Mail strikes go on as anger continues

MORE postal strikes are planned this week as office workers whose job is to decipher badly written addresses join the fight.

Three days of industrial action are planned, starting on Thursday when logistics staff in mail and distribution centres will walk out on a 24-hour strike.

That will not have a direct effect on the postal service in North Staffordshire, because there are no longer any distribution centres based in the area.

Then on Friday, Manual Data Entry Centre (MDEC) staff will stage a one-day walk out from the offices at Festival Park, Etruria. About 150 staff will strike from 6am on Friday until 6am on Saturday.

It will be followed by a walk-out on Saturday by all postmen and women in the ST area, which will affect about 1,100 Communication Worker's Union (CWU) members.

The protests are over how Royal Mail has implemented its modernisation.

CWU branch secretary Andy Plant said: "The MDEC staff are mainly a night shift. They decipher the post codes that machines can't read. There are only three centres in the country and there's probably about 150 staff that work at Festival Park."

He added: "We are not against modernisation or job cuts. We recognise that a smaller, more skilled workforce is the way forward. But it is how Royal Mail has gone about that process."

MDEC shop steward Mick Brennan said: "There are as many local issues as national ones, mainly to do with terms and conditions.

"Management have been restricting people from taking annual leave, people requesting certain dates off will be refused, then towards the end of the working year will be forced into taking time off."

Mark Mainwaring, aged 26, of Alsager, works at MDEC. He said: "I will be out on the picket lines on Friday. They won't get me back in until we have got some sort of deal."

Colleague David Hall, aged 30, of Burslem, said: "Royal Mail's modernisation programme is an attack on their employees. It is all about cost cutting and depriving people of employment."

John Nihill, aged 28, of Stoke, added: "It is the way Royal Mail go about the modernisation process. It is done with an iron fist."

Mark Higson, Royal Mail's managing director, said: "It's appalling but sadly not surprising the CWU has called still more strikes in its determination to damage customers and ruin the UK postal service."

"The CWU leadership has failed to honour and deliver the agreement we negotiated that would have averted last week's strikes, ensured no further strikes until the end of the year and given both parties a period of calm for further talks."