Royal Mail: More strikes announced in run-up to Christmas

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Royal Mail has requested its postal staff to bring their family members to work to provide a helping hand in order to break the strike action and “save Christmas”, a news report has claimed. Around 100,000 workers from the Royal Mail have gone on strike demanding better pay.

On Thursday, the postal service organisation asked their staff to “bring friends and family to support the operation and deliver Christmas”.

Bosses described the scheme as “a really great initiative” and “really quick”.

To help deliver the country’s Christmas postage since the Second World War, Royal Mail has recruited an army of seasonal workers, but the strike has left firms crippled in the busy festive season, with missing and late packages causing chaos for shoppers and businesses.

Royal Mail said in a statement: “Royal Mail has well-developed contingency plans, but we cannot fully replace the daily efforts of our frontline workforce.

“We’ll be doing what we can to keep services running, but we are sorry this planned strike action is likely to cause you some disruption.”

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) described the family and friends scheme as “next level desperation from Royal Mail”, saying that “the support for the strike is so strong that they are asking managers to bring in friends and family to clear the backlog.”

A CWU spokesperson added: “Royal Mail are risking serious security risks by bringing in completely untrained randomers with no experience to plough through your Christmas post.

“There is a better day of dealing with this backlog: stop the destruction of your workers’ livelihoods, guarantee you’ll treat them with the respect they deserve, and let them get back on with grafting over Christmas.”

Royal Mail said that friends and family are paid the same rates as agency staff, and that checks are carried out to ensure all staff can work safely and legally.

A spokesperson clarified that staff hired in the run-up to Christmas are also given the necessary training.

Meanwhile, the delivery service apologised after businesses branded its Christmas marketing campaign “patronising” and “awful”, using the taglines “parcel collection you can count on” and “xtra support for xmas”.

A Royal Mail spokesperson said that the festive promotion was “in no way intended to detract from how seriously we are taking the situation” after receiving a flurry of complaints.

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They added: “The CWU’s planned strike action is holding Christmas to ransom for our customers, businesses and families across the country, and is putting their own members’ jobs at risk.

“The CWU has engineered these strikes to take place at a time where it causes maximum disruption for our customers – by refusing to talk about change for months and stalling over ACAS for a month.

“We are doing everything we can to deliver Christmas for our customers. We have renewed our calls for additional support from friends and family, something that we do every year.”

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