Finnish postal group Itella will begin statutory labour negotiations next week with the aim ofreducing 390 jobs in mail and parcel operations in response to a drop in volumes.
The negotiations will affect both administrative and production functions in Finland, thecompany announced. All in all, the negotiations will concern around 2,200 people. According to aninitial estimate, approximately 390 permanent employees will be made redundant. The company alreadymade some 70 administrative staff redundant earlier this year. The total number of redundancieswill represent about 2% of its 23,500 staff in Finland.
But the Finnish Post and Logistics Union (Pau) said it was “enraged” by the plans and wouldconsider delivery stoppages next week in protest, the Helsinki Times reported.
The majority of the redundancy need applies to the Helsinki Metropolitan area, but otherlocalities will also be affected, Itella said. Manual mail sorting in Rovaniemi and Kajaani will betransferred to the Oulu Post Center for automatic processing and the customer service centreoperations in Savonlinna will be discontinued due to a reorganisation. In the Lahti region, thestatutory labour negotiations will concern Itella Logistics. The majority of Itella jobs in theselocalities will remain after the negotiations.
Itella already announced in March that it is planning an undisclosed number of lay-offs atits largest parcel sorting centre at Vantaa, north of Helsinki. The redundancies will concernemployees working in sorting and terminal operations at the logistics centre, which has around 460employees and handles some 22 million parcels a year.
Itella said that by cutting costs and enhancing operations, it is preparing itself for theongoing structural change in the postal industry. Furthermore, the global economic downturn has hada considerable impact on demand. During the first part of the year, logistics and post volumes havesubstantially decreased in comparison to last year.
Also in the long run, Itella faces significant challenges to be able to maintain the nationalservice as it is. In the next few years, the entire European postal industry will face a majorstructural change as postal industry competition will be promoted through a directive reform. Inaddition to communication going electronic, there will also be legislative changes, both of whichwill affect labour needs. With the ongoing mail sorting network development and long-terminvestment program, Itella will create the preconditions for long-term operating opportunities.
“It can be seen in Itella’s operations that customers such as newspaper and magazinepublishers and mail order companies are facing difficult challenges. Our only alternative is toadjust our operations to correspond to customer demand and needs at the moment as well as in thelong term. Postal services are funded entirely with income received from customers; Finland uses notax money to finance postal services,” said Jukka Alho, President and CEO.
“For the personnel, the statutory labour negotiations are an extremely unfortunate matter.Although we have already been preparing for the necessary changes, this will not alleviate thedisappointment of the personnel when regrettable decisions are made that concern them personally.We aim to use all opportunities to cushion the impact of the changes. In our experience, both theage structure of the personnel and relocation opportunities to other assignments inside the companyhave always brought some relief to the situation,” Alho pointed out.
