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Late February PostNL announced a restructuring plans to run through 2017, which includes thousands of lay offs of Dutch postal workers, a move the union ABVAKABO has vowed to shed more light on.



PostNL decided in their restructuring plan to continue the reorganization of the Dutch postal operator but not as dramatically as planned initially. This includes the reduction from current 260 sorting centers to 125, instead of the initially-planned 9 sorting centers. This also includes the reduction of fulltime post employees from 3.500 to around 2.000, instead of stopping full-time employment entirely. This is a clear sign that the company partly understood that only with a good network of facilities and well trained people, quality service can be provided. The destruction of quality employment would be also the ruin of the postal industry.



Nevertheless management understood the connection between quality services and quality jobs only partly. They announced to continue reducing the work force dramatically by 1650 to 2250 jobs, mainly in the centralized and the centralized overhead staff plus the commercial department. “Although the radical and gigantic cuts in the overhead staff, the Dutch public opinion is only focused on mailmen. ABVAKABO FNV is trying to influence the debate to put more attention on the gigantic cuts in overhead staff”, explains Susan Eijgermans, union officer of ABVAKABO FNV.



ABVAKABO FNV is affiliated to UNI Europa Post & Logistics. “We will support our Dutch colleagues with all necessary means in their fight against the dramatic lay offs and to protect the postal workers in the Netherlands”, says Cornelia Broos, policy officer in UNI Europa, “more than 2200 workers will lose their job. This short sighted destruction of quality employment is unacceptable. We can’t accept that managers continue to follow neo-liberal strategies even though this has failed already so many times in Europe and worldwide.”