Royal Mail Losing Four Hundred Staff a Week, Union Says
The Communication Workers Union says departures have risen from about 330 a week to 400 from a workforce of 83,000 since a new delivery system was introduced, and that it is “not working in hundreds of offices”. Royal Mail says the reforms are part of making the service financially sustainable.
The system, known as DM26, reorganises rounds into groups of three workers and changes walking patterns, with second class delivered every other weekday and first class and parcels daily. It has reached about 1,000 of 1,200 delivery offices. Of more than thirty staff interviewed across the four nations, eight tracked their steps and all had risen by a quarter to a third, some to around 25,000 a day. Bryn Dymott, who delivered in Wootton in Bedfordshire for nine years, left in July rather than face another Christmas he called shambolic, saying it was “proving it’s impossible to have four people’s work done by three people”. One postal worker in the West Midlands described leaving first class mail behind on a road that had been running late for weeks, “but I’m sure a manager would have ticked a box to say all first class mail went out”. The attrition figures are the union’s and the company has not disputed them, answering instead on delivery times. It announced 2,500 job cuts six days ago.