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Postal

In five minutes, Parliament gets info that Post said wasn't available

(24 February, 2009): For over 12 months we've been asking Australia Post some straight-forward questions about the impacts that their Future Delivery Design Project would have on you, your jobs, your take home pay.

You can see the evidence of our efforts here:

Senior management has continually said that they won't know the impacts until they actually implement the change - by which time, it's hopelessly late to try to offset the impact of the changes.

Post's approach flies in the face of the agreed consultation processes set down in EBA6.

We've disagreed with that approach all along - but they stuck to their guns, claiming in front of their own Managing Director on 6 February that they couldn't give us information because it didn't exist.

Fast forward to 23 February and Post is required to appear before Federal Parliament's Senate Estimates Committee.

NSW Senator Steve Hutchins asked a serious of detailed questions about FDD (you can read the full transcript here)

What came out of the hearing?

  • 176 jobs predicted to go next year
  • 63 jobs to go this year due to OCR improvements, another 23 in 2009-2010
  • 20 job losses due to the introduction of sequencing in 2008-09
  • 70 more due to sequencing in 09-2010
  • 19 in delivery
  • While full-time employment fell by 24, the number of part timers in MND shot up by 400
  • The countries where Post has taken an interest in the rollout ofsequencing has been the US, Holland, Sweden, Norway and Germany (Europe has had a heavy reliance on part-timers in sequenced mail, as opposed to the US, where full-time work has been maintained)

It took five minutes to find out what we've been asking for for over a year.

And we've had to drag the dispute into the Australian Industrial Relations Commission as Post stonewalled on that and EBA7 (by the way, we've learned that the dispute we lodged has been re-assigned to a senior representative of the AIRC, Vice President Lawler).

It goes to show why we've had such deep misgivings about the change process in Post and their lack of genuine commitment to the consultation process - unless it involves trying to weigh you down with reports that don't actually provide answers to your questions.

Got a view? Let us know what you think via feedback@cepu.asn.au