rosiet2008:

Doubble M:

No, they could keep the same amount of people but you would not need tens of people watching machines sorting letters.  However the people who used to sort letters will not nessacerilly get sacked, they can be the people who deliver the letters.

And what happens to the people who already deliver the letters?  We just have more people delivering them?  May help I suppose if it means going back to more than one delivery a day but if the mail is modernised and work takes less time to do I can't imagine Royal Mail holding on to the same number of workers.  It's their golden opportunity to save money as well as modernise - why would they want to hold on to surplus staff.

The people who already deliver letters would probably still keep their jobs.  As there would be more efficient machines the services would be improved and more reliable so there would potentially be more customers.  A lot of people and companies use couriers because they are reliable, some people think of royal mail as a poor service which can not guarantee postage time, 2nd class and 1st class are not guaranteed, they say that 2nd class usually arrives in 3+ working days for 2nd class and 1 to 2 working days for 1st class but are not considered lost until 2 weeks after they have been posted where as with couriers it is considered lost if it has not arived by the time they say and if it doesn't arive on time they refund you.

If workers are sacked they will always get jobs at other postal companies.  The Royal Mail Group make a loss from post offices so if they want to keep post offices they will need to make more money in other parts of their business.  If sacking workers which would not be doing anything then that might be useful but just because they are modernising doesn't mean that all of them would be sacked as people need to load and unload the machines too.  Although the jobs will not be the same as now they will still be in the same place.

Currently when post is put on to a conveayor belt and it is put through a machine which sorts out letters, large letters and packets.  The post codes on letters are read using optical character recognition and they are sorted and weighed by hand on trains or in the sorting office.  The machines like what they have in other countries would be able to all of these jobs so although there may be less sorting jobs those in the sorting office can be put on to deliveries to help the current post men and women some of which complain that they have too much to deliver