Related Articles
Growing up in the north-east market town of Darlington, Simon Thompson has fond memories of attending the nearby Durham Miners’ Gala in the 1970s and 1980s.
For many working class families, the annual trade union jamboree was – and remains – a highlight of the social calendar.
“My grandfather was one of [Arthur] Scargill’s boys,” the Royal Mail chief executive says.
“He was a huge [trade] unionist. I remember when I was a kid, they always used to have Durham Miners’ Gala. With all the banners. I haven’t been for years, but I remember it very well,” he adds with a small chuckle..
Convincing many in the working classes of the merits of change is serious business – as Thompson witnessed first hand growing up.
“My grandad and my dad had a bit of a tenuous relationship. My dad decided that he wanted to go to further his education; he became an accountant. I think he was the first one that stepped away from what his father would have thought [was normal].”
With Margaret Thatcher dominating at the ballot box, politics was an even more sensitive topic.
“Whenever there was a general election going, my dad and my grandad never used to see each other for months,” he says.
Four decades later, following a career including stints at Apple, Ocado, Honda – and as managing director for the NHS test and trace programme – Thompson is witness to another industrial row. But far from an innocent young bystander, he is right at the centre.
On Tuesday, 115,000 members of Communication Workers Union (CWU) are expected to support strike action at the former state-owned postal monopoly. They are opposing reforms to “Amazon-ify” Royal Mail and demanding steep pay rises.
Speaking from Royal Mail’s headquarters above the sorting office in Islington, North London, the 55-year-old refuses to be drawn on the “what ifs” of the voting results.
It is no secret the company has been stuck in the dark ages for far too long – as Thompson’s predecessors have been at pains to point out. Since being privatised by the coalition government under David Cameron in 2013, the fortunes of Royal Mail have been volatile – usually determined by the support, or lack thereof, of powerful trade unions determined to hold on to working practices of a bygone era.
“There are things that we are doing now, they’re absolutely on the [cutting] edge. And yet there are other things that when you walk around and you see you’re just like: ‘Oh come on!’,” he says.
“During my time here as chief executive we’re not going to have our Kodak moment.”
Thompson doesn’t mean that in the positive sense. Rather, he is referencing the American photograph company’s refusal to accept the digital age, which shifted Kodak from household name to corporate has been.
The same fate awaits Royal Mail if the unions get their way, he argues: “We have the opportunity here and we need to take it.”
“Our whole working patterns in delivery are based on what we used to do for letters,” he says. “We start at the same time, we end at the same time, and we do a six days week. But that’s not what our customers want.
“We need to make sure that we have a duty pattern that covers seven days of the week,” Thompson adds. “We need later start times so that we can have these later deliveries in the day.”
Automated but unused
A brief tour of the Mount Pleasant site, once the biggest sorting office in the world, reveals some of Royal Mail’s working practices conundrum.
Source link
