By Emma Birchley, East of England Correspondent
Post Office workers have gone on strike over plans to close 70 state-owned branches and a dispute over pay.
The closing Crown branches - which are currently directly managed by Post Office Ltd - would be franchised and put within retailers such as WH Smith, which has already happened in some towns.
Debbie Spiteri, who works at the Dagenham branch in Essex, has been employed by the Post Office for 32 years and said she thought she had a job for life.
"I thought I would be here until I retired in my 60s, but now it looks like I may be made redundant, looking for another job and at my age I didn't want to be doing that," she said.
"I feel sorry for the local people. A lot are elderly and if they have to go somewhere else, they won't. They won't go into a shop to do their business because to them they want the personal touch."
The Post Office insists staff will be transferred to a new employer or offered voluntary redundancy, but the Communication Workers Union predicts 800 jobs will be lost.
Roger Gale, general manager of the Post Office's Crown and WH Smith network, said the changes are needed.
"It's absolutely not a programme of closing post offices," he said.
"We want to retain post office services on the high street but we have to do it in a way that doesn't lose tax-payers' money.
"What we're trying to do is get the Crown Network to a point where it breaks even. It currently loses £37m a year of tax-payers' money and what we're trying to do is to remove that loss."
The 373 Crown offices, which are usually the larger ones, represent just 3% of the total post office network.
But the CWU says its staff deal with a fifth of all customers and handle 40% of financial transactions involving things like banking and credit cards.
Clive Tickner, the CWU's representative for the Dagenham area, questions the timing as the Post Office launches its new current account.
"Ironically, if they close down Crown offices there will be less outlets to transact the current account so I'm very, very concerned that they are eroding away at the Post Office so that there will be nothing left in a few years' time," he said.
There is also concern about the impact on the high street.
Deborah Satchell works at Heathway Dry Cleaners in Dagenham.
She said: "It will affect the local shops because people will go elsewhere to do what they have got to do and it will take the business away from the local community."
The strikes are the seventh round of action in the current dispute and will only affect the Crown branches.
Staff are also calling for a pay rise of 3.5% for 2012/13 and a further rise this financial year, but the Post Office says that is not possible when it is making losses.
Instead, it is offering a series of cash payments totalling up to £3,400 before April 2015.
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