“The delay is part of the equation”

For several weeks, the residents of Sainte-Croix de Mont, in Gironde, have been experiencing significant delays in mail delivery, sometimes lasting several months. A problem that extends to the entire Aquitaine region, where thousands of letters accumulate in sorting centers due to lack of sufficient staff.

Every day, when he opens his mailbox, Cyril Cigana is imbued with the same disillusionment. For several weeks, in his town of Sainte-Croix-du-Mont, in Gironde, the deputy mayor has noted problems with the delivery of his mail. “December 20, 2024, today is January 21, 2025, so one month and one day late, plague the latter, an envelope in his hands. Sometimes it lasts up to two months, I received one the last week of October.”

Here, in this town of just over 800 inhabitants, the problem is recurring. “The residents are starting to complain, indicates Mayor Michel Latapy. The postman comes in principle every day, except when there is a problem of non-replacement since sometimes we have empty mailboxes.”

“Many users wait weeks to receive a simple letter in Gironde or more generally in Aquitaine,” confirms the CGT-SUD inter-union association. On the Cestas industrial platform, letters from the five Aquitaine departments are piling up, with delays of a month and a half for certain letters. “At least 500,000 letters which have not yet even gone to the offices concerned are stagnating due to lack of human resources and time to process them,” alerts the union in a press release.

These delays are explained by the closures of several sorting centers, the most recent of which concerns that of Poitiers. “The user suffers twice the mail delay, that which there is at the level of industrial sorting platforms, and the structural delay that there is at the level of sorting distribution, because there is no enough letter carriers to do the job”, indicates union representative Willy Dhellemmes.

There are lots of rounds that are left every day in the offices because they cannot be distributed.

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Willy Dhellemmes

SUD La Poste Representative

Under these conditions, management would then prioritize distribution of advertising mail, “that is to say, if at a given moment the postman does not have time to do all the distribution, we ask you to prioritize advertising and leave the mail, which we denounce”, explains Willy Dhellemmes. “For a postman, it's crazy to distribute advertising as a priority over medical letters and invoices, it's an aberration.”

“Ten years ago, leaving a letter in a mail center sorting locker was impossible, today, the delay is part of the equation, because it allows staff to be eliminated, François Daurel, representative of CGT La Poste. The idea is to save money and so we revel in these delays.”

The unions are calling for an end to the closure of sorting centers, and the parallel recruitment of temporary workers. “Today, there are structurally 30% of precarious colleagues who occupy permanent work positions, who should be fixed-term contracts who are not.”

We have a permanent understaffing, we estimate that we need around a hundred more people.

François Daurel

CGT La Poste Representative

For its part, management recognizes delays, but explains, to compensate for these dysfunctions, the implementation “mutual aid from other platforms last week”. She specifies that additional recruitment of fixed-term or temporary workers would be underway.