SIGNIFICANT DELAYS in sending letters and parcels to the United Kingdom through the post are expected following a series of one-day strikes by Royal Mail workers and fears that a national strike is looming.
Members of the Communications Workers Union (CWU) will ballot from tomorrow on whether to escalate their action to a national walkout. The result is due on September 30th during the Labour Party’s annual conference in Brighton.
The CWU claims that the backlog is already larger than that during the 2007 national strike, with more than 20 million posted items delayed, although this is denied by Royal Mail management.
Last night An Post acknowledged that delays were affecting UK-bound mail from Ireland. “But the disruption has been targeted, so it has been quite difficult to gauge the actual delay that is occurring,” a spokesman said.
“We will be informing our customers that there is a possibility of a national strike and that there will be delays.”
The Royal Mail is seeking to change workers’ conditions and increase the length of postal routes, arguing that some postal carriers do not do full shifts. The changes have been successfully implemented in a number of sorting offices.
Speedy and urgent change was vital because 10 million fewer letters were being posted each day in the UK than three years ago, said Paul Tolhurst, Royal Mail’s operations director.
“But it is increasingly clear that the CWU simply refuses to believe that mail volumes are declining by around 10 per cent annually despite the clear evidence of this in the UK and every other postal market around the world,” he added.
