Poland - Strike Paralyses Polish Post Offices

Classified Polnews

Warsaw, Poland - 5 June, 2008 A strike by the Polish Solidarity trade union and several minor organizations ground Poland’s state-owned postal service to a virtual halt in large sections of the country this week, despite the fact that the union can claim no more than a tenth of its employees as members. Led by a major sorting hub in Lódz, striking Polish workers have managed to slow the flow of mail to a trickle.

“The situation isn’t good, especially since sorting centres in Warsaw, Bydgoszcz and Gdansk also came to a standstill,” a Lódz-area spokesman for Poczta Polska told the daily Dziennik Lódzki. “Not all the workers in the sorting department are striking, but a few people is not enough to keep the work going.”

Most post offices remained open, but staff were powerless given the problems elsewhere in the system.

The strike comes at a time when pensioners are receiving monthly payouts, many of them in cash by mail carriers. Incidents of elderly people trying to get into closed post offices by force were reported throughout the country.

“I’m very worried that I won’t get my pension,” Wroclaw resident Helena Urycz told local daily Gazeta Wroclawska. “What will we live on if the mailman doesn’t bring us our money?”

The unions want a raise of PLN 537 per month. At the end of May 32 other unions accepted Poczta Polska’s more modest offer of PLN 305, making it unlikely that the company would negotiate further.

This article copyright by the New Warsaw Express. You are invited to read more at New Warsaw Express

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