The End of QWL/EI for Rural Carriers
The announcement came as no surprise for me because of the abuse of the process by both craft and management. The process needed to be a consensus process as was originally designed. The process when used as intended is a way for management and craft to opt in to getting questions answered and problems solved and bridge barriers brought on by lack of contact with those in charge of the office.
This process is golden in work environments where management has a large contingent of employees and has little time to address the issues that arise on the work room floor and small offices that need outside intervention to moderate personality conflicts that can cause great stress when there isn’t an outlet for both.
The process served as counseling, information exchange, training, and postal modernization. Small things like Spanish 3849’s, stamp order envelopes that replace blank envelopes often lost in the mails by unthinking customers and educating craft and management in the use of the Rural Carrier Matrix and edit sheets. Improvement of parking practices of LLV’s would probably not have come without the QWL/EI program to facilitate improved conditions in our offices when people weren’t panicked by extending their day another 1/2 to one hour into the heat of the summer or the darkness of the christmas package season. Why not meet at the end of everyone’s shift? Carriers on different sized routes come in at different hours, and many want to go home after being an industrial athlete for 3-5 hours ending their day mentally and physically exhausted.
In some instances it became a forum for management want-to-be’s to show their skills at controlling fellow craft members to impress managers with their ability to control their fellow craft members in the meetings. This alone blocked members from participation because they were often controlled out of the process but even with that it still served a purpose to solve problems because those individuals couldn’t help but improve something in the name of recognition and served the process well.
After the shootings brought on in the eighties and nineties showing the high disconnect between management and craft the QWL/EI process was instrumental in holding overbearing management to eye to eye contact to their employees as a group with outside participation reducing the stress brought on by the lack of accountability in the management arena.
It often provided the only medium for management to learn the contract and for employees to participate in a forum where everyone was on an equal basis of information sharing.
Letter carriers work very hard for the money and deserve at the very minimum what the contract guarantees each carrier. Cutbacks usually precede periods of heavy inflation and modernization making the carrier that much more important to delivery of the postal products in the recovery periods.
This begs the question are we back to those kind of stresses and those kind of sweetheart deals where smoke screens and sweetheart deals nullify the spirit of the contract to give everyone an equal right to benefits and seniority rights? Is management accountable to all carriers by conscientiously abiding by the contract? Can we implement a replacement for the process that will give voice to those who need to know that the USPS is not going to return to policies that corner employees to the point of losing all hope and going postal on their fellow employees and management?
Is there some replacement that will allow those who see a way of improving on procedures, customer support and security for all who work there so we can at least work together as a postal team under one roof. If we regress then the terrorists are not our only concern, there are many forms of terrorism and some of the most insidious kind is practiced skillfully in the good old USPS.
