Claims registered ahead of post talks

Royal Mail loses £750,000 a day

The UK's main postal union has set out a claim for an 8% pay rise ahead of a conciliation meeting with Royal Mail management on Monday, reports say.

According to the Observer newspaper, Communications Workers Union (CWU) negotiators will ask for the pay rise to be "no strings" - in other words, without it being dependent on productivity gains or job losses.

The Royal Mail has offered 3% this October and another 1.5% in April - but is offering what extra payments it says will take the total to 14.5% if the union agrees to a single mail delivery a day, new processing targets for regional centres and agreed redundancies.

The talks at the conciliation service Acas are aimed at averting a strike ballot planned to take place later this month.

But at present it seems the two sides remain far apart.

The CWU has some 160,000 members, but some estimates say that the Royal Mail's current plans would lead to as many as 30,000 job losses.

That, the CWU says, is unsustainable - and it claimed last week that the 14.5% offer was not a genuine, containing "more strings than a philharmonic orchestra".

'Watershed'

Royal Mail's management, meanwhile, says it is being strangled by the regulator, Postcomm, which it believes is introducing mail market competition faster than it ought to.

That makes hard-to-stomach cutbacks a necessity, the Royal Mail says.

Allan Leighton, the Royal Mail's chief executive, said the company could head back into profit this year - but a strike would blow that out of the water.

"We are at a real watershed," he told the Sunday Telegraph.

"We will probably make £100m this year compared with a loss of £1.2bn two years ago.

"But we are in a position where we could really surge forward or fall back to where we were. We could lose momentum."