To What Extremes Will Congress Go To Whip The Unions
Don’t you find it funny, the drama companies that have a high union profile are experiencing. The Republican debaters, (I.E. Rick Perry in particular,) said he would immediately “Get Rid Of The Unions”.
The people who control our well being all meet at some resort in Northern California, playing games and burning their cares. They decide how far they will go to break the bank that supports the well being of our country. Will they overfund the military? Will they overfund EPA?
Will they GIVE the nations treasury away to undeveloped countries? Will they give the treasury away to Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, and other companies such as these, money that belongs to the American Taxpayer?
The POINT: we work, we save, we pay into the entitlement fund, they work us harder, pay us less, and take that money we worked ourselves to the bone to save for our futures and squander it away for the sake of making us cheap labor, low maintenance drones that serve their class of hedonistic Druids.
Enough Said:
All The Talk About Postal Losses
These talks or news leaks appear in the years and month leading to new contract negotiations. The Postal representatives have their spin doctors working 24/7 on spinning their circumstances as if they were being elected to office to look bleak until they have finished contractual negotiations with the major unions.
If you watch carefully at the end of these negotiations we will have record volumes of mail processed primarily by machines that have replaced a major segment of the postal work-force offsetting those so-called losses through elimination of jobs and highly reduced time standards used to establish a letter carriers rate of pay. If they’re broke now, how did they pay our wages 10-20 years ago? I process more mail now than I have in any time in my entire postal career of 29 years.
Postal work is not by itself a difficult profession. The work is fairly easy at first appearances if looked at it from a detail oriented repetitious outlook. The difficulty is when a truck breaks down, it is late fall and the clocks have been set back and their is a surge of parcels, certified letters, and out of the blue every traffic jam, railroad crossing and person looking for answers to mailing his package arrive all at once and you have to be off the street by 5:30 to get the out-going mail on the last truck for next day processing.
You are considered by management as a machine that filters mail, sells stamps, picks up and delivers parcels, get’s certifieds and registereds whitnessed and signed for and does this all in every kind of weather hot, high hot winds, high cold winds, through orchard and farm lands that have tractors and trailers slowing you down, waiting on the garbage man to back his vehicle down an otherwise impassable narrow streets and threading through impatient drivers stressed by your presence.
Your time standards are based on traveling with a sense of urgency, delivering mail as fast as possible down pot-holed poorly maintained approaches to mailboxes from the multitude of customers alienated by the government, running parcels to the door casing catalogs and magazines at 600 per hour and letters at over 1000 per hour and not having any of your body parts erode from repetitive stress on the joints and cartilaginous body tissues.
We have the image set by congress of being overpaid glorified paper-boys while they continue to soak the American Tax Payer by giving themselves raises and bonus’s to try to appear corporate and deserving by finding illegal methods of reducing our pay and benefit packages. George Washington accepted no pay for his military service why do they and why did Anthony Frank so much as accuse the Government of using the Postal Service as a “Cash-Cow” his words and I’m not the only one that has witnessed this kind of abuse.
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.