There are moments when a single document is enough to bring down an entire narrative of “successful reform.” And there are moments when a state organization’s own management signs its own admission of failure. The Hellenic Post (ELTA) appears to have reached precisely that point.
After years of restructurings, budget cuts, voluntary exits, branch closures, and government announcements about “restoring viability,” ELTA now finds itself unable to carry out even the core of its mission: delivering packages and mail.
And the admission does not come from workers or union representatives. It comes from management itself.
According to a confidential internal document exclusively obtained by Ta Nea, ELTA’s management is calling on its staff to voluntarily sign up for parcel delivery runs across the Attica region, in order to cover areas where deliveries have essentially collapsed.
The document, signed by the General Director of Human Resources, was sent on the previous Thursday evening and asked employees to declare their willingness to participate by midnight on Sunday, June 14, 2026, via their personal email accounts. The reason: delivery services are failing to meet their obligations, and thousands of items have been sitting undelivered for weeks.
The situation is alarming. In areas such as Kaisariani, Vyronas, Ampelokipoi, Kypseli, Agios Dimitrios, and Nea Makri, residents have been waiting weeks for electricity and water bills and other essential documents. These are items directly tied to people’s daily lives, since unpaid bills risk leaving customers without power and water in the middle of summer.
In this context, ELTA management is asking administrative employees to leave their desks, use their personal vehicles, and take on delivery work in pairs, work that should normally be carried out by a properly organized and adequately staffed distribution network.
In plain terms, ELTA is asking office workers to become couriers in order to patch up the gaps of a system that has broken down.
This is an unprecedented situation for a public company of strategic importance. Even more telling is the fact that management explicitly acknowledges in the document that its courier delivery staff “are unable to complete their delivery work on time” and that the situation is damaging both customers and the company’s image.
This amounts to an official admission of operational failure, and the question that follows, according to insiders, is an uncomfortable one: where did the hundreds of millions of euros spent over recent years on rebuilding ELTA actually go? The Greek state and taxpayers have funded rescue, transformation, and modernization plans to the tune of nearly 300 million euros. Citizens heard talk of digital transition, new business models, restructuring, and sustainability.
Today, however, the reality speaks for itself: ELTA is an organization that cannot adequately perform its basic functions and is now looking for “volunteers” to cover its most elementary operations.
The matter takes on even greater dimensions given that ELTA operates under the oversight of the Greek state’s Superfund and is a public company for which the state retains full supervisory and strategic responsibility.
What is being revealed here does not expose only the current management. It exposes the entire management model applied over recent years and those who assured the public the company was on the road to recovery.
The irony is particularly sharp: while management asks workers to voluntarily fill in the gaps, it is simultaneously rolling out a new voluntary departure program. According to sources, employees born up to and including 1970 may exit ELTA while receiving 50% of their salary and social security contributions until retirement, with a concurrent ban on working for competing companies. The contradiction borders on the absurd: staff are being shown the door with one hand while volunteers are being recruited with the other.
Workers speak openly of an atmosphere of frustration and anger, not only because they are being asked to cover shortfalls they did not create, but because management itself is now acknowledging it cannot ensure the delivery of the company’s most basic operational output.
And when a public service organization reaches the point of asking its own employees to work “voluntarily” just to keep running, workers say the problem is no longer operational. It is political. And the question is no longer just about who will deliver the bills. It is, first and foremost, about who will take responsibility for the unraveling of a historic institution that for decades served every corner of the country and today cannot even meet its most basic obligations.
