USPS Workers Are Overpaid and Should Lose Collective-Bargaining Rights, Trump Panel Says

Claiming that U.S. Postal Service employees are paid much better than workers at FedEx and UPS, a presidential task force wants to de-fang the postal labor unions.

"USPS employees enjoy a pay and benefits premium over their private sector counterparts, although the size of this premium is likely falling,” the Trump-appointed Task Force on the United States Postal System said in a report released Tuesday.

“Based on Treasury [Department] staff analysis of 10-K filings, in 2017, total per-employee cost at the USPS was $85,800, compared to $76,200 and $53,900 at UPS and FedEx, respectively.”

(A Dead Tree Edition analysis of a USPS report largely corroborates the claim about Postal Service compensation: Average base pay for postal employees in Fiscal Year 2017 was $25.23 per hour, which works out to nearly $53,000 annually. Benefits and overtime added about $31,000 per full-time equivalent employee.) 

The panel recommended that “the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Act be amended to apply to the USPS and its employees,” which would ban collective bargaining for postal workers’ compensation. The vast majority of USPS employees are represented by one of nine labor unions or two management associations.

Not in the mainstream media
The anti-collective bargaining proposal, which has gone mostly unnoticed by the mainstream media, “would enable the USPS to address the costs and complications with its current labor system, and allow for better workforce planning and cost control within its rapidly evolving business model,” the panel’s report says.

“USPS employees should not be afforded protections and rights not enjoyed by other federal employees."

The Postal Service spends 76% of its budget on compensation and benefits, which the panel said is “a much higher share of . . . costs when compared against other private courier companies.” That’s despite postal officials achieving “limited labor reforms” in recent years.

“Postal salaries have risen at slower rates than those in the private sector, collective bargaining agreements have gradually transferred a portion of health premiums from the USPS to individual workers, and the USPS has been able to lower the number of employees, from a high of over 905,000 in 1999 to around 634,000 in 2018, relying more heavily on non-career employees.”

But the panel noted that the postal workforce has actually increased by about 4% in the past three years because of the rapid expansion of package deliveries.

 “Given the expected growth in package delivery services, personnel costs are expected to continue to increase in future years, offsetting the increase in the corresponding revenue,.” the panel wrote. It didn’t address the extent to which productivity gains or package-delivery price hikes could reverse that unfavorable trend.

Related articles: 

• Lower Pay Rates Are Boosting USPS's Finances 
• Postal Workforce Is Both Shrinking and Growing 
• 8 Reasons USPS Productivity Is Declining: The Employees Speak Out

Bang-Up Job: USPS Blames New Employees for Rising Motor Vehicle Accidents

The increasing use of non-career letter carriers has caused a steady rise in motor vehicle accidents and liability, postal officials said this week.

The U.S. Postal Service’s liability for motor vehicle tort claims (paid to victims of accidents) rose from $48 million in Fiscal Year 2015 to $88 million in FY2016, the Postal Regulatory Commission recently pointed out.

In responding to that observation on Thursday, the Postal Service explained: “Since the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreements between the Postal Service and several employee unions, which expanded the role of non-career mail delivery drivers, there has been an increase in the number of motor vehicle accidents (MVAs).”

“The number of MVAs attributed to career carriers has remained largely flat, while those attributed to their non-career counterparts has increased out of proportion to the percentage of the carrier workforce that they occupy.” The 2011 agreements created the non-career City Carrier Assistant (CCA) and Rural Carrier Associate (RCA) positions, which last year combined for one-fourth of the USPS’s carrier workhours.

The cost of saving money
The lower pay, paltry benefits, and more flexible schedules of the 70,000 or so CCAs and RCAs are probably saving the Postal Service at least $500 million in annual compensation. But the inexperienced employees have also meant more mis-delivered mail, employee injuries, lower productivity, higher turnover, and ballooning recruiting and training costs, according to the USPS.

The Postal Service has not provided specifics on the number of motor-vehicle accidents or what proportion of accidents or tort claims are caused by non-career employees.

