ROYAL Mail bosses are being balloted on strike action in an escalating dispute over compulsory job cuts.
The 730-staff mail centre in Bromley-by-Bow, which employs around 50 Barking and Dagenham workers, faces the axe in the new year as part of a nationwide programme of modernisation.
Royal Mail managers have not gone on strike since the 1979 winter of discontent. The dispute raises the threat of disruption to delivery of Christmas cards and presents.
Royal Mail said its modernisation programme responded to falling volumes of post, a rise in electronic communications and competition from private companies like TNT.
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