Tomorrow, the Minister for Communications, Noel Dempsey, will endeavour to get talks started between An Post management and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) in an attempt to avert industrial action being planned by the CWU for Friday onwards. Efforts to get talks started last week failed because agreement could not even be reached on a third party to chair them. The prospect of an accord this side of Friday is pretty bleak.
The CWU's strike action has been necessitated, it says, by An Post's refusal to pay the terms of the current national wage agreement to its 10,000 staff. An Post management, for its part, has argued that staff will receive all the increases due to them if they implement Labour Court recommendations on changes in work practices. This the employees have refused to do.
To the outsider, it would seem that the situation in An Post is not fully rooted in reality. True, the company did return to profit last year, to the tune of €7 million, but it saved €20 million over the year by not paying wage increases. Fundamentally, An Post costs too much to run. It must change the way it operates or it will face a gradual and unavoidable decline in business to the point where the company will need a multiple of the 1,000 redundancies it is seeking at present.
Already, the company is experiencing a drop in mail volumes in spite of strong growth in the economy. The reasons for this may be many and complex, but the cost of postage and the unreliability of the service, especially as to next-day delivery, are undoubtedly factors. The company's plans for a new price increase (a 16 per cent increase was granted in 2003) will only serve to further diminish the volume of mail. And as volumes diminish unit costs will climb even higher.
Industrial relations at An Post are not what they should be and basic salaries for the vast majority of the staff could hardly be described as generous. Nevertheless, the employees need to concentrate now on what is in their own long-term interests, and that is a return to growth for the company, the retention of as many jobs as is realistic and the best terms and conditions for employees that are affordable. An agreement to bring the company back into growth has to come first, however.
To that end, the CWU should reassess its decision to mandate strike action. If the strike goes ahead, it will solve nothing. To concede pay increases without a material change in work practices which will deliver real efficiencies and an automation agreement which will reduce the huge overtime bill would be commercial suicide.