The USPS told the PRC earlier this year that its FY2017 strategy for reducing motor-vehicle accidents includes “redesigning the driver training program to expand opportunities for new drivers to become more skillful. Testing will be added to the program to assess the suitability of each employee to perform duties as a professional driver.”

Related articles

• USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires
• Postal Service Revs Up Its Hiring
• Flexible Workforce Lowers USPS Wages -- and Hurts Productivity
• Turnover Rising Among Non-Career Postal Workers

 

Turnover Rising Among Non-Career Postal Workers

USPS is looking for answers to rising turnover.

Plagued by increasing turnover among non-career employees, postal officials are trying to stem the tide with new management incentives and an overhauled orientation program.

The average annual turnover rate among non-career employees rose from 38.69% in FY2015 to 42.82% last year, the U.S. Postal Service reported earlier this month. Postal officials had set a target of 34.8% for FY2016.

Turnover was worst among City Carrier Assistants (CCAs), rising from 54.24% to 59.66%. Among the other three major non-career categories, turnover for Rural Carrier Associates rose from 30.1% to 35.29%, for Postal Support Employees remained stable at 36.6%, and for Mail Handler Assistants increased from 29.86% to 37.67%.

“Most frequently cited causes for non-career employee turnover are lack of schedule flexibility, physical demands, and employee did not like supervisor,” the USPS said.

Swelling the ranks of the non-career workers – who are paid far less than their career counterparts and receive few benefits -- to more than 130,000 is yielding huge savings for the USPS. But it’s come at a cost.

Postal officials acknowledge that having so many inexperienced employees is lowering productivity, increasing on-the-job injuries, slowing deliveries, and jacking up recruiting and training costs.

“Because CCA turnover represents the biggest opportunity for improvement, non-career employee turnover was selected as an NPA [National Performance Assessment] indicator for field positions with high concentrations of CCAs (large Post Offices and Stations and Branches),” the USPS said. Pay-for-performance bonuses for postal managers are based on progress toward meeting NPA targets.

The USPS is also rolling out a revised new-employee orientation program that attempts to address the factors that cause turnover – “from training to feeling welcomed and supported by supervisors,” the USPS reported in December. A pilot of the program in Northern Virginia decreased turnover 22%, the agency said.

Related articles:

• USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires 
• Survey Says: The USPS Is a Terrible Place to Work 
• Postal Service Revs Up Its Hiring

Survey Says: The USPS Is a Terrible Place to Work

An organizational tumor that has festered within the U.S. Postal Service for years burst into public view this week at exactly the wrong time.

Part of report obtained by InsideSources

An employee survey that postal officials tried to keep under wraps proves what countless postal workers have been saying for years: The USPS is generally a horrible, dysfunctional place to work.

What makes the Postal Pulse survey results so meaningful is that the Gallup Organization compared the USPS data to those of other client organizations.

InsideSources, which obtained the survey results through a Freedom of Information Act request, estimates the comparison involved a pool of 400 companies. Even for those of us who’ve heard horror stories from hundreds of postal employees, the USPS’s numbers were stunningly awful.

How low can you go?
On nine of the 13 questions – from how supportive immediate supervisors are, to development opportunities, to fellow workers’ commitment to quality – the USPS scored in the bottom 1 percentile. In other words, for each of those nine questions, about 396 companies scored better than the USPS and only three, at most, scored the same or worse.

On job satisfaction, postal workers were in the 2nd percentile, while on “I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right” the USPS was in the 3rd percentile. By far, the Postal Service’s best question, in just the 16th percentile, was “I know what is expected of me at work.”

Having a toxic workplace wasn’t so bad for the USPS a few years ago when retention and recruiting weren’t issues. With shrinking mail volumes and virtually no ability to implement layoffs, the agency rarely hired new workers and encouraged long-timers to retire.

