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Royal Mail and CWU in talks to avert postal strike

Although talks between Royal Mail and the Communication Workers' Union are continuing the likelihood is that there will be national postal strikes on Thursday 22nd October and Friday 23rd October 2009.

Royal Mail are advising customers to post mail before or after the action has taken place as a delay to the mail posted on Thursday and Friday is inevitable.  

This is the information on the Royal Mail website as of 20th October 2009, as to what plans they are putting in place to try and minimise disruption:

Date	Function striking	General service impact
Thursday 22nd October	Mail Centres & Network Distribution Units.	Limited processing, movement & collection of ordinary mail (if local collections performed by staff at a Mail Centre).
Friday 23rd October	Delivery Offices & Collection Units.	Limited delivery & collection of ordinary mail (if local collections performed by staff at the Delivery Office).

•  “If national industrial action takes place, Royal Mail has strong contingency plans in place and will do everything possible to keep mail moving and minimise disruption for our customers.
• Keep mail moving - hundreds of managerial and contract drivers will move mail around the country on strike days.
• Delivering mail – We’ll continue to prioritise Special Delivery™ and Royal Mail Tracked™ mail for delivery on strike days, however the nature of the CWU action means we cannot guarantee doing so. In order to provide customers with clear guidance on service, we will be removing the Special Delivery guarantee for items posted on Thursday 22nd and Friday 23rd which would be due for delivery on Friday 23rd October and Saturday 24th respectively. We will restore the guarantee of delivery as soon as we can be sure of being able to honour the service promise. We expect to be able to do this by Monday 26th.
• Use of managerial and support resources on strike days to maintain premium services, open callers’ offices and to collect from Post Office branches and as many posting boxes as possible.
• Supporting goods distribution - we have additional sorting and distribution capacity in place to aid the distribution of packets through our network.
• Targeted recovery - concentrating managerial and support resources on affected areas to deliver mail after the strikes.”

 For further updates please go to: www.royalmail.com

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