Employees at Posti's sorting centre in Helsinki on 7 December, 2016.
Satu Taavitsainen (SDP), a member of the Supervisory Board of Posti, says she is appalled by the current disarray of mail delivery services in Finland.
She states in a press release that it is incomprehensible how Prime Minister Juha Sipilä (Centre), who is also responsible for corporate governance, and Minister of Transport and Communications Anne Berner (Centre) are standing idly by as mail delivery services continue to be disrupted by unsustainable problems.
The Government must take immediate action to address the problems and guarantee the availability of mail delivery services across the country, she urges.
“On Saturday, I once again received feedback from citizens at my reception about delayed and missing mail deliveries. I have brought up the issue several times in the meetings of the Supervisory Board, but Sipilä, Berner and the management of Posti are seemingly uninterested in mail deliveries and have forgotten that they are a basic public service,” says Taavitsainen.
“They are faced with a national catastrophe, and yet they have not lifted a finger. it would be easy to fix the problems, if you had the desire to do the right thing.”
Taavitsainen also expressed her concerns about the well-being of postal employees, demanding that the state-owned postal and logistics service provider recruit more full-time employees and re-consider its questionable policies on overtime and hired labour.
“State-owned companies have to serve the public. I want Posti to handle its basic responsibilities well, respect its employees, and treat mail senders, mail recipients and magazine subscribers with dignity,” she writes.
Posti has recently come under heavy criticism for its recurring failures to make mail and newspaper deliveries on schedule. Last week, the state-owned service provider was accused of temporarily losing the entire print run of Demokraatti, the official publication of the Social Democratic Party, which was delivered to its roughly 11,000 subscribers one day behind schedule.
The delivery problems have occurred primarily in regions that are more susceptible to disruptions because of their high delivery volumes, Juhani Vuola, the director of delivery services at Posti, admitted to Uusi Suomi on Friday.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT Photo: Aleksi Tuomola – Lehtikuva Source: Uusi Suomi