Hiring boom
But a shift to using more non-career employees has been a major USPS cost-saving tactic the past few years. That, coupled with stabilizing mail volumes and high turnover among the non-career workers, has caused the USPS’s hiring needs to explode – to the tune of 117,000 new employees last year and a projection for 125,000 newbies this year. (See Postal Service Revs Up Its Hiring.)

And with other big employers like Walmart and McDonald’s recently boosting their minimum pay, the Postal Service faces stiffer competition for new employees willing to work for relatively low pay and limited benefits. It can’t afford to have a bad reputation, backed up by data, for being a lousy employer.

A USPS spokesperson told InsideSources that the agency has “assembled a dedicated, high-performing Employee Engagement team of employees who have begun the process of training all our postal leaders (tens of thousands) to translate” the survey’s results “into a Daily Mission. We will hold postal leaders accountable for actively identifying and correcting their work environment issues in order to achieve a more satisfied and productive workforce, ultimately resulting in more satisfied customers.”

The USPS didn’t become such a toxic workplace solely because supervisors don’t know how to lead, so training alone won’t fix what ails it. A mess this big requires massive culture change, which usually means a thorough overhaul of how an organization hires, promotes, evaluates employees, and communicates with them, among other things.

Related articles:

• 8 Reasons USPS Productivity Is Declining: The Employees Speak Out  
• USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires
• New Postal Hires Mean More 'Return To Sender' Mail

Postal Service Revs Up Its Hiring

The U.S. Postal Service hopes to bring on 125,000 new employees this year, continuing a recent hiring binge caused by the agency's blossoming package-delivery business.

The agency hired 117,000 new workers during Fiscal Year 2015, virtually all of them into non-career positions, postal officials said Thursday in a document presented to the Postal Regulatory Commission.

“The Postal Service still has a continued need to hire 125,000 non-career employees in FY16 to maintain the appropriate levels,” the USPS document says. “Continued hiring of non-career employees (including PSEs [Postal Support Employees] and MHAs [Mailhandler Assistants) is necessitated by conversions to career positions and current attrition rates.”

Among last year’s new non-career workers, 52,000 have left the USPS (including 22,000 short-term, peak-season hires), 5,000 were converted to career positions, and 60,000 were still in non-career positions at year-end.

The USPS ended FY2015 with nearly 492,000 career employees and 130,000 non-career workers, both numbers slightly higher than a year earlier. The payroll continues to grow: The Postal Service ended December with 7,000 more careerists and 4,600 more non-career workers than it had a year earlier.

An e-commerce-driven surge in package deliveries, plus the addition of such new services as Sunday delivery, are fueling the hiring binge and employment growth. It’s a huge turnaround for an organization that cut an average of 21,000 workers annually between 2000 and 2013 and rarely had to hire new ones. And it runs counter to government and news-media reports predicting further USPS cutbacks.

Growing pains
The growth is also causing new headaches for the USPS.

“Recruiting for City Carrier Assistants (CCAs) is a challenge in some regions due the physical nature of the position and extreme outdoor environments, as well as local economic conditions,” the report said.

The wave of new hires has been blamed for everything from higher work-related accident rates to increased problems with delivering poorly addressed mail. The USPS has struggled to orient, train, and equip the new hires – sometimes, for example, failing to provide cold-weather gear to rookie carriers.

Related articles:

• Report Predicts Major USPS Downsizing - But Is It on Target? 
• New Postal Hires Mean More 'Return To Sender' Mail 
• 10 Ways E-Commerce Is Reshaping the USPS 
• USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires

Holiday Shipping Boosted USPS Overtime

U.S. Postal Service employees were unusually busy during late December, which apparently confirms projections that the agency's package business experienced dramatic growth during the holidays.

In the pay period from Dec. 13 to Dec. 26, overtime increased 15% over the same period last year, while total workhours were up more than 6%, according to a USPS report released this week.

The typical postal worker put in more than 8 hours of overtime per week during that period. For several groups of employees – notably mailhandlers, vehicle service drivers, and city carrier assistants – the average was more like 12 hours.

