Royal Mail union votes overwhelmingly in favor of a nationwide strike

(Reuters) – Britain’s Royal Mail (L:) staff want to go on a nationwide strike, the Communications Workers Union (CWU) said on Tuesday, after it alleged that the company failed to adhere to a pension deal signed last year.

CWU said more than 97% of a ballot of roughly 110,000 British postal workers were in favor of going on strike. Some 76% of its members working in Royal Mail voted in the ballot, the union said.

“The prospect of the first national postal strike in a decade now looms large,” CWU said in a statement.

Royal Mail, which has 142,000 employees in Britain, said it was disappointed that union chose to ballot for industrial action and that it was still in mediation with the union.

Royal Mail last year reached a deal with the union over pensions, pay, a shorter working week, culture and operational changes, after nearly 10 months of negotiations. (https://reut.rs/35DHVio)

“Today the new RMG leadership are breaking that agreement,” said Terry Pullinger, Deputy General Secretary (Postal) at CWU.

“We would urge Royal Mail Group to now enter serious negotiations with this union,” said Dave Ward, General Secretary at CWU.

The company was not immediately available to comment on Pullinger’s comments. The run-up to Christmas is its busiest time of the year.

Royal Mail, privatized four years ago, is one of the few big British firms still to have a defined-benefit pension scheme, which pays out a proportion of a member’s final salary depending on how long employees have paid in to the scheme.

By contrast, a defined contribution scheme is a retirement plan in which the employer and employee contribute to an investment fund that is used to buy a pension on retirement.

Under a collective scheme, contributions are pooled, instead of being held in an individual account, helping to share risk.

Disclaimer: Fusion Media would like to remind you that the data contained in this website is not necessarily real-time nor accurate. All CFDs (stocks, indexes, futures) and Forex prices are not provided by exchanges but rather by market makers, and so prices may not be accurate and may differ from the actual market price, meaning prices are indicative and not appropriate for trading purposes. Therefore Fusion Media doesn`t bear any responsibility for any trading losses you might incur as a result of using this data.

Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.