THE ROYAL Mail in the United Kingdom is to be hit with a three-day national strike by more than 100,000 postal workers as the confrontation with the Communication Workers Union worsens.
More than 40,000 mail sorting staff and drivers picketed at 30 sorting centres yesterday throughout Britain and Northern Ireland, while 78,000 delivery and collection workers are to refuse to work today.
British prime minister Gordon Brown urged Royal Mail management and the CWU to hold urgent negotiations, warning that a strike was “self-defeating” and would lead to Royal Mail losing business.
Up to nine million pieces of mail are currently held up, mostly in London, following a summer of one-day stoppages, but there are fears that the backlog could grow to 100 million within days.
Last night, An Post said mail posted to Northern Ireland and Britain might “be subject to delays while the backlog is cleared”, though items sent by An Post’s courier and parcel services would not be affected.
So far, Royal Mail has managed to put into position just a few hundred of the 30,000 temporary workers it intends to recruit before Christmas because of delays in completing security checks. The number of temporary staff being hired is twice the norm, raising fears among workers that Royal Mail intends to break the strike using picket-breakers, with echoes of the miners’ strike in 1984. Tougher security checks were introduced after a series of thefts in sorting centres in 2002 and 2003. Royal Mail was subsequently fined more than £11 million (€12 million) for failing to check properly for criminal backgrounds.
In addition to losing major contracts, including one from the Scottish government, Royal Mail is facing a 10 per cent a year cut in mail volumes, as more and more communications are delivered electronically. Each 1 per cent fall costs Royal Mail £70 million (€77.3 million).
In a day of trading blows, the managing director of Royal Mail, Mark Higson, said it was “totally outrageous” for the union to accuse the company of reneging on a deal when it was the union which was “walking away”.
Union leaders, led by the CWU’s deputy general secretary, Dave Ward, he said, had not been able to get the union’s executive to agree to a deal hammered out in late night talks on Tuesday.
“My door is open and my phone is on and I am urging them again today to meet me so that we can all sign that agreement, get the strikes stopped and give us some peace in which we can get on with delivering Christmas for our customers,” he said.
Business secretary Lord Mandelson, who faced further attacks yesterday from the unions, indicated that the British government might shortly urge both sides to go to the UK’s strike conciliation agency, Acas.
“I don’t think trading insults in this situation helps resolve the dispute. Politicising or dramatising it is useless. People need to focus on what issues are dividing them,” Mr Mandelson said.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party said it would sell Royal Mail if it won the general election next year.
“We propose to bring in private capital, assuming it is not in too disastrous a state by next May,” said shadow business secretary Ken Clarke.
The company is “old-fashioned” and “broke” and it must urgently change its culture to stop business draining away, said Mr Clarke, who criticised Mr Brown for abandoning plans to sell off 30 per cent of it earlier this year.
A series of regional strikes has been staged by the CWU since last June, particularly affecting London, Bristol and Coventry, but this week’s actions are the first to be held nationally for two years.