Poste Italiane: Minister Gentiloni establishes new minimum working standards of post offices in summer
The Minister for Communications, Paolo Gentiloni, showed the ministerial decree endorsed by him, establishing new minimum working criteria post offices will be obliged to respect in summer.
This decree states criteria avoiding to Poste Italiane to work short time or, even, not to work at all because of the total closure of its post offices. For this current summer they will recourse to provisional criteria.
Poste Italiane ever made recourse to daily or hourly reductions in working timetable either to cope with rotating shifts due to staff holidays or for a reduction in daily work at post offices desks. This produced great worry in people of those municipalities concerned in closure, mayors and prefects of the involved area. So much so that, last summer many mayors of little municipalities ( sometimes with a little post office ), while expressing the disconfort due to these reductions, demanded, as everybody’s concern, more guarantees concerning the execution of tasks.
In consideration of this, the Ministry of Communications, in joined agreement with Poste Italiane, issued a 2007 plan to better guarantee users in defining minimum working standards to vouch for the service mostly in municipalities with 5000 people or less or, at any case, to avoid every modification in timetable under 18 hours a week.
The ministerial decree introduces the summer Opening Plan to be transmitted to the Ministry of Communications within 30 April of every year for the timespan 15 June – 15 September. If the Plan, submitted to the Ministry of Communications exam, is deemed compatible with standards defined in art. 12, it will be forwarded to both CNCU (National Council of Consumers and Users) and ANCI (National Association Italian Municipalities) in order to receive relevant, non binding opinions.
Minimum working criteria foresee:
• it is not possible to work short time neither daily nor hourly in municipalities with 5000 residents or less having an only post office;
• Daily or hourly reductions are possible in case of the presence of a post office being at least 10 Km away and whose timetable is regular and connected with means of transport;
• Daily or hourly reductions can’t foresee working hours being less than 3 days and 18 hours a week;
• Tourist municipalities can, on the contrary, foresee, in mutual understanding with mayors, longer timetables.
Besides, the Ministry will care about a monitoring activity concerning the respect of the Plan, if necessary by means of repeating controls, whereas Poste Italiane is obliged to submit, within 15 October, a report on the outcomes achieved.
As for summer, the Ministry and Poste italiane agreed on a transitional plan already foreseeing minimum criteria, such as:
• Single post offices can employ a modification in timetable not lower than 3 days a week and 18 hours a week.
• Mayors of tourist municipalities can foresee, in mutual understanding with Poste Italiane, longer timetables.
• Citizens of municipalities interested in timetable changes must receive a prompt and total information of these modifications.
