The national postal service Postnord has announced it intends to let go of upwards of 4,000 employees – roughly 40 percent of its entire staff in Denmark – in a bid to streamline its flailing economy following revelations that the Danish part of Postnord ran up a loss of 1.5 billion kroner in 2016.

Furthermore the service wants to deliver mail just one day a week in the future and wants politicians in Denmark and Sweden, the other co-owner of Postnord, to cough up 2.3 billion kroner to help bail them out and make the transition.

“It’s a hard punch. We know the company is struggling financially and something needs to happen, but it hurts to have to say goodbye to so many colleagues,” Torben Struck, a spokesperson for postal workers in Region South Denmark, told DR Nyheder.

“We may be able to make do with fewer employees, but we are already really busy and I have a difficult time ascertaining at this juncture whether it will be enough.”

READ MORE: First class shake-up at PostNord to blame for third class results

Will Sweden play along?
Postnord expects that the transition will take four years to complete and that it will suffer a loss on letter distribution during that time.

Following the transition, packages and letters will be consolidated in two tracks: a basic track named ‘blomst’ (‘flower’), which involves the postal workers only delivering mail once per week, and a second track called ‘ekspres’ (‘express’) that encompasses day-to-day delivery.

But it is unknown whether Sweden, which owns 60 percent of Postnord, wants to contribute to the straightening of the postal ship in Denmark.