Notification of Welcome to Royal Mail Sessions (New Entrant Recruitment)

Notification of Welcome to Royal Mail Sessions (New Entrant Recruitment)
Branches will be aware that as part of the New Entrant Induction process agreed in 2006, the CWU has a timeslot of one hour allocated to recruit new entrants as members of the Union. In the past there has been no official structure in place to notify Branches of when or where the Welcome to Royal Mail (WTRM) sessions were taking place.
Colleagues will also be aware that in order to address the resourcing shortfalls that have crystallised of late, Royal Mail has embarked upon a recruitment drive across the country. How these resourcing shortfalls materialised is the subject of ongoing discussion with the business but in order to maximise the number of new entrants being engaged, Royal Mail notified the Union that they were making a temporary change to the induction training programme, whereby new entrants received their first day training in the workplace (covering health and safety) with the remaining induction training being carried out within one month of their appointment.
The Union immediately responded advising the business that this was unacceptable and that whilst we acknowledged the need to close the resourcing gaps as expediently as possible we could not accept that the CWU would not have access to new employees on commencement of their employment. A meeting subsequently took place with the business; in attendance for the Union was Shelley Banbury – PEC Member and Lynn Browne – Senior Field Organiser. As a result of this meeting the business has confirmed that in addition to new employees being given Health and Safety training, they will also be introduced to the CWU Representative. It is therefore imperative that CWU Representatives take this opportunity to recruit new employees.
Royal Mail also confirmed at the meeting that the CWU’s one hour slot would remain in place on day one and that the WTRM sessions have been revamped to make them more informative and professional. Given the aforementioned revamp, the CWU have agreed to change the one hour slot to commence at 11:00 as this is the optimum time given in the new programme.

COMMUNICATION WORKERS UNION

URGENT INFORMATION FOR MEMBERS
In addition to the above, the negotiators were successful in securing details of dates and venues of the day one training sessions, up to week commencing 30th November 2015 (copy attached). Further dates will be circulated to Branches in due course.

Any enquires from Branches /Representatives should be referred to Lynn Browne, Senior Field Organiser, lbrowne@cwu.org in the first instance.
Yours sincerely

Terry Pullinger​

Deputy General Secretary (Postal)