Mail centre fight flares

WORKERS at the Australia Post Dandenong Letters Centre are locked in battle with management to remove new workplace conditions they fear could lead to repetitive strain injury and job boredom.
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) this week told Star workers at the centre were up in arms over new rules that reduced the number of times staff can rotate between machinery during an eight-hour shift.
The centre sorts more than 6.5 million of the state’s letters and parcels each day.
While Australia Post says a large component of the centre is sophisticated sorting machinery, more than 1000 workers are still required to supervise and operate some machinery and to manually sort some items.
Union secretary Joan Doyle said workers at the centre used to rotate between machines about four times each shift.
She said this relieved staff of repetitive movement and added variety to their jobs.
But under new conditions, Ms Doyle said workers faced spending almost an entire shift on one piece of machinery, with only some manual letter sorting at the end.
Ms Doyle said most employees worked overnight to sort mail collected during the day.
She said the union had conducted a survey during May and June, canvassing the thoughts of 371 workers.
Ms Doyle said that 248 respondents complained of current injury or pain, highlighting the case against the new work conditions.
She said the results showed that only five per cent said they would not mind the new conditions.
Ms Doyle said the union was concerned that workers would suffer repetitive strain injury as a result of the new working conditions.
“Management is clearly taking the wrong approach,” she said.
“People will become bored if they are working on the same thing.
“But the main point is that with rotation you use different muscles on different machines.
“Otherwise, people are standing up all night (on night shift) doing the same thing repetitively on reinforced concrete.”
Australia Post did not respond to Star’s questions on the reason behind the changes or whether repetitive strain injury was a concern.
But it did say in a statement that it had no intention of reversing the changes.
“There are no plans to vary the arrangements, which have been implemented at DLC after extensive consultation with staff,” the statement said.
In the same statement Australia Post said it had an excellent safety record, “with systems in place to monitor and continuously improve the health and safety of our employees”.
It also questioned the objectivity, methodology and reliability of the union survey.
Ms Doyle said the union had been to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission this month but was refused a hearing because of concurrent negotiations for an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement.
She said the union would now call in Commcare, the WorkSafe equivalent for Commonwealth workplaces to assess the safety of workers at the letter centre under the new working conditions.