An Post staff holding the country to ransom AGAIN

D

Diddles

Guest
Here we go again another day another strike looming.
Unions in my humble opinion are sometimes the root of the problem.
To all An post staff:
Be thankful you have a job to go to in the mornings.All the management want you to do is your job.
It would make a nice change to receive post on a regular basis instead of once a week as I said on a previous post.
The sooner you have some serious competition the better.

D
 
Fair comment Clubman.

However, I don't know if you heard the debate on the Dunphy show this morning. Even the Union Rep admitted there were indefensible work practices in operation in An Post. While An Post mgmt sound pretty incompetent, when faced with a militant workforce with incredibly outdated 'us versus them' mentality and antiquated work practices, and the constant shadow of the Bert hanging over anything they negotiate, they couldn't but appear incompetent.

It seems to me part of this problem stems partly from the nudge nudge wink wink manner in which the pay agreements were carried out, whereby there appears to have been an unwritten agreement (or expectation on the part of the workforce) that at best the only productivity gains expected from staff before they qualified for their pay rises were cosmetic and wouldn't really affect productivity in any significant way.

I thought the kind of work practices being discussed today went out of fashion with the demise of British Leyland in the 70's. Silly silly me.

With the Bert in power there's absolutely no need for any of these public sector work practices to change...

Never fear post-receiving citizens of Ireland, the taxpayer will once again come to the rescue (but only after the obligatory inconvenience to the public and small business in order to teach us a lesson) and ensure your post is delivered on time!! (Ah well, give or take a couple of days. I mean Mick rang in sick what with his back and all and sure ye know yerself...)
 
Close it down and put the contract to run a national postal service out to tender.
That would be the solution if we had a competent public service what were able to deal with the private sector without being fleeced. We don't so the solution will be for the taxpayer to bend over and get shafted by the public sector again.
Total job security in a company run for the benefit of its employees. Who were these jokers benchmarked against anyway?
Nothing will change.
 
Close it down and put the contract to run a national postal service out to tender
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Talked to a friend who's in the union in An Post about this at the weekend. The privatisation was coming anyway in 2008 (I think ??), and as they believe that it will take 2.5-3 years to set up another service theyre not bothered with that threat. Im not convinced on those time frames but there ya go.
 
As far as I know the timeframe for opening up the market to competition is actually 2009.
 
Purple said:
Close it down and put the contract to run a national postal service out to tender.
That would be the solution if we had a competent public service what were able to deal with the private sector without being fleeced. We don't so the solution will be for the taxpayer to bend over and get shafted by the public sector again.
Total job security in a company run for the benefit of its employees. Who were these jokers benchmarked against anyway?
Nothing will change.
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Who would you suggest should be invited to submit tenders? Gama? Irish Ferries? AIB? Or any of the other bastions of private industry who shaft their customers & employees?
 
RainyDay said:
Who would you suggest should be invited to submit tenders? Gama? Irish Ferries? AIB? Or any of the other bastions of private industry who shaft their customers & employees?
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As I said,
That would be the solution if we had a competent public service what were able to deal with the private sector without being fleeced. We don't so the solution will be for the taxpayer to bend over and get shafted by the public sector again.
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An Post and its ilk make me sick. There are lots of people out there who have to actually justify their pay rises by (gasp!) working harder and better.
Our airwaves will be filled with union parasites telling the rest of us how "my members" deserve their 70's style work practices (which aren't really 70's style, that's all management lies etc) and big pay hikes. All of which comes out of the pockets of private sector workers, many of who are glad to just have a job. 100 jobs a week going in manufacturing and not a word from the unions but the same jokers want the government to throw more money into their public sector bottomless pit? Jim Larkin never saw the union movements raison detre to keep the public servants in their cocooned world by shafting those at the bottom of the ladder. Sick, sick, sick.
 
Purple said:
Who were these jokers benchmarked against anyway?
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Actually they weren't. Commercial semi-states were excluded from the benchmarking process. But, hey, don't let the truth spoil a good argument:p
 
Actually they weren't. Commercial semi-states were excluded from the benchmarking process. But, hey, don't let the truth spoil a good argument
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Doh!
Well according to RTE radio this morning they are looking for pay increases of up to 25%. Whatever mechanism was used to arrive at those sort of pay claims it wasn't based on what happens in the private sector where SME's and internationally traded services companies live.
 
