UNI at the JPGU Conference

Publié: 17 Juin 2011
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 Neil Anderson, Head of UNI Post & Logistics Global Union addressed the JPGU Conference being held in Kawasaki, Japan, and said he first wanted to share his condolences with the union for the colleagues who are dead or missing from the terrible earthquake and tsunami that devastated the northern part of Japan on 11 March. He said, " For me a person who comes from New Zealand, a country that also suffers devastation from earthquakes, I can really feel the pain of the Japanese people. My country has also recently suffered an earthquake where there was terrible devastation and deaths, thankfully not so many as in Japan, but your fellow postal workers lost colleagues and have been dealing with the terrible after affects of the Christchurch earthquakes. However, postal workers in both countries are continuing their services".



Neil pointed out that mail volume going down is not the phenomenon of Japan only. It is an international phenomenon. "If this situation continues, if we don’t do something, mail companies will soon be facing very serious financial problems and many postal workers jobs will be lost. All the indications are that even if there is some recovery in mail volumes after the recession, it is likely that they will continue to fall over the long term. We cannot sit and wait to see if we are right or wrong about mail volumes, we must act now to work with the postal companies to diversify our services, from mail to packages, to find ways to exploit the e-commerce revolution, and to find new services and products."



Luckily enough, Japan Post has a successful Post Bank and Post Insurance. But the problem is, whether Postal financial services and packages can accommodate postal workers in the current numbers. Unions are losing members and reducing their activities which is an inevitable outcome if we don’t find ways to grow or attract new members.



He said that UNI is growing, the industry is growing in different ways, but the public postal sector is diminishing: We can avoid this scenario if we can convince unions and our members in the postal sector that they must reach out to their brothers and sisters in the postal industry, in the multinational companies such as DHL, UPS, FedEx, TNT and DPD that already have 60% of the work we do. We have to convince our members to reach out and help to organise, to welcome their brothers and sisters in the private postal companies into our unions so we can all work together to make the postal industry a good place to work, with unions working to get good wages and conditions for all workers in the industry



Finally he congratulated Brother Takeuchi for his outstanding service to postal unions globally and wished him well in his retirement as President of JPGU.



Later in the Conference, a new leadership was elected for the JPGU with Hiroshi Usuki being elected President, Shoichi Toda and Nobutoshi Miyakoshi elected Vice Presidents and Toshimichi Omata General Secretary.