Who’s Side Are You On Anyway?
One thing I find frustrating about some of my fellow employees is that they view the Postal Service as some kind of government sponsored cash-cow, able to grant any kind of cash wish to any of over 700,000 employees at any given time. Some inscrutable people create situations of getting hurt for the specific purpose of collecting workman’s comp. or early retirement, (not to denigrate those who obviously need workman’s comp through no fault of their own.)
RCA’s or past RCA’s who remember the struggle to become regulars are insisting on giving RCA’s full benefit packages even if they only work one day a week, just because of single mothers who choose to work here need extra help. I’m not unsympathetic to those in need, but there is other state or government sponsored programs out there for that purpose. Should the space-challenged USPS be responsible for providing Day Care for mothers in extreme need who hire on to the USPS? It’s a nice thought, and probably workable in some area’s but who will pay the price? If the welfare side of government would step in, and assist the USPS towards that endeavor in cases where that would make sense, then maybe the Postal Service could work day care, medical, and life insurance into their menu of offerings to newly hired employees.
The Post Office has already moved in a direction that helps struggling hire’s by assigning postal-owned vehicles to a large number of Rural routes, making the need to provide a delivery vehicle unnecessary in most cases. This program has improved name recognition for the Postal Service in it’s new era of competition, and added much more space for delivery and pick up of parcels along with the many other services that a Rural Carrier, (otherwise known as a’ Post Office On Wheels’,) provides to the rural communities.
The regulars, who get a regular relief day in conjunction with a Sunday, would, and have to give up having a 2-day weekend for those benefits to take effect, and rely on a relief position in the form of a PTF. Many regulars have already moved to that non-2-day relief day to receive the incentive to have their routes minimized at a 43k status, which on the positive side gives the carrier a badly needed break in the middle of the week. The only problem with this, is they have already moved to make hiring relief carriers less of a problem by making large number of rural routes 6 day routes, minimizing the need for assigned relief carriers and cutting the costs of training due to the overturn of relief carriers who find life here to much of a struggle after surviving the initial training, drug screening and shadow days, only to be assigned to one of those routes who don’t have an assigned vehicle and having to service, fuel, and pay for a reliable vehicle less than 5 years old. (Yes that rule is often bent, but those are the requirements by the USPS.) And then expected to wait 7 years minimum if they are lucky in high growth offices, (much longer in small low-growth communities,) before they will receive a benefit package from the postal service.
These relief subs are only guaranteed one day a week, and told by the trainer to not let other work interfere with being called in on a rural route while the hiring supervisor will tell the relief not to quit their other job, producing the impression that they don’t have to come in when called. According to the contract they can be required to come in if the matrix is exhausted. The other job often pays the carriers health benefit package, so if it is jeopardized the carrier will opt for the worse of two evils and take the job with benefits. Complicating matters is when the supervisor hires a friend or family member and doesn’t want that friend to be encumbered by the normal burdens of a Rural Craft member, such as putting up all P.M. mail, leaving it for the regular to deal with the day after the weekend or time off.
On that one-day of pay and Equipment Maintenance the Relief Carrier received Allowance per week they have to keep their vehicle running enough to be reliable on the route, which is impossible unless your husband or the carriers other job is a mechanic and gas station owner where he has the tools and can get wholesale fuel to run the route. A late model car should have no problems, but many who are new hires can’t afford a late model car as they are starting out in life and struggling like many do. In essence, by the amount invested in a “Reliable Car�?, the relief carrier who is only paid one day per week pay is subsidizing the post office with the costs of maintaining that car, going into dept to keep it repaired, and may not have the credit rating to afford a late model car to do the route in. The PO doesn’t pay the interest on a car or figure that into the amount of EMA paid to that person.
PTF’s receive benefits on the City Side, and now on the Rural Side, but in order to become a “Formula Office�? that utilizes PTF’s you have to meet certain criteria. And that criteria can change back to assigned subs for each route.
The regulars are already seeing their jobs devalued through automation, and are reeling from recent decreases in time standards that have moved many routes into the ‘H’ category and will; with the advent of new automation tools the postal service has invested in, further reduce the standard of living of the Letter Carriers in all crafts. These changes have reduced their routes by an average of 3 hours per week. That time was overtime in the past, bringing carriers closer to the City Craft hourly wage, and now the Post Office has moved to make all routes 40 hours or under per week. Who needs reorganization, when the current organization is on a fast track to making the job a minimum wage job?
The distinction between crafts are slowly disappearing, with the assigned vehicles, the high-density routes, the city style delivery to business’, apartments, and park-n-loops making the only thing that separates crafts is scan points, clocking in and uniforms. The Rural Craft are questioning why the pay scale is so lopsided in favor of City Delivery. Rurals travel farther than the City making the reduction in deliveries a requirement based on the time it takes to travel and deliver each delivery point.
Rural delivery costs more because of the added fuel and maintenance on those kinds of routes. Are the Rural Craft subsidizing the City deliveries because of this added expense on their routes? Ya Think? It takes so much time to travel that distance, no matter if you have mail or not. You have a requirement to travel that distance and delivery times will fluctuate radically on those kinds of routes simply because of the distance traveled. Is the USPS forcing those carriers to deliver unsafely by imposing reduced time and pay scale wages on them, narrowing the window of delivery time by forcing later start times, pressuring them to delivery by cutoff time or darkness, for that kind of delivery and manipulating the volume those routes carry via the new automation techniques that allow them to govern the different classes of mail on any given day?
