The week that was: 27 April 2012
Rounding up the biggest stories as reported by Post&Parcel in the last seven days, including the passing of a major reform bill in the US and the latest results from UPS…
US Senate passes postal reform bill
The US Senate passed a major postal reform bill designed to rescue the US Postal Service from its current financial crisis. The bill now awaits a compromise deal with the House of Representatives.
The 21st Century Postal Service Act (S.1789) includes measures to reform USPS pension and healthcare financing arrangements, allow the Postal Service to reduce its workforce by around 100,000 jobs, and change to a five-day delivery week after a two-year delay.
But, provisions added that delay the closure of “unnecessary” postal facilities were denounced by the USPS Board of Governors as “totally inappropriate” given the excess capacity in the mail processing network.
UPS continues to be affected by e-commerce growth
UPS is continuing to be significantly affected by the global growth in e-commerce trade, top executives said this week, as the company released its results for the first quarter of the year.
The Atlanta-based shipping giant saw a 4.3% increase in its package volumes quarter-on-quarter, delivering about a billion items in the three months up to 31 March, 2012.
Domestic e-commerce growth in the United States was a particular positive within UPS results that saw slower growth in international business than Wall Street was expecting, particularly in Asia.
Spain’s Correos set to cut 2,000 jobs this year
The new president of Spain’s loss-making postal service Correos, Javier Cuesta Nuin, has said his company is planning to cut 1,900 to 2,000 jobs this year, after cutting twice that number last year.
Appearing before Spanish lawmakers in the Budget Committee, Cuesta said the cuts were necessary for the survival of the company in a “very difficult economic environment”.
With declining demand for mail services in a market that has been fully open to competition since January 2011, Cuesta said efforts to increase revenues in recent years had not been enough to stem the company’s losses.
CWU to restart “Keep the Post Public” campaign
Britain’s biggest communications industry union voted to re-launch its crusade against the government’s plans to privatise Royal Mail.
The Communication Workers Union, which represents some 207,500 members in the UK postal and telecoms industries, gathered for its annual conference in Bournemouth, expressing unanimous backing for the restart of the “Keep the Post Public” campaign.
Expectations are that Royal Mail could be partially or fully privatised in late 2013, but the CWU said there was no “moral or economic case” for the sale.
