The Royal Mail Christmas preparations for peak seasonal volumes continue this week with the opening of six dedicated sort offices to cope with the surge of parcels and cards in the run-up to Christmas. They will open over the next few weeks.
The centres will be staffed by temporary Christmas workers around the country incluing a super parcel sort centre at Atherstone in the West Midlands.
The parcel sort centres are again being set up to sort a significant proportion of the seasonal parcels Royal Mail handles, before they are delivered to the door by Royal Mail’s postmen and women. Last year, Royal Mail handled around 130 million parcels during the Christmas rush.
Around 3,300 Royal Mail Christmas workers will be based in the parcel sort centres. They will support Royal Mail’s 120,000 permanent postmen and women, who sort and deliver the mail all year round, including Christmas which is the busiest time of the year for the UK postal service. Royal Mail Group is taking on 20,000 seasonal workers in total this year across its operations.
The parcel sort centres are in Atherstone near Tamworth, Bathgate in West Lothian, Bristol; Greenford in West London; Normanton in West Yorkshire and Warrington.
The opening of these new centres comes against the background of an ongoing dispute between Royal Mail and the post workers’ union the CWU. The dispute centre around working parcatices Andy pension provision. Despite a ballot overwhelminngingly in favour of action, from a majority of the union membership, Royal Mail successfully challenged the strike which was to go ahead on 19th October.
The parties are now going through a process of arbitration and negotiation that makes it highly unlikely that there will be postal strikes this since of the New Year.
