Bognor Regis gearing up for postal strike

Their action, coupled with the bank holiday Monday and a lack of overtime, is likely to mean postal services will be disrupted for up to a week.

Paul Mountain, their union spokesman, said the strike was intended to draw the public's attention to the attacks on Bognor's postal services by Royal Mail.

"This dispute has nothing to do with pay," he said. "Royal Mail is threatening to impose on its staff a revision of duties that will not work.

"It is using planning values that are highly unachievable for sorting the mail and preparing deliveries which will mean staff being ready to go out on delivery much later than currently and then not having enough hours left to complete the delivery itself."

A particular concern of the changes was their impact on the town's firms.

The deliveries which covered all the industrial estates, such as Durban Road and Oldlands Way and the town centre area, would all be made to start an hour later, he added, with too little time to be completed to mean items going out much later than at present.

"We have adapted to change but Royal Mail just want to take the cuts too far. We urge the public to support us to try to protect what we still see as a public service," he added.

The strike was agreed by 63 votes to eight in a secret postal ballot among Communication Workers Union members at the Clarence Road depot. The strike method was agreed at a meeting last Friday.

Mr Mountain, the CWU's representative in Bognor, said the postmen and women had seen their average number of properties for each delivery increase to about 500 from 340 in the past four years.

Their numbers had been cut in the same period from 119 to about 70.

But they were now being asked to cycle from the town centre to Pagham on a bike with 32kg of mail in just eight minutes or ten minutes to get to Barnham.

He accepted Royal Mail's comment the volume of mail had dropped nine per cent since 2005, but said his members had done more than enough to compensate for this.

A Royal Mail spokeswoman said: "The CWU is again saying one thing and doing another. Publicly, it says it wants modernisation yet it writes regularly to members saying union policy is to oppose change on the ground.

"The company has already condemned the CWU for striking locally over much-needed modernisation and change which has already been successfully implemented by our people in the majority of offices around the UK and is working well.

"Yet the union now wants strikes even in those offices which have already successfully completed the changes.

"These changes are all covered by the 2007 agreement on pay and modernisation, which the CWU leadership signed in the presence of the TUC, but which it is now reneging on in a way that clearly hurts our customers and our people and damages Royal Mail.

"The union claims to support modernisation, yet acts to destroy it.

"Royal Mail's future rests on providing customers with high-quality, reliable services at great value for money.

"It's time the union realised customers have a choice in a market where there are not just many rival carriers, but rival electronic means of communication."

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