‘Going same way as steel’

The announcement yesterday (May 17) by the Post Office to cut  600 jobs in its cash handling operation, Supply Chain, led to calls from the CWU and Unite for the Post Office management to resign in protest over government funding cuts to the service.

The job losses announced today come on top of an expected loss of up to 500 frontline jobs from the franchising of 39 of its flagship Crown post offices and the loss of over 50 dedicated financial service experts selling products in branches through a further savings programme.

The CWU and Unite believe the Post Office is in crisis and heading for extinction unless the government and company change course.

“With this latest round of job losses, the management of the Post Office has to face the facts that it is in crisis and heading for ruin,” said CWU general secretary Dave Ward.

“If they care about the future of the network they should resign in protest at the straight-jacket government cuts have left them in.”

The Post Office was split in 2012 from the Royal Mail in the run-up to privatisation. It will see cuts to its funding of ÂŁ210m in 2013 down to zero in 2019.

Ward said that the job losses “show that under Sajid Javid’s leadership the Post Office is heading the same way as the steel industry.”

He noted that this year alone CWU members in the Post Office face 500 frontline job losses in branches, 500 job losses in its cash handling business supply chain and the closure of their pension scheme.

Unite officer for the Post Office, Brian Scott, said that the redundancies of 79 Unite members announced today take the total number of proposed job losses to 130 in the last two weeks.

Road to destruction

“These proposals tear the heart out of the Post Office and put it on the road to destruction,” he noted.

“The Post Office’s business plan, which was agreed with the government, has failed,” Scott went on to say. “Those at the top should accept the blame for that – but instead they are adopting a slash and burn approach in an effort to cover this up.

“We will not sit back and watch them destroy a public institution.”

Both the CWU and Unite are now calling for the government and the Post Office to halt the programme of cuts and to sit down with unions, customers, small businesses and communities who rely on it, to put together a fresh strategy that can develop new services and safeguard it for the future.