Border Force officials will join a wave of industrial action in Britain on Friday, starting the first of a series of strikes at airports, while Royal Mail workers will walk again for two days before Christmas .
Passengers traveling to the UK have been warned to be prepared for longer queues at immigration at airports, while many letters and parcels will now not be delivered before Christmas as staff take action over the payment of the inflation
Heathrow, the largest of six airports where Border Force staff are due to strike, said it expected the vast majority of journeys to be unaffected, with no flights canceled ahead of industrial action.
About 1,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union will continue to strike for the remaining days of 2022, except for December 27.
The Home Office, which is responsible for the Border Force, has called in officials from other departments as well as hundreds of members of the armed forces as a contingency workforce to try to mitigate the effects of the strikes.
Border Force chief operating officer Steve Dann has not ruled out worst-case airport closures, saying the traveling public should expect disruption.
Just under 9,000 flights are now scheduled to land at the six affected airports – Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Gatwick, Heathrow and Manchester – during the strikes, carrying up to 1.8 million passengers, according to data from the firm Cirium aviation analysis. Officials will also target a seaport, Newhaven, in East Sussex.
Airports are confident that contingency staff and electronic gates, which will not be affected, will process most passengers effectively during the strikes. The volume of passengers traveling through airports is still only about 85% of pre-pandemic levels.
Heathrow expects there to be little or no impact on departing flights, with all terminals open as normal, but warned that arriving travelers should be prepared for longer waits at immigration, particularly if they do not have passports that can be used at automatic gates.
Meanwhile, Royal Mail said it would do everything it could to guarantee the delivery of last-minute Christmas cards and parcels as tens of thousands of postal workers walk out again in an increasingly bitter dispute with their Union of Communications Workers.
Royal Mail said the industrial action, which will have covered 18 days this year over Christmas, had now cost it £100m.
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A spokesman said: “Over the next 48 hours we will be doing everything we can to deliver Christmas to our customers. Thousands of employees across the business have swapped their regular day jobs to help sort and deliver the festive mailbag. We are grateful to them and to the more than 12,000 people who returned to work on the last day of the strike.”
A CWU spokesman dismissed the claim and said industrial action was strongly supported.
The Royal Mail spokesman added: “We urge the CWU to seriously consider our pay offer of up to 9% and work with us to return the company to profitability… [Its] The future and the jobs of all our employees depend on modernizing Royal Mail so we can better meet the changing demands of customers.”
The CWU has accused Royal Mail of rejecting an offer to call off strikes. Its general secretary, Dave Ward, said the company was trying to “destroy the jobs of postal workers and take their union out of the workplace”.
The two sets of strikes follow action by nurses and ambulance workers earlier this week. Industrial action, including a ban on overtime at train operating companies, has continued to severely disrupt some rail services, while further rail strikes at Network Rail have been ongoing since Christmas Eve.