German postal workers reject part-time contracts

German postal service provider Deutsche Post has met with resistance from the union Ver.di over plans to introduce part-time only work in its letter delivery division. Deutsche Post, which currently employs more than 65,000 post men and women, says part-time contracts are the only way to reduce costs and make Deutsche Post more competitive before the group loses its current letter delivery monopoly in Germany in 2007. Europe’s largest postal group is contractually bound to guarantee jobs until 31 March 2008, putting redundancies out of the question as a cost-cutting measure.

Ver.di says plans to employ new workers on a part-time only basis will lead to a drop in quality. Furthermore, as Deutsche Post has such a high turnover of staff, between 6,000 to 7,000 staff changes each year, it could take only a decade before full-time employees were phased out altogether. Already, 1,100 trainee postal workers have been offered contracts for 30 hour instead of 38 hour working weeks. Ver.di says that recent trials of part-time contracts in Berlin and Brandenburg were not successful, as workers had to be called in from elsewhere and even then they often had to work longer than 10 hours a day.