Initial reports suggest that U.S. e-commerce-related shipments were up 20% in the busy Black Friday-to-Christmas period versus 2014, with the USPS taking a larger share of the growing pie.

“Shipping and package” services still account for less than one-fourth of the USPS’s revenue. But rapid growth in those labor-intensive offerings, such as Priority Mail and Parcel Select, is shaking up an organization that had become accustomed to shrinking volumes and drastic workforce reductions.

During the last quarter of calendar year 2015, overtime was 9.5% higher than a year earlier, with total workhours up 2.6%. The agency ended December with 652,000 employees – 11,000 more than it had a year ago – with the ranks of clerks and postal support employees (PSEs) seeing the biggest gains.

Related articles:

• Report Predicts Major USPS Downsizing - But Is It on Target? 
• 10 Ways E-Commerce Is Reshaping the USPS 
• USPS Is Gaining on FedEx and UPS in E-commerce Shipping 

Report Predicts Major USPS Downsizing - But Is It on Target?

Priority Mail boom is keeping letter carriers busy.

Here we go again: Yet another government study has spurred news stories about how the U.S. Postal Service is on the verge of massive downsizing.

“The next decade isn't expected to be kind to postal worker employment,” stated U.S. News & World Report recently, based on a new Bureau of Labor Statistics study. The postal workforce “is expected to contract by 165,000” from 2014 to 2024.

Reports like that don’t help the Postal Service’s efforts to recruit new employees. Many of the agency's 100,000-plus annual new hires work long hours at low pay with no benefits in hopes of snagging a coveted career USPS position. That doesn't sound like a very promising career path -- if the BLS is correct.

But it looks as if the report is based on old data and outdated assumptions.

Contrast BLS’s prediction with a statement this week in USPS’s annual report to Congress: “The Postal Service increased the number of career employees by approximately 4,000 in FY2015, compared to the year before.” The number of non-career employees also rose slightly.

The growth trend is continuing in FY2016, which began Oct. 1. The postal workforce has risen about 2% -- more than 12,000 employees – since a year ago. Postal officials aren’t planning any major job reductions this year and seem to have backed off of earlier plans to implement significant cuts in the coming years.

Still, 2024 is a long way off. And the Postal Service shed more than 280,000 workers from 2000 to 2013, so the kind of cuts predicted by the BLS are not unprecedented. So let’s take a look at why the agency is predicting that the postal workforce is about to shrink again:

After declining 38% from 2000-2013, USPS employment has leveled out.

“Overall employment of postal service workers is projected to decline 28 percent from 2014 to 2024. Automated sorting systems, cluster mailboxes, and tight budgets will adversely affect employment.”

Sorry, BLS, automated sorting is old news and seems unlikely to yield much in the way of future productivity gains. Opposition from many corners means that a shift to cluster mailboxes will proceed at a snail’s pace. And tight USPS budgets are nothing new.

“Employment of postal service clerks is projected to decline 26 percent from 2014 to 2024. Employment may be adversely affected by the decline in First-Class Mail volume due to increasing use of automated bill pay and email.” Wrong again. The number of postal clerks actually rose more than 5% in FY2015, as the dramatic outflow of First-Class Mail volumes slowed to a trickle. How much more impact can email have when it’s already made the personal letter nearly obsolete?

More BS from the BLS
“Employment of postal service mail carriers is projected to decline 26 percent [from 297,000 to 219,000] from 2014 to 2024. Employment may be adversely affected by the use of automated “delivery point sequencing” systems that sort letter mail directly. This reduces the amount of time that carriers spend sorting, allowing them to spend more time on the streets delivering mail.”

Again, old news: Delivery-point sequencing of virtually all letters has been in place for several years, so it’s not likely to cause any more job cuts. And DPS for flat mail, in the form of the Flats Sequencing System, has been a major disappointment. The numbers of both career letter carriers and non-career city carrier assistants inched up during FY2015, the USPS told Congress this week.

