550 jobs delivered for festive season

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http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/ne ... ticle.html

ROYAL Mail has created 550 temporary jobs to deal with badly-written Christmas cards – offering a short term boost to the struggling employment market.

The roles for so called "address detectives" are at Etruria, as the company prepares to handle more than 300 million poorly addressed cards during the festive period.

New recruits will be on hand to help the 120-strong team in Media Way, Etruria, to decipher the addresses of items that cannot be read by machines.

Community leaders say the positions offer short-term respite after hundreds of workers have been laid off in the city, including at pottery firms Wedgwood, Spode and Churchill China.

Roy Allen, general manager of the address detectives, said: "Letters and cards that have clearly written addresses and a postcode can be read by our machines, and handled 20 times faster than by hand.

"Photographs of items that do not go through our sorting machinery, either because they do not have a postcode, or are poorly addressed, are called up on computer screens by our address detectives, who use their skills to decipher the intended location and code the envelope so that it can still be sorted automatically rather than by hand."

He added: "Mail volumes almost double on peak days in December, and it is important that people properly address their Christmas cards and use the postcode."

Royal Mail has already recruited the extra workers ahead of the festive period.

It expects to deliver more than two billion items over the Christmas period nationally, but estimates that more than 300 million cards and letters will not be able to be read by its automated sorting machinery. The firm aims to deliver every letter.

Meanwhile, people are being urged to post Christmas cards before December 18 if they are sending them second class, or December 20 for first class mail.

Stoke and Trent Vale councillor Paul Billington, who has seen jobs axed at historic pottery Spode in his ward, said the jobs provide welcome respite from economic gloom.

He said: "I hope that some of them get the chance to prove themselves to Royal Mail and perhaps get a long-term position there.

"There are plenty of people out there who haven't got a job at the moment, perhaps because they have been made redundant."