Mail disruption increases as wildcat chaos builds

Disruption to Royal Mail services has put increasing strain on mail deliveries in parts of the UK as postal workers take wildcat strike action.

Postal workers at Coventry's mail distribution centre have walked out to join 20,000 other workers in unofficial strike action.

According to some sources over two-thirds of London postal workers are on strike causing a backlog of undelivered mail in the nation's capital.

The industrial action was sparked some two weeks ago when workers walked out after a driver was suspended in Southall, London. Within days the wildcat action had spread to other adjacent areas of England when the Royal Mail attempted to redistribute delayed post to other mail centres.

Action has been taken in Essex, Kent, Milton Keynes and Oxford and postal deliveries in these areas have been severely disrupted. Yesterday, the action spread as far as Scotland on Wednesday when workers at Wishaw, Lanarkshire, protested at being sent mail transferred from the affected London centres.

Although talks aimed at resolving the dispute are set to resume, the Communication Workers Union has said that managers are threatening workers over the action.

However, the action apparently has no official backing from the union, and Royal Mail Chief Executive Adam Crozier said that this was a "red herring" to exacerbate the situation.

Yesterday, Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the CWU, wrote to members saying that Royal Mail had "deliberately orchestrated the current situation and is actively prolonging the dispute by introducing new demands that attack our member’s terms and conditions".

In the letter he appealed for "commonsense so that all parties can set aside their current difficulties and just get back to work with everybody being treated with dignity and respect".

Negotiations between management and union sides on pay and changes are set to continue at ACAS.

(SP)