Royal Mail Strike in August & September 2022 Due to Pay Disputes

A Royal Mail strike has been announced today after receiving a notification from the Communication Workers Union (CWU) that it will call upon all members to commit to 24-hour strike action.

The strikes are set to commence from 00:01 for 24 hours on Friday 26th of August, Wednesday 31st of August, Thursday 8th of September, and Friday 9th of September.

Royal Mail Strike Reaction

“After more than three months of talks, the CWU have failed to engage in any meaningful discussion on the changes we need to modernize, or to come up with alternative ideas.

“The CWU rejected our offer worth up to 5.5% for CWU grade colleagues, the biggest increase we have offered for many years. In a business that is currently losing £1 million pounds a day, we can only fund this offer by agreeing the changes that will pay for it.

“Royal Mail can have a bright future, but we can’t achieve that by living in the past. By modernizing we can offer more of what our customers want at a price they are willing to pay, all whilst protecting jobs on the best terms and conditions in our industry. The CWU’s failure to engage on the changes we need is an abdication of responsibility for the long-term job security of their members.

“We apologize to our customers for the disruption that CWU’s industrial action will cause. We are ready to talk further with CWU to try and avert damaging industrial action but, as we have consistently said, it must be about both change and pay. We have contingency plans in place and will be working hard to minimize disruption and get our services back to normal as soon as we can to keep people, businesses, and the country connected.”

Ricky McAulay, Operations Director, Royal Mail.

As a business owner, you now have a few weeks’ notice to put an alternate courier or shipping service in place if you rely on Royal Mail for your deliveries.

Alternatively, if you cannot do that, it would be a wise idea to begin adding banners to your website or adding text to your order confirmation emails to let your buyers know that delivery times will be slower than usual due to the Royal Mail Strike.

For more context to the situation, you can see the Facebook video from the CWU where they explained the situation from their point of view.

https://www.facebook.com/TheCommunicationsUnion/videos/629819651705550

Dave Furness

Dave is a Co-Founder of eSeller365. For over 10 years he has been involved with eCommerce with a particular interest in the marketplaces and the huge opportunities available for sellers when utilizing a multi-channel strategy. After a year of being the UK’s youngest eCommerce consultant, he built an education platform called UnderstandingE that showed the world how to utilize Magento as the “Third Generation of Multi-Channel software”.

Dave has also created a YouTube channel dedicated to entrepreneurship and eCommerce as well as a podcast dedicated to mental health awareness. When Dave isn’t working his main interests include learning and playing Chess, researching the Crypto and NFT space, and trying to find the nearest beach.