Now, the efficiency of the postal service comes into question, when they hire untrained or unqualified relief personnel to process mail at the plants on weekends and holidays, increasing the poor quality of mail, and time that a carrier has to deliver unprocessed addressed-bar-coded mail that was processed properly during the evaluation mail count that determine the wages of a Rural Carrier, but not the rest of the year when machines are allowed to get dirty and are not properly maintenanced. So in effect reducing the wage scale of Rural Carriers adding more hours to their day without additional compensation, and Highway Contract Carriers but increasing the already double wage scale of City carriers over Rural Carrier and over 3 times the scale of Highway contract carriers, because the City Carriers use more overtime hours and get more pay to cleanup the sloppy mail.
And then there are the checkout clerks on weekends that take long lunches during the return time of the letter carriers in all crafts, leaving checkout unattended, not properly checking carriers out of Registered mail or re-supplying stamp purchases delaying the carrier when these transactions are required before the carrier leaves the office by the duties and responsibilities in the PO603 as well as the City version of duties and responsibilities.
Ranting and Raving
Christmas is coming soon and we’ll be delivering toys to all the girls and boys. We have increased our package deliveries of gifts and all to 142 plus million homes and it’s getting to the point that if you have an older postal jeep to deliver there is not enough room to handle the average load of parcels, much less gifts, at least on a heavy parcel day. The old jeeps are meant to travel at less than 50 mph, and actually less than 45, a little faster than the horse and buggy days, they were meant for city delivery in the old days of a few feet of mail and a few parcels. EbayÓ has been our greatest source of revenue and our greatest nightmare. Delivery confirmations are giving business’ greater confidence that their product is being delivered on time and we are a healthy service to the American business entrepreneur as well as the rest of the country. With gas prices spiking like never before, it’s hard on the person who uses their own vehicle on their route, but people are enduring hard times and staying with the program. It is especially hard on the relief mom who is struggling on her own to provide for her family to keep the home fires burning with heat and food on the table. Our job has built in exercise, and you need to be in shape to stay in shape doing the kind of work we do. A secretary in a Dr’s office asked me about getting on with the postal service. I explained that it is an athletic job, that once you start, you don’t stop physically moving until you either take a 10 minute break, (for the city side,) or as we do, you take you 30 minute lunch break, (which most rural skip to get home sooner.) The rest of the time you are working against the clock and you want to move through your day as fast as you can with a sense of urgency. I have to ask myself, as much as I love doing this kind of work, what is the toll it’s taking on my body. Most athletes retire fairly early in life and go on to other types of work. Women are more vulnerable than men as their bodies seem to only hold up for about 15 years then start breaking down. Should we work out 3 times a week at the local health club to keep fit? Good question… I would think we keep in pretty good shape with all the movement we do each day, 5-6 days a week, 50 or more weeks a year. We are classified as industrial athletes… That means it’s a physically demanding job… How, I ask, can you try to get benefits for a relief employee who only works one day a week? I don’t see the break even for a company, and I don’t understand how someone who works the better part of a full time job feels ok about someone who doesn’t getting the same perks for far less work input. (Scratching my head.) I only get a few posts on the subject, but the ones I get seem very determined to change things. The only change that will come is a conversion to a PTF position in every office that has 2 or more routes. Meaning many offices will have to give up 2 days in a row off on weekends, (still scratching my head.) Really folks it has to make economic sense. We have to pay our own way here. We are not a welfare institution… are we? Does the public owe you a living? Does one day a week work mean everybody else has to sacrifice for you because you say it’s needed, because this is a government service?
Stop Griping
To be honest, the USPS has taken a bad rap by its employees who don’t realize the value of the jobs they have. The USPS is the most customer-oriented company in the world. Who else provides the level of service to the masses of the U.S.? Their jobs are public service and they have job protections others don’t enjoy through collective bargaining. The USPS has provided vehicles to a multitude of Rural Carriers on a scale never before heard of. I can’t answer why this is a recent event in postal history, but nonetheless, it is now a reality. By not participating in your union you risk losing the support those unions give the USPS through PACs and other activities that help forge congressional language that protects the Rural Craft, USPS and continues to improve the Rural Crafts working environment.
If you take an us-or-them attitude about the USPS or the UNION, then you probably take that attitude about your mother and father, your sister and brother and neighbors and can’t be relied or taken seriously in anything you attempt to do in life. The RCA’s have one of the best jobs in the world, they have a great deal of latitude in accepting work, working as dual capacity, delivering express mail on Sundays, for those that want it, the work is there that can pay for so-called benefits you feel deprived of. Anyone can buy private health insurance, and anyone can invest in an IRA, so the complaint that there are no benefits falls on deaf ears. Where can you get that kind of work anywhere else? I’m waiting to hear your answers to this one, cause if it’s out there we should all run to it. We have the TSP program, matching funds retirement, health insurance, life insurance, long-term care, workman’s comp, and a great work environment and meeting hundreds of people in the performance of our duty. The job is never dull, and filled with variety and yes diversity. Veterans enjoy protections provided by the Merit Systems Protection Board so, in closing, I propose a challenge to all the disenchanted among you: go and find the best in others and you will find the best in yourself. Contribute something, anything, just put one foot in front of the other and make it a better hour, day, year, world for you and us all. You don’t do that by griping.