i have a mate in motherwell who only does royal mail work through manpower. he is being paid £16 p/h
of course there may be a very slim possibility of him talking out of his arse 
What do you think would have been a better system for the picking into duties, and allocating holidays - other than seniority for a matter of interest? 
scanny77:
i have a mate in motherwell who only does royal mail work through manpower. he is being paid £16 p/hof course there may be a very slim possibility of him talking out of his arse
I’d like to know in the first person who’s getting £16ph monday-friday at RM. You might get £9ph days, £11.75 weekday nights, and £16ph sundays and bank holidays - but that’s not the same as what your brothers first mate twice removed’s governors cousin down the pub told you in Motherwell I guess. 
C’mon - somone say "I’m fred bloggs, I work 11:00 to 23:00 at RM and I get rate of pay for it.
Winseer:
scanny77:
i have a mate in motherwell who only does royal mail work through manpower. he is being paid £16 p/hof course there may be a very slim possibility of him talking out of his arse
I’d like to know in the first person who’s getting £16ph monday-friday at RM. You might get £9ph days, £11.75 weekday nights, and £16ph sundays and bank holidays - but that’s not the same as what your brothers first mate twice removed’s governors cousin down the pub told you in Motherwell I guess.
C’mon - somone say "I’m fred bloggs, I work 11:00 to 23:00 at RM and I get rate of pay for it.
I got £14.70 odd an hour for my basic hours, i work from 12:30-20:30 monday to friday, i take home £410 after deductions. the only reason folk would be on £9 an hour is because they have only just started at rm but because I and most folk who do rm have been their for ages we get a better pay rate, some agency tosh that im not complaining about.
The other run we had in our depot which has now changed was a ■■■■ sight near £16 an hour
So, you get what looks like an overtime rate after 40 hours. Looks pretty good though none-the-less, except the TSA boast at the bottom. A salary sacrifice scheme? It does seem odd that you get pay increments after being there for so many months, bearing in mind that full timers themselves have not exactly been getting much in the “mark time” paydeals over the past few years.
Mark time pay and overtime being scrapped to be given out to agencies (FT not allowed to cover absent shifts anymore) were two of the many reasons that weighed in favour of me walking 2 years back. I can see now why they don’t let the recently departed come back as agency for so long! 
If you could, you could take the VR money and come back on more money as agency!
Winseer:
What do you think would have been a better system for the picking into duties, and allocating holidays - other than seniority for a matter of interest?
I would have preferred if they just rotated the runs, giving everyone a share of the SA. Im guessing you know what i mean by that. I was a flex driver so did get a good variety, but was always near the bottom of the pile when it came to overtime.
I did leave a few years ago but don’t think its changed much.
Winseer:
So, you get what looks like an overtime rate after 40 hours. Looks pretty good though none-the-less, except the TSA boast at the bottom. A salary sacrifice scheme? It does seem odd that you get pay increments after being there for so many months, bearing in mind that full timers themselves have not exactly been getting much in the “mark time” paydeals over the past few years.Mark time pay and overtime being scrapped to be given out to agencies (FT not allowed to cover absent shifts anymore) were two of the many reasons that weighed in favour of me walking 2 years back. I can see now why they don’t let the recently departed come back as agency for so long!
If you could, you could take the VR money and come back on more money as agency!
No my overtime and basic rate are roughly the same tbh. but this is the basic due to the agency working regulations or some pish, RMs own drivers get more money than us but thats because we dont get the bonuses etc
as for the tsa crap i dunno what the hell it is
Overtime was allocated on aggregate, and never seniority. New Boy with Zero hours (starting aggregate) could effectively pick up nearly everything going overtime wise, until their aggregate caught up with the docket kings. This would never take more than the entire 26 week reference period, when aggregates get reset. This system not only seemed fair, but it meant that no driver could put themselves in for more hours per week than would actually be permitted by law, because “compliance admin” via BoS would constantly monitor hours to make sure no one took the ■■■■ - a good and fair thing I reckon! Try and get 84 hours in one week at royal mail, and BoS will have your guts for garters before you get halfway.! RM Not ‘recognising’ POA means that there’s no “48 hour duties, with another 36 hours sitting in laybys = 48 hours pay = compliant” scams either. 
If your forunate enough to find yourself in a layby, you’re not on POA, but “other work” and still being paid in other words. You just won’t get more than your legal maximum hours - ever. 
Rotating the runs was something done in the old days. It was a big push to get full timers to agree to fixed duties, but once they were implemented, they were popular, because the senior folk could get first dibs at the runs they wanted out of the pot. I spent nearly 22 years at RM, and by the time I left, my seniority had risen to about 30 in an office of about 90 drivers. A “full” duty re-write resign might have jobs for 80 of the 90, and 10 “floaters” beyond, who’d effectively pick up the duties vacant that were known in advance - ie scheduled leave. Sometimes a senior driver might pick into a “dogsbody” floater duty, because it meant they got some variety. The pay was the same whether you were 30 years old, having just started or 30 years old with over a decade under your belt already with the firm. The differences in pay came from earlies/lates/nights 17t or 38t pay scales. 6 combinations where C+E nights paid the most, and 17 earlies paid the least. Pretty straightforward to understand.
I believe all these systems on a whole work a lot better than some systems I’ve seen at other places, which I believe encourage bad habits, such as staircasing overtime rates (encouraging you to run bent), overtime according to seniority (junior Full timer gets refused, handed out to agency senior instead) and of course working more than a 48 hour week before every other avenue of possible cover is exhausted (meaning you’d have to give back hours before the end of week 3…)
Those wishing to leave on VR terms actually find it hard to get offered the VR. The firm has made a mistake I believe in the MTSF agreement in offering VR on seniority when it doesn’t make any sense at all. A guy due to retire next year might be offered 5 figures to “go early” (costing the firm stacks!) whereas someone much lower in seniority wouldn’t be offered it at all. The payments based on years service by your average wage not including overtime seemed fair enough. It meant that permanent nights might get more than a longer standing bod on days, but it was capped at 24 months worth anyway - so 30 years on nights or 40 years on days didn’t really make any difference in the end. THe rare VR offers to staff with less than 24 years & on nights of course turned out to be a cushier deal pound for pound, which was why I took it.