Purple said:
An Post and its ilk make me sick. There are lots of people out there who have to actually justify their pay rises by (gasp!) working harder and better.
Our airwaves will be filled with union parasites telling the rest of us how "my members" deserve their 70's style work practices (which aren't really 70's style, that's all management lies etc) and big pay hikes. All of which comes out of the pockets of private sector workers, many of who are glad to just have a job. 100 jobs a week going in manufacturing and not a word from the unions but the same jokers want the government to throw more money into their public sector bottomless pit? Jim Larkin never saw the union movements raison detre to keep the public servants in their cocooned world by shafting those at the bottom of the ladder. Sick, sick, sick.
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Nice rant, but let's bring some reality to bear. It is just not true to say 'not a word from the unions' in relation to manufacturing jobs. The 'panacea' of private sector just doesn't stand up. We've seen how the private sector PPP approach has added 8% to the costs of building schools (check out last year's C&AG report).

I'm not saying that the workers/trade unions are faultless. However, the simple blaming of all problems on the unions and assuming the solution lies in the private sector is facile.
 
We've seen how the private sector PPP approach has added 8% to the costs of building schools (check out last year's C&AG report).
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A private company's sole reason for existing is to make money. They did well to add 8% to the cost of building schools. It's the public sector's fault for paying the money - not the private sector's fault for taking it.
 
umop3p!sdn said:
It's the public sector's fault for paying the money - not the private sector's fault for taking it.
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Just to be more specific - It's the fault of the Govt who decided the policy of using PPP's.
 
the 25% mentioned includes about 12.5% for sustaining progress. the other 12.5 percent is for postal workers only,( not for the clerks on the counters for instance) and the whole 25% is over 3 years and if the changes dont achieve the loss of 1400 jobs then only 16.5% gets paid.Gather that most of the change has to be made in Dublin where the work practices are pretty much imbedded. told that the country posties etc wont have to make much of a 'sacrafice' to get the 12.5%, and that's why the cwu didnt put the vote to all their members, as they know the majority of workers will accept the deal. what rankles the workers is the the refusal of the company to pay the pensioners their increases even though the pension fund is totally seperate from An Post and the claim the company cant pay the sustaining progress because they have no money but yet spent over €100million on new machinery etc and didnt borrow a red cent of it , unlike other business' which borrow for capital expenditure. think the management might have ideas of running the business down and then making an offer for it when its privatised as no one else will touch it. an post sitting on an awful lot of underused and vacant property sites at present ie sds on naas road, galway post office and drogheda post office spring to mind. handful of staff working in front of building only and big empty premises vacated by eircom and postmen lying idle. and an post sold two companies this year for €87million netting a profit of €70 million. what private company would drive vans up and down rural lanes for 48c a stamp.? fair bit of cherry picking when it comes to privatisation.
 
RainyDay said:
Just to be more specific - It's the fault of the Govt who decided the policy of using PPP's.
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So you accept that it's not the fault of the private companies then?
The government does have some questions to answer about why it spent so much money on capital projects in the last 5 years when the economy was in full employment and growth rates were high. It caused inflationary pressures that just swallowed up much of the money they spent. The flow of labour from Eastern Europe will have had a dampening effect on this but only in the last year or two. That would have added a good % to the cost of building schools whomever did it.
The underlying problem with trying to privatise or deregulate what are now public sector monopolies is that the civil service is not able to interact with the private sector without being made fools of.
cuchulainn makes some excellent points. The management is by no means free from blame here but there are three in the bed, the company, the unions and the government. No company can be run properly when it cannot make strategic decisions without the shadow of political expedience falling across it's path a few steps down the road. And God knows that Berties mob, with a few notable exceptions, are the masters of political expedience.
 
Hi Purp - Yes, I'm not blaming the private companies for the PPP costs. I'm clearly blaming those who made the decision to go down the PPP route (even though the Govt have access to far cheaper capital than any private company).

I'm pretty sure the C&AG report into the PPP school building took the inflationary pressures into account. They were comparing like with like, i.e. building under PPP vs building via normal public tendering at the same point in time.
 
On a more general point any empathy/ sympathy I may have or have had for any group of workers be they taxi drivers, aer lingus staff, hauliers, farmers, teachers postmen etc. ends when they go on strike - no excuse for inconveniencing those who are not involved. I thought the labour court was there to help in situations where grown men and women can't sit down and sort industrial problems out for themselves :confused:
 
Hi Rainy, I agree that PPP's are a bad idea in a climate of buoyant exchequer funds and very low interest rates (and as you pointed out, lower again for the government). The underlying problem of the public sectors inability to interact with, employ or regulate the private sector is still there. I cannot understand why it keeps happening be it PPP's, hospital IT systems, hospital cleaning contractors, transport infrastructure, grant payments to farmers, etc.
The civil service is unable to project manage and regulatory bodies are unable to regulate. That's where the real waste occurs.

And what that particular rant had to do with An Post I don't know ;)
 
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