QCOSTARICA – Long hours and excess of daily deliveries of packages from China are among the top complaints of a group of 32 mail carriers who protested outside the Legislature Friday morning.
The National Association of Public and Private Employees – Asociación Nacional de Empleados Públicos y Privados (ANEP) – reported the letter carriers and eight administrative support staff working at the Zapote, San Jose mail centre, were one a work protest for several hours.
The Zapote centre is where all packages are received, processed and sorted for delivery to homes, businesses and mailboxes.
The Correos de Costa Rica (Post Office), made a point to let the media and customers know that the protest did not affect deliveries on Friday, service resuming to normality by 9:30am after a last-minute meeting with the workers by Correo’s general manager, Mauricio Rojas.
The ANEP says its members are complaining that each has to deliver and average of 2,000 packages a day, from 6:30am to 7:00pm, Monday through Friday and from 7:00am to 4:00pm on Saturdays.
But, according to Correos, each carrier does not delivery daily more than 300 packages. Meanwhile, Claudio Sanchez, ANEP’s point man in the carrier’s claim, said the work accumulates every day, because of a lack of personnel causing a delay in the delivery of all the packages promptly.
The increase is due to the transformation of Correos from a simple delivery of mail to an e-commerce business, Boxcorreos.com, where customers can make purchases online. Correos says the majority of the purhcases are from China on websites like Wish and Aliexpress, as well as Amazon and other online retailers, and delivered to Costa Rica.
According to Correos, the number of package arrivals grew 826% from January to June this year, compared to the first half of 2015.
Source: La Nacion, Correso de Costa Rica
