Year: 2003

Royal Mail has snapped up a 17% share in Moving Technologies, a supplier of address change technology. As part of the deal Royal Mail has signed up to launch a new online change of address service. Over 800 companies are signed up to the service, including the main utility providers, banks and supermarkets, a number expected to grow to over 2,000. It is estimated that over 11m home-movers could benefit from using the service each year.

Threats to Christmas mail deliveries across the country as the postal workers’ dispute worsened.

The Communication Workers Union is to consider ordering a new ballot over job losses and changes to working practices. That would cause massive disruption in the runup to the festive season.

A wave of industrial action was being launched today with tens of thousands of postal and council workers staging strikes in disputes over pay which will hit mail deliveries and disrupt schools and refuse collection.

The industrial action in London will be followed by a building workers’ stoppage in Liverpool on Friday and could herald the start of a winter of unrest.

Leaders of the Association of University Teachers were meeting today to consider national industrial action over pay and BT workers were staging a separate protest over allowances.

The strikes were expected to involve 60,000 local government employees and up to 30,000 Royal Mail workers in the capital as part of campaigns for increases in London weighting allowances.

Postal workers’ leaders warned that industrial action over pay could threaten the Christmas mail could and spread across the country as thousands of postmen and women staged their latest walkout.

Members of the Communication Workers Union in London marched through the capital and called on the Government to intervene in a bitter row over allowances.

Deputy General Secretary Dave Ward warned that postal workers in other parts of the UK could be balloted in the next few weeks in a separate dispute over jobs and working practices.