Union mulls post strike decision

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The Communication Workers Union (CWU) will only decide whether to press ahead with a fresh wave of postal strikes, hours before action is due to start.

The CWU has resumed talks with Royal Mail as they try to reach an agreement on working conditions and pay.

CWU negotiators will then brief the union's executives on progress made this afternoon.

If no deal is reached, up to 120,000 CWU members will stage three 24-hour strikes from Thursday.

The two sides have been locked in the latest round of talks since Monday, after agreeing to meet at the headquarters of the TUC in London.

The TUC helped to resolve a dispute between the CWU and the Royal Mail in 2007.

They left the meeting at midnight last night after agreeing to more talks on Wednesday.

Union leaders and Royal Mail chief executive Adam Crozier have both been briefed on details of the talks so far by their representatives at the meeting.

Backlog

Royal Mail expects its backlog to have fallen from 30 million to five million items since last week's strikes.

The company said employees returned to work on Saturday to start clearing the piles of letters and parcels delayed by two 24-hour walkouts last Thursday and Friday.

The CWU had claimed the backlog was in excess of 100 million items on Saturday.

If this week's strikes go ahead, they are due to involve:

<ul class="bulletList" ><li>Thursday - 43,700 staff in mail centres, delivery units in mail centres, network logistic drivers and garage staff walking out from 0400 GMT </li><li>Friday - 400 workers at three sites in Plymouth, Stockport and Stoke, who assist mail centres by reading and entering mail addresses </li><li>Saturday - 77,000 delivery and collection staff across the UK. </li></ul>

CWU deputy general secretary Dave Ward said the dispute was "fundamentally" about jobs but the issue of the Royal Mail's £10bn pension deficit also needed to be resolved urgently.

He said: "There's no prospect of us building a successful future for the Royal Mail and for the workforce unless the government actually deal with that issue."

Legal advice

On Tuesday, the CWU said it planned to go to the High Court to stop Royal Mail using agency staff to clear the post backlog caused by the strikes.

Royal Mail had planned to hire 30,000 temporary workers to deal with the backlog of post and the Christmas rush, which it insists complies with the law.

The CWU hopes to show that the company is breaking employment law.

"We are taking legal advice and are assessing the evidence," a CWU spokeswoman said.

The law states that firms cannot recruit workers to do the job of employees called out on a legitimate strike.

Royal Mail says its recruitment is "fully in line with all employment law".

"The recruitment is not to bring people in to do our postmen's work when they are out on strike," the company said in a statement last week.

It insists its action is designed "to make sure that we have people to help clear any backlogs between strikes as well as to help ­- as happens every year ­- with the seasonal build up of mail in the run up to Christmas".

Royal Mail told the BBC it had nothing further to add to last week's statement on the issue.