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:

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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.

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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.

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Have a great week

George

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Coeur d’Alene Press

RE: Fighting ‘The Femail Man’

It’s too bad that this story gets lost in gender wars.  The real story is automation is pushing the limits of human endurance.  We are about to go to the next level of automation in our office.  In the months to come we will lose people to automation who are the middle postal workers who route the mail to each carrier.

The carrier will have to add more customers to each route to make up for what automation will take away especially on rural routes but also city routes and CDS routes.

We have a formula that will give us 2 minutes per each box per 6-day week if we maintain a route with fewer than 12 boxes per mile, (impossible after the next phase in of automation.)

The minute we go over 12 boxes per mile we get 1.82 minutes per box per week.  If we deliver to a central box, (apartments, trailer parks, business, new housing developments use central boxes,) we only get 1 minute per box per week.  (The Postal Service can potentially save 2 billion a year with delivery to central boxes.)  That’s not 1 minute per day, but 1 minute per 6 days of mail delivery, (you do the math.)

The formula is computed on the lowest volume month of the year, February and the luck of the draw of what mail might show up then verses the rest of the work year.  An inventory is made of every piece and type of mail, plugged into a formula that is used to pay us for all of the year, (the rest of the year mail volume is heavier than the post-Christmas slump,) leaving us with nothing but hustle on our minds to get our routes finished before the sun sets and the last dispatch truck leaves.  I’m a rural carrier and I don’t get paid by the hour, but by the above method.

That pace of delivering mail is maintained even on light mail days, not just out of habit, but also because it is figured into the formula and lets us go home early.  Some customers will complain because we burn up the road to achieve our mission as efficiently as possible, but if customers start leaving mailboxes blocked with kids toys, trash cans, pit bulls, farm animals, parked cars, overhanging limbs and branches, or snow on any significant amount of our routes, we will be delivering in the dark and past the last dispatch truck that takes the mail we collect for delivery.

When we walk our walking sections to deliver to houses should it be necessary for us to come armed with deadly force to defend against that loose Rotweiler that is known to kill more people than any other dog including Pit bulls?

Now the post office has essentially merged with DHL, UPS, and FedEx for sharing the delivery loads.  They say we have a monopoly on the mailbox.  That has essentially disappeared over night.  I have delivered DHL, UPS, and FedEx parcels on my route.  I’m sure they are doing the same with USPS products.

If we got paid for all the real services we provide, especially pruning customers trees and shrubs, moving kids toys, the price of postage would skyrocket which is not in our best interest or the general publics best interest.

The postal service has a zero tolerance for missing the dispatch trucks with outgoing mail.  We are penalized if we are late for that truck.  Methods of punishment include changing our start times, cutting the size of our routes, (hence cutting our pay,) and forcing different casing methods that force us onto the street transferring the workload to the street which makes us do the work, (that could be accomplished so much easier in the office,) to the street.

We have been called glorified paper boys by some members of congress who are trying appeal to those who would transfer every penny of the postage stamp that pays for our services into their own advertising pockets, (yes Marty, you were once one of those on the congressional dole if you were an ad exec and as a writer still are,) while working us into the ground before we can collect a retirement pension, (which I might add was radically changed when it was moved to FERS from CSRS,) but those who make those kind of statements don’t realize the work that goes into delivering a paper route much less serving the number of people we serve daily delivering mail, selling postal products, picking up and delivering parcels and mail, and offering friendship to those whom we serve.

Our local surgeons know us by first name for constant knee, wrist and shoulder repair for the damage repetitive and awkward motions cause that we endure to deliver the mail efficiently.  Just try it during the heavy months of the year.  We must maintain an average speed of 10-15 miles per hour just to stay within the time allotted to do the job.  That doesn’t sound like much in terms of speed, but when you take into account we have to come to a full stop, collect outgoing mail, sell stamps, and deliver parcels to the door, well, our average speed doesn’t reflect our true speed.

If you were to drive where you had to stop quickly, accelerate quickly, constantly watching out over your shoulder for speeding customers who hate to get caught behind a delivery vehicle for even 10 seconds, making constant turns down every cul-de-sac, private drive, and street on your line of travel, you would find the same stresses on your neck and lower lumbar that a fighter pilot endures.  (We hire a lot of those by the way.)

That very friendship we establish with our patrons can get taxed when we are under pressure to deliver the amount of mail that we now have to face each and every delivery day that will only double by the end of next year.

Thanks so much for the cookies and milk, the walnuts, the fruit and other goodies my appreciative friends supply me who know the meaning of a fair days pay for a fair amount of work and I have so many on my own route who have toiled for a living and know what I endure daily.  I’ve been delivering for nearly 2 decades to the same customers and we know and appreciate each other well.

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Hmmm, O.K. .  You can opt in to the ODL or, (work day relief list,) twice a year now instead of just once.   The sticky issues are Relief carriers not receiving COLA until 2011. Rural carriers are going to pay higher health care portions 1.2, 1, 1 . We lost the fletter argument.

Those on the roles during the 2002 count have some remuneration coming as much as $300 for regular carriers and regular carriers will receive their portion (after taxes,) of $686.00 cash and COLA’s every 6 months instead of annually.

Each 3982 label received during the mail count will be 15 seconds unless the carrier is required to perform any additional duties of completing Forms 3575, 3546 and/or writing addresses on Form 3982. In such instances, the credit for the 3982 label will be two minutes.

Revenue generation will require the use of time already allowed for stamp stock credits.  They will hold your route only 6 months now instead of a year, (two years before the last contract.)  Do I detect a downhill slide?  Oh, almost forgot to mention that Regulars buying new RHD vehicles will qualify for a $1,000.00 credit and $500 credit to reliefs and regulars who buy or convert a vehicle to RHD for their routes.

So, anyone have anything to say?

George

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More to come on this broadcast and who made it.

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