TWENTY-SEVEN Crown Post Offices in Scotland are to be closed and sold
off within the next financial year, according to a senior source within
PO Counters, the Communications Workers Union said yesterday.
The leak comes as PO Counters employees in Glasgow and district
prepare to stage their second 24-hour strike on Monday week in protest
at the closure and sell-off programme which has seen 130 Crown offices
close in Scotland since 1988.
The CWU predicts that at the current rate of closures Scotland will
have no Crown Post Offices at all by the end of 1997. However, PO
Counters last night sought to dismiss the claims as ''scare-mongering
nonsense'' that would only cause alarm to staff and customers alike.
Scottish general manager Wendy Goldstraw declared: ''We are totally
committed to preserving the network of 2135 Post Offices in Scotland''
although, she added, this might mean changing the status of some wholly
owned POs and providing locations more in tune with shopping preferences
through partnership with retailers.
The union, created last month from the merger of the Union of
Communications Workers and the National Communications Union,
immediately seized upon the fact that Mrs Goldstraw never once mentioned
Crown POs in her statement. It claimed that it was verification that the
leak, from a previously reliable source, was accurate.
Mr Liam Murphy, CWU counters secretary for Scotland and Northern
Ireland, stressed that the union had never accused the PO of seeking to
dismantle the network, but of privatising Crown Offices by the back
door.
The union says it already has identified 10 of the offices to be
closed and is demanding that PO Counters ''come clean'' by publishing
its secret hit-list.
Those identified as being earmarked for closure are Glasgow George
Square, Saltcoats, Wishaw, Bellshill, Aberdeen Torry, Edinburgh Wester
Hailes, Possilpark, Greenock Cathcart Street, Greenock Nicholson Street,
and Wick.
Mr Murphy descibed the closure of dedicated, publicly owned Crown Post
Offices as a national disgrace and said that PO managers should have the
decency to reveal their plans to the public rather than doing deals to
sell off post offices behind closed doors.
''Despite the victory over PO privatisation last year, the industry is
being privatised by stealth as our post offices are being taken over by
supermarkets and other retail chains,'' he said, adding that the whole
closure programme was shoddy, sordid, and dishonest.
Mrs Goldstraw replied that management had been totally frank about
what it was doing and why it was being done. She added that some 95% of
all post offices were now run on an agency basis in partnership with PO
Counters. The threatened industrial action in Glasgow and Strathclyde
would gain nothing and would only inconvenience customers.
The almost total lack of communication between management and union
was demonstrated by conflicting accounts of last December's 24-hour
stoppage.
Mrs Goldstraw claimed it was a flop, with only 20 POs out of 700 not
opening, and Mr Murphy was adamant that some 36 of the targeted Crown
Offices were closed with only nine kept open by managers shipped in from
as far as Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Edinburgh and even Northern
Ireland.
The union and the Post Office did agree, however, that the
introduction of new technology was resulting in almost all first class
and much of the second class post being handled in first deliveries in a
growing number of areas.
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