A UNION is locked in crunch talks with Royal Mail bosses over the company's failure to give bonus payments to staff at two York sorting offices.

A union leader warned today that if a satisfactory deal is not offered to more than 200 postal workers, he would not hesitate to call a ballot for industrial action.

Dave Dowling, area delivery representative of the Communication Workers' Union, said that when new sorting arrangements were introduced as part of the switch to one single delivery a day, targets were set for workers.

If they achieved their targets, they would receivebonus payments of £26 per week.

But he said workers at Birch Park and York West sorting offices - which serve households and businesses in the northern and western areas of York respectively - had only hit their targets on about three occasions each.

This meant they had missed out on hundreds of pounds over the last months.

There were similar problems over the sorting offices at Scarborough and Bridlington, which serve households in Ryedale, and which had never hit their targets so far.

The union believed that the targets set in the four offices had been "unrealistic". As a result, customers served by them were failing to receive the level of service they expected. Post was delivered, but not as quickly as it should.

"This is about terms and conditions for workers, and about the quality of service we give to the public," he claimed.

"It's a question of culture. Do we want a public service which makes a reasonable level of profit, or a commercial organisation simply pursuing a maximum level of profit?"

He said that workers in the Central sorting office, which serves the city centre, along with eight other offices in the region, had been given more realistic targets which they had been able to meet.

He said both the Central and York West offices were based in Leeman Road, with workers on either side of an "invisible line" receiving quite different pay packets for doing the same job.

A Royal Mail spokeswoman said today that it was continuing to work closely with union and staff to reach efficiency targets.

"Further improvements have been planned which, when implemented, should enable us to reach those targets and trigger bonus payments for our staff."

News of the talks comes only weeks after a postal worker came forward to speak to the Evening Press about problems at a York office.

The postie claimed it was in chaos, with piles of postbags going undelivered daily, but Royal Mail denied there was any backlog of mail and said the company was achieving the targets of its operating licence.

The Evening Press's Stand And Deliver campaign, pleading for the single postal delivery to be made to York businesses in the early morning rather than later in the day, won backing from scores of businesses earlier this year.

Updated: 10:16 Friday, July 02, 2004