The BLS wisely hedged its prediction about letter carriers: “The post office is playing a greater role in the delivery of goods purchased online. An increase in the number of deliverable packages as a result of e-commerce may slow the rate of employment decline for carriers.”

That’s an understatement: Largely because of a 14% increase in the USPS’s “shipping and packages services,” the numbers of both career and non-career letter carriers actually inched up during FY2015.

USPS’s strong growth for labor-intensive products like Parcel Select and Priority Mail shows no signs of abating. That, coupled with only minimal decreases in traditional letter mail, means that the Postal Service is unlikely to do much downsizing during the next few years.

Related articles:

• USPS Employment Levels Have Stabilized
• Why Letter Carriers Are Not an Endangered Species
• Few Postal Jobs Will Be Cut in 2016
• Prospects Dim for USPS Early-Retirement Offers 
• 10 Ways E-Commerce Is Reshaping the USPS

Few Postal Jobs Will Be Cut in 2016

Don't look for any major downsizing from the U.S. Postal Service during the coming year: A new report indicates the postal workforce will remain stable through late 2016.

The agency is projecting a 0.6% decrease in work hours during Fiscal Year 2016, according to an annual financial plan it released Friday. That suggests this will be the third consecutive year of virtually no change in the size of the workforce, after a three-year period (2010-2013) in which the service shed one-sixth of its career employees. Work hours and the number of employees actually inched up during FY2015.

The financial report says that Phase II of Network Rationalization (the politically sensitive closing of mail-processing centers) and a 2.1% decrease in mail volume will make the slight cuts in workhours possible.

“These savings are forecasted to be partially offset by increases in training hours, growth initiatives and the impact of an additional delivery day for Leap Year,” the report says.

A change of plans
The Postal Service released a five-year plan in April 2013 that called for cutting 92,000 career employees by September 2017, then almost immediately put the brakes on more than a decade of downsizing: Since that report was released, the career workforce has hardly budged, ending FY 2015 at 492,000.

That 2013 plan projected many of the cuts would come from curtailing Saturday deliveries, but that proposal has apparently been abandoned. Five-day delivery isn’t even mentioned in the FY2016 financial plan.

“The continued growth in the number of packages -- which are much more labor-intensive than letters – and the ever-growing number of delivery points, make it increasingly difficult to capture work hour savings,” says the FY2016 plan. “We will continue to innovate to drive efficiency.”

Assuming that the 4.3% exigent surcharge on most postal rates will be eliminated early next year, the plan projects a revenue increase of only $400 million, to $69.3 billion. With an estimated $1.5 billion in additional expenses, that would mean an operating loss of $100 million. (Politicians and the news media will call it a $5.9 billion loss because they will include the supposed prepayment of retiree health benefits that postal officials wisely refuse to pay).

Other articles on the Postal Service workforce include:

• USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires
• Why Letter Carriers Are Not an Endangered Species
• Prospects Dim for USPS Early-Retirement Offer
• 10 Ways E-Commerce Is Reshaping the USPS

Prospects Dim for USPS Early-Retirement Offers

U.S. Postal Service employees waiting for incentives to retire early shouldn’t get their hopes up.

“It is unclear if USPS will continue to use separation incentives to reduce the size of its career workforce,” says a new Congressional Research Service report, “U.S. Postal Service Workforce Size and Employment Categories, FY 1995-FY2014.”

The Postal Service’s latest five-year plan, updated in April 2013, “included a goal to reduce its career workforce to approximately 404,000 employees through attrition by 2017” which would represent a 17.3% decrease (84,300 fewer employees) from FY2014 staffing levels,” the report says.

USPS staff told the CRS this month that it’s working on a new five-year plan, which the researchers said “might contain new strategies for increasing the cost efficiency of the workforce, including the alteration or removal of workforce reduction goals.” Translation: “Postal officials acknowledged they have abandoned their impossible staff-reduction goal and therefore aren’t likely to offer early-retirement incentives any time soon."

