Tag: France

Edouard Dayan of France’s La Poste, elected this week as director-general of the Universal Postal Union, will take over the venerable United Nations agency at a challenging time for the world postal industry.

In rich nations, “snail mail” has lost ground to email and the web, and national posts face stiff competition from private operators in the parcels sector, where they now have only a quarter of the domestic market.

Instead, posts have responded to privatisation, deregulation and the explosion in communications technologies by turning themselves into high-tech commercial enterprises offering a range of mail, logistics, financial and other services, often internet-based.

This has meant painful cost-cutting for many. More than 1m postal jobs have been lost in the past decade. Thousands of post offices, mostly in rural areas, have been shut.

Nearly one in 10 postal workers in France went on strike Tuesday to protest against reorganisation plans they fear will lead to nearly half of the country’s 14,000 post offices being closed and massive lay-offs. “Around seven to nine percent of personnel” observed a nationwide stoppage called by three of the state-owned organisation’s main unions, management at La Poste said in a statement. It added that it had taken steps to ensure mail and courier deliveries would not be halted. “Disturbances will therefore be very limited for all clients, both companies and individuals,” it said. La Poste is planning on reducing the number of post offices dotted around France in an effort to streamline operations and put it on a competitive footing compared to counterparts in other European countries, but it has been coy on details.