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Malmö dwellers forced to deliver their own mail

As postal workers assigned to the Malmö district of Seved feel too threatened to carry out their duties, the residents themselves will now have to deliver their own post.

Malmö dwellers forced to deliver their own mail

”You do what you have to do, we have to solve it somehow. And we have no idea how it will work before we have tried, that’s how I look at it,” Swedish Postal Service (Posten) district manager Rolf Weiffert to local paper Skånska Dagbladet.

For months, Seved has been plagued by continuing problems.

Threatened postal workers in the area were forced to carry panic alarms and many residents say they don’t dare go out at night.

From February 1st, two residents in the area will help authorities deliver mail to some 500 households in the area.

The Posten and Malmö city will be co-operating on the project, which will begin as a 6 month trial project and focus on getting young people engaged in postal delivery, according to the newspaper.

“I’m satisfied,” Anders Malmquist, district manager with the city of Malmö, said.

“Young adults get an insight and an understanding of how it is to work in the postal service.”

The two young people who will deliver the letters are currently being recruited.

They will be employed for 12 months by Jobb Malmö, a community project, and get introductory education by the postal system, followed by an internship and, the plan is, eventual employment as a postal worker.

The municipality sees the venture mostly as a workforce project to steer the unemployed youth into work life, even if the idea itself stems from criminality and the lack of safety that has come to characterize the area.

The postal service denied that there was a need for new postal worker recruitment, but stated that the there was a danger of the postal service coming to a halt.

Since the police beefed up camera surveillance of the area in December, the number of incidents has decreased, but the district, which has 4,500 residents, has always had considerable social problems.

Half of the population is between 19 and 44 with a majority of foreigners.

Less than half of the adults have paid employment and the average income is low.

Youth gangs have taken over parts of the town and are engaged in more or less open drug trafficking.

In October, one postal vehicle was also subjected to an attempted robbery.

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Can you rely on Sweden’s Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

Wednesday marks the last day you can send first class letters or parcels in Sweden and still hope they'll make it in time for Christmas Eve. But how reliable is PostNord, the company which runs Sweden's postal service?

Can you rely on Sweden's Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

What can you still send and hope for it to be delivered by Christmas? 

The Christmas deadline for letters and parcels outside of Sweden already passed on December 12th, as has the deadline for ordering anything online and hoping for it to arrive on time, with most e-commerce companies advising customers that anything ordered later than December 19th will not arrive in time. 

But if you’re sending first-class letters, pre-paid parcels, and small packages for delivery through the letterbox, you can still send them up until December 21st. The same goes for other parcel services such as Postnord MyPack Home, PostNord MyPack Home small, PostNord MyPack Collect, and Postpaket parcels.  

And if you’re willing to pay a bit extra, you can send express mail letters, express parcels, and first class ‘varubrev’ small parcels up until December 22nd. 

“Those dates still apply. We have written in a press statement that if you send by those dates you can be pretty sure that they will arrive in time,” Anders Porelius, head of press at PostNord, told The Local on Tuesday. 

But can you trust Postnord to deliver when they say they will? 

Not entirely.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, Sweden’s postal regulator, ruled on December 8th that the company was failing to meet its regulatory target of delivering 95 percent of all letters within two working days, with 28 million letters delivered late between June and November. 

An investigative documentary by TV4’s Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts) programme, was sent pictures showing huge piles of late, undelivered letters in one of PostNord’s terminals, and interviewed postal workers who said that they were unable to complete their deliveries now they had been moved from daily to every other day, as they had twice as many letters to deliver on the days when they worked. 

“You get yelled at by the customers, and rightly so, you get yelled at by your bosses, and you scold yourself because you feel like you’re not able to do enough,” said Emilia Leijon, one postal worker. “We pretty much never manage to deliver a whole satchel. There’s too much post and too little time.” 

What is PostNord doing about the delays? 

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority has given the company until January 30th to carry out an analysis into why it is not managing to meet its targets, and to draw up an action plan of how it is going to improve. 

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