USPS shed about 92,000 career workers from FY2010 to FY2013, with more than half receiving such incentives as Voluntary Early Retirement (VERA) and cash bonuses of up to $20,000. But the only early outs in FY2014 involved 1,380 postmasters, and the number of career employees has actually inched up in the past year.

An ecommerce-fueled rise in the USPS’s package business, slower decreases in traditional mail volumes, and apparent abandonment of a plan to curtail Saturday delivery have made obsolete the goal of shrinking to 404,000 careerists. After teetering on the edge of insolvency a couple of years ago, the Postal Service has recently operated on a slightly cash-positive basis despite backing off on workforce-reduction efforts.

Related articles:

• The Hidden Benefit of Postal Service Retirement
• USPS Employment Levels Have Stabilized 
• 10 Ways E-Commerce Is Reshaping the USPS

 

 

10 Ways E-Commerce Is Reshaping the USPS

The E-commerce Revolution is reverberating throughout the U.S. Postal Service, but not in the destructive manner of other digital disruptions like email, online news, and electronic bill payment.

Largely, if not solely, because of online merchants, the agency’s “Shipping and Package” revenue is growing at a 10%-plus annual rate – no doubt a surprise to the digerati who for years have been predicting that the USPS would wither away into obsolescence.

One expert estimates Amazon now turns to the USPS to ship 40% of its U.S. sales, and that doesn’t even include packages that are handled by FedEx and UPS and then turned over to the Postal Service for final delivery.

The rapid growth and favorable prospects for such products as Priority Mail and Parcel Select are bringing about extensive changes to the agency’s operations, plans, and even how it thinks about itself.

Here are some of the ways the E-Commerce Revolution has already changed the U.S. Postal Service:

1) Endangered no more: “Postal worker” still appears near the top of nearly everyone’s list of occupations most likely to go the way of buggy-whip makers, but the lists are out of date. In response to declining mail volumes, the Postal Service endured year after year of downsizing, including 155,000 workers from 2007 to 2012. But the surge in e-commerce deliveries has derailed plans for further cuts, keeping employment levels steady the past three years.

2) Newbies: During the downsizing years, new hires were a rarity, but these days a retiring worker usually has to be replaced, typically by a non-career worker. The USPS’s hiring rate has tripled and its workhours devoted to training have doubled in the past four years. The agency has struggled to recruit new workers and bring them up to speed, acknowledging that the newbies are leading to more mis-delivered mail and on-the-job injuries.

3) Parcel-only routes: I haven’t seen any official statistics on the subject, but anecdotes indicate the USPS is delivering more parcels-only routes rather than the usual approach of having the same letter carrier deliver parcels, letters, and flat mail to the same addresses. One reason is that the agency’s aging fleet of LLV delivery vehicles is not designed for today’s heavy mix of parcels.

4) Renting vehicles: Another sign that the postal delivery fleet is overloaded: The Postal Service is in the process of lining up minivans and cargo vans that are “up to 2 tons capacity for delivery of packages and to fill in for vehicles out of service.” Exact numbers apparently have not been determined, but “during the holiday season one can anticipate that a single location may have a demand level of 50 to 100 vehicles.”

Concept for wifi-enabled cluster mailbox

5) Mailboxes: The USPS recently revised its standards for new residential mailboxes, shifting to a larger size that can accommodate more packages. It’s also trying out new designs for cluster boxes that can handle package deliveries, including ones that are wifi enabled. (In the near future, maybe your mailbox will send you a text saying “You’ve got mail – and a package too!”)

6) Financial strength: The headlines still say the Postal Service is losing money. But take away the Congressional accounting gimmicks and the agency has gone from the verge of insolvency to better-than-breakeven status in recent quarters, with growth in the Parcel Select and Priority Mail products playing a major role.

7) New delivery vehicles: With its stronger cash flow, the Postal Service has been able to accelerate the much-needed replacement of its aging delivery fleet. The new vehicles will have more space devoted to the growing flood of packages from Amazon, eBay, and other online sellers.

