Bulgarian postal workers ready to go on strike over lack of reform

Employees of state-owned postal operator Bulgarian Posts were ready to go on strike over a lack of reforms and restructuring in the company, leaders of postal workers’ trade unions said on October 24, as quoted by Dnevnik daily.

The trade unionists’ reaction was in reply to the absence of Bulgarian Post’s executive director Entsislav Harmandjiev from a round table discussion on the restructuring in the sector. The principal owner of the company, the Transport Ministry, was not represented at the forum, either.

The syndicates said postal workers had been preparing for months to go on strike because of the government’s lack of vision for the future of the operator. Bulgarian Posts were not present at the discussion because they had nothing to say to their employees, trade union leaders said. They had asked Harmandjiev many times to present them a strategy for the company’s development but he always offered them just rearranged versions of strategies drafted by previous managements. The current management obviously had no strategic vision for the development of the company and that was demotivating the employees and reason for many of them to resign.

All conditions existed for the liberalisation of the postal services market in Bulgaria after January 2009, said Oleg Zlatarksi from the State Agency on Information Technologies and Communications, which defined the state policy in the sector.

The services, which are currently reserved only for Bulgarian posts would be liberalised after the end of 2008, and in all the other services there were private operators on the market already, he said.