Management at An Post has sharply criticised the Communications Workers Union's (CWU) plans to ballot members on plans for radical restructuring of the loss-making State company.
It said the process could take up to three weeks, time the company could ill-afford.
However, the CWU has rejected this, saying that the company only put the final pay increase proposals to it last Friday, after seven months of talks at the Labour Relations Commission.
CWU workers will be balloted on a 5.35 per cent pay proposal and a range of other issues, including the franchising out of rural delivery services.
Separately, they are to be asked to endorse the possibility of taking industrial action. Such action could disrupt Christmas postal services.
Both sides met at the Labour Relations Commission yesterday to sign off on what had been agreed and disagreed. It is understood that there are substantial areas of disagreement.
If CWU members vote down the company's proposals, the process will then move to the Labour Court.
A spokesman for An Post said last night that the ballots would delay further a process that had already dragged on. He reiterated that the company's financial position - it forecasts a €30 million operating loss this year - was such that it could not afford such delays.
The spokesman said that, although many matters were complicated, An Post believed it should not have taken so long. "The ballot is just delaying the real issues that need to be faced up to," he said.
He also said the company could not understand why there was such opposition to franchising out rural postal deliveries. It would mean that postal workers who took voluntary severance would most likely become self-employed and do the deliveries.
He said a similar system had been used in SDS, an arm of An Post, where drivers used their own vans to do deliveries and therefore the principle was already established and had been agreed by the CWU.
An Post has already announced plans to reintegrate SDS into its operations, with several hundred job losses. Overall, the company is seeking 1,450 job losses.
Mr Seán McDonagh, CWU national officer, said last night that the company had only put a firm pay proposal last Friday, after seven months of talks.
He made no apology for the delay, saying that there were around 100 points of disagreement and that members were entitled to ballot.
Mr McDonagh said one of the An Post proposals' flaws was that employees would not get the 5.35 pay increase or "allowances", as he called it, if the savings An Post envisaged were not achieved.
He said people were being asked to deliver mail on rural routes at lower rates of pay. He claimed it was not possible to succeed in delivering mail under these circumstances.