8) Non-mail: In the past year or so, letter carriers have been delivering an increasing variety of items that bypassed the usual postal network – such as groceries, cut flowers, fresh seafood, and bottled water. The volumes are generally small and limited to a few test markets, but the trend is toward letter carriers delivering more items that don’t have a stamp, meter mark, or postage label. 

9) Less focus on letters and flat mail: Mailers grumble that postal executives talk and think about nothing but packages these days, even though letters and other boring-ass traditional mail still bring in three-fourths of the USPS’s revenue. They say it’s no coincidence that First-Class Mail delivery has suffered – or that the most recent USPS annual report shows 14 photos of packages and only one that (barely) shows letters. 

10) Sunday: Just five years ago, postal officials were clamoring to shut down all weekend deliveries, though they eventually amended the proposal so that Saturday delivery of parcels would continue. But now Postal Service LLVs are a common site on Sunday in scores of cities, as 7-days-a-week delivery for Amazon has swept across the country since a market test early last year. And postal officials are talking about providing Sunday service for other merchants as well.

Related articles: 

• USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires   
• Yo, Mailman, Bring Me a Flounder and a Dozen Roses
• New Postal Hires Mean More 'Return To Sender' Mail
• USPS Employment Levels Have Stabilized

Does the Postal Service Have Too Many CCAs?

The U.S. Postal Service is pushing its ability to hire low-paid City Carrier Assistants to the limit – and apparently beyond the limit.

The agency had 3,300 more CCAs in April than allowed in its labor contract with the National Association of Letter Carriers, a report USPS issued last week indicated.

The 2011 contract that created the non-career position capped the number of CCAs in each district at 15% of the total number of full-time career city carriers -- plus another 8,000 nationwide to allow "flexible windows which may be necessary to develop and provide new products and services."

The report shows that USPS had 164,582 City Carriers on its rolls in April. Adding 15% of that number plus another 8,000 yields an apparent cap of 32,687 CCAs. But the same report says the Postal Service had 36,074 CCAs.

It could be argued that the Postal Service is following the spirit of the labor agreement because career carriers are not being harmed. None have been laid off, and on average they are getting about as many overtime hours as they did four years ago (though some individual carriers have seen drastic changes in their overtime).

The average base pay for CCAs was recently reported as $15.80 per hour, versus $27.52 and much better benefits for full-time city carriers.

A key to new ventures
USPS is certainly capitalizing on the "flexible windows" and "new products and services" that the NALC contract envisioned. Relying on lower-paid CCAs has been a key to the Postal Service’s rapidly expanding Sunday deliveries for Amazon and its hopes of competing with private businesses on delivering a variety of "non-mail" items from groceries to fresh flowers.

The growing pool of CCAs has also helped USPS serve an increasing number of delivery points and grow its labor-intensive parcel business.

Amazon grocery packages awaiting delivery by CCAs

But the Postal Service will be hard pressed to grow further without increasing the ratio of CCAs to career carriers even more.

Accounts of 60-hour workweeks for bedraggled CCAs are already legion. Since October, CCAs have worked an average of one hour of overtime for every five hours of straight time, and at times during December the ratio was one to three.

The wage savings from using CCAs have also come with some costs. Turnover is high, straining the Postal Service’s ability to hire and train new CCAs. And the new hires are reportedly more prone to injuries and to missed deliveries than are long-time carriers who know their routes well.

Related articles:

• New Postal Hires Mean More 'Return To Sender' Mail
• Why Letter Carriers Are Not an Endangered Species
• Third Bush on the Right, Please: USPS Grocery Deliveries Would Need Lots of TLC from Carriers
• USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires

 

 

Why Letter Carriers Are Not an Endangered Species

“Mail carrier” was recently named as one of the 10 worst careers in the U.S., largely because of a supposedly bleak employment outlook.

“Hiring of mail carriers has been on a steady decline with the proliferation of email and text messaging,” CareerCast said in ranking mail carrier #191 out of 200 careers. “Of all careers tracked in the 2015 Jobs Rated Report, mail carrier has the worst 10-year growth outlook.”

