BERLIN/BONN (dpa-AFX) - The Verdi trade union continued warning strikes at the postal service on Tuesday with work stoppages at letter and parcel centers and in delivery operations. "It started well everywhere, high participation, the mood is good," said a union spokesman in Berlin on Tuesday morning. Thus, millions of letters and hundreds of thousands of parcels are likely to be left lying around again. With the industrial action, the union wants to emphasize its demands in the current round of collective bargaining.

Verdi has called on postal workers in Dortmund, Hamburg, Saarbrücken, Nuremberg, Frankfurt/Main and Stuttgart to hold protest rallies. According to the union, around 8,000 postal workers had already stopped work on Monday. According to the Post, this slowed down the delivery of around one million letters and several hundred thousand parcels.

The union is demanding 15 percent more wages and salaries for the approximately 160,000 pay-scale employees in the Post & Parcel Germany sector. The demand is justified among other things with the high inflation. "Our members are taking to the streets because they simply cannot afford a loss of purchasing power," said Verdi negotiator Andrea Kocsis.

The Post reacted with incomprehension to Verdi's actions. A company spokesman said at the beginning of the week that the group had already announced an offer for the next round of wage negotiations on Wednesday and Thursday. The new warning strikes were therefore excessive. The union's behavior was to the detriment of the Group's customers. Swiss Post considers the level of the wage demand to be "unacceptable".

Warning strikes had already been held on several days in January. Most recently, 20 percent of parcels and 9 percent of letters were not delivered on one day due to the walkouts./rea/DP/jha