The postal union has ignored a last-minute plea from government ministers for it to drop its plans for further strikes by announcing a second 24-hour stoppage to start next Thursday night.
Royal Mail management said more strikes would achieve “nothing” except drive away further business to private rivals and lead to wider migration of customers to e-mail and the internet.
Delivery services were badly hit by a staff walkout over wages and conditions last Friday which was followed by the closure of several large post offices on Monday in a separate dispute over plans to close 85 crown branches and move services to retailer WH Smith.
The Communication Workers Union argued today that Royal Mail’s refusal to engage in fresh negotiations over pay and modernisation plans left it with “no alternative” other than to pursue further strikes.
Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the union, said action would be called off if the Royal Mail agreed to engage in meaningful negotiations on a range of issues.
“However, if you simply restate your previous position “” that you will only meet to explain the challenges facing the business “” then a further strike will take place,” he added in a letter to Royal Mail chairman, Allan Leighton.
In response, the employers said they were willing to meet at any time but expressed concern that the CWU appeared to be ignoring the challenge facing everyone inside Royal Mail “which is the absolute need to modernise”.
They pointed out that the mail market was declining by 2.5% annually, that 40% of Royal Mail’s bulk business mail had gone to private firms already and claimed that rival firms were far more efficient than the state-owned group while paying their staff 25% less.
Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Royal Mail, said in a letter to Billy Hayes, the general secretary of the CWU: “The business is already losing revenue. Your action on Friday has merely served to accelerate this process with more of our customers moving to other forms of communications media such as email and the internet.
“For some this is a temporary measure, but we know from experience that once businesses change the way they communicate to customers … they rarely come back, if ever.”
Earlier in the day, the new business and enterprise secretary, John Hutton, called on Royal Mail workers to abandon strike plans. In an answer at parliamentary questions, Mr Hutton said: “We must all want and hope that the current wave of industrial action at Royal Mail ends and ends quickly. It is not in the interests of the company. It is certainly not in the interests of the business for this industrial action to continue.”