The worker’s unions for the Spanish postal service warn that there are 70,000 items still to be delivered, just in city of Granada alone.

The authorities say that the real figure is half that and amounts to just one day’s delay.

Christmas deliveries always put a strain on any postal service and we all know that if you want your Christmas cards to arrive in time, you have to send them off early, yet…

December in Spain is plagued by public holidays and each one is a day that mail is not delivered, so if the 896 postal workers in the province didn’t have a hard enough tasks, these ‘fiestas’ make it worse.

Of the 70,000 letters in the backlog around mid month, you can add 6,000 registered deliveries and 1,500 packages – remember that we’re talking about the capital and not the whole of the province. So, let’s talk about other towns in Granada.

Motril had a 3,000 letter backlog, plus nearly a thousand registered delivers (scary letters from Hacienda and Seguridad Social, for example).

It should be worth remembering, mind, that these figures come from the unions, issued days before sitting down with the Government (Correos y Telégrafos) to beat out a ‘convenio’ or labour-terms agreement, so the scarier the better.

Also to be taken into account was the postal strike on the 27th of November, which had a strong turn out and resulted in the Almuñécar office, for example, closing for day through lack of staff.

What’s behind it all are the cuts to postal staff – since 2011 the number of postal workers in Granada province has dropped from 1,196 to 896, which is logical owing to the drop in snail-mail users.

(News: Granada, Andalucia)