. You’ll see lies in the media put out by Royal Mail like “we’re losing 1 million a day”, but this isn’t true.
“We can’t win this alone.
“Thank you.”
Tom Wilkinson
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