Finland set to send home 860 postal workers

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The Finnish postal and logistic service provider Posti Group announced on Tuesday that it will launce cooperation negotiations, in which up to 860 employees will be laid off.

The negotiations will start at the beginning of February. The sphere of negotiations will affect a total of some 7,600 Posti’s permanent employees.

Posti attributed the massive redundancies to rapid digitalization in recent years. Communication is increasingly taking place via the Internet, while the delivery volumes of printed mail are constantly falling, said the group in a press release.

In 2015, the number of delivered letters and other addressed shipments decreased by 102 million. The sharp fall in delivery volumes reduced Posti’s profit by some 75 million euros(81.43 million U.S. dollars).

Digitalization has already reduced overall delivery volumes to the level of the 1960s, said Heikki Malinen, Posti’s CEO.

The new collective agreement obtained for the postal industry was a step in the right direction for reforming Posti’s operations, said Malinen.

Founded in 1638, Posti Group is a state-owned company of Finland operating in more than 11 countries across Europe. In 2014, the group slashed about 1,100 jobs. In June 2015, it announced to close nearly 80 percent of post offices across the country and to cut over 300 jobs. Currently, Posti employs about 21,000 postal workers.

Last November, postal workers in Finland staged a nationwide strike to protest against the plans to make collective agreements more flexible and to hire more non-union temporary workers. The company’s operations were disrupted for about two weeks.