CareerCast’s jobs outlook was based on a U.S. Labor Department projection that the number of mail carriers would shrink by 28% from 2012 to 2022. That’s no surprise: Just about everyone knows that digital technology is making letter carriers an endangered species.

There’s just one problem with this scenario: “Just about everyone” is wrong.

The number of people delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service is actually growing slightly.

It's true that since the end of 2012, the number of career USPS employees involved in mail delivery has dipped slightly, from 243,000 to 237,000. But the shrinkage all occurred during 2013; recent statistics show the number has stabilized or is rising slightly.

And when non-career employees like city carrier assistants (CCAs), are included, mail delivery looks like a growth field. That, plus the high turnover among CCAs, is why “We’re hiring!” signs are popping up at many post offices.

USPS statistics don’t provide apples-to-apples comparisons of non-career employee counts, but the numbers on hours worked are a good proxy. So far this year, the straight-time hours worked by all (both career and non-career) “city delivery carriers” are up 5% from two years ago, while the hours for all “rural carriers” have increased nearly 3%.

Digital technology taketh away, and . . . 
What “just about everyone,” including the Labor Department, seems to miss is that digital technology – specifically, online purchasing – is adding work for the Postal Service’s carrier force. When stuff is bought online, someone has to deliver it.

And when that delivery is to a residential address, chances are that the “final mile” is handled by a USPS letter carrier even if the package was sent via UPS or FedEx.

The Postal Service is doubling down on its unique ability to reach every residential address. It has slashed some Priority Mail prices for frequent shippers and is testing rapid delivery of everything from fresh flowers to groceries.

Outgoing Postmaster General Pat Donahoe hinted late last year that Sunday delivery of packages would soon become the norm, not just something USPS does for Amazon in select markets.

So all indications are that the number of packages delivered by letter carriers will continue growing, which is why specs for USPS’s new delivery vehicles call for more storage space. Those packages are far more labor intensive than traditional mail; Priority Mail boxes don’t end up in nice walk-sequenced trays or carrier-route bundles.

And even the labor savings from the gradual shrinkage of traditional mail mostly get canceled out by continuing growth in the number of delivery addresses.

The big threat
The big threat to employment levels for USPS carriers is possible curtailment of Saturday delivery of letters and flats. But that would put only a sizable dent – nowhere close to a 28% reduction – in letter-carrier employment levels.

And it continues to face rough going in a reluctant Congress, where members have recently been getting an earful from constituents about slow delivery.

So don’t put letter carriers on the endangered-species list just yet. (There may be good reasons to put “mail carrier” on the list of 10 worst jobs, as I'm sure some postal workers would be happy to explain, but employment prospects are not one of them.)

The moral of the story: Beware of projecting past trends into the future, especially when the recent past runs counter to those projections.

Related articles:

• The U.S. Parcel -- uh, Postal -- Service Presents Its Wish List to Congress

• USPS Employment Levels Have Stabilized

• FedEx Cries Foul Over Postal Service Price Cuts

USPS Struggles With Wave of New Hires

The U.S. Postal Service’s shift to a lower-paid workforce comes with a steep price. By the agency’s own admission, the hiring of more non-career employees has led to lower productivity, worse service, higher injury and turnover rates, and increased investment in new training programs.

USPS has historically been staffed by long-serving employees, but currently 103,000-plus employees -- one of every six active postal workers -- has been with the agency less than a year. That's triple the newbie rate of just four years ago.

In those same four years, despite cost-of-living adjustments and other pay raises for most employees, average base pay for the Postal Service has actually declined 4%.

Eat your young
The lower average pay rate was made possible by what some have called “eat your young” labor contracts – where current union members are well taken care of in exchange for concessions regarding future hires.

For example, USPS has more than 37,000 city carrier assistants, a non-career position that emerged from a 2013 labor contract. Their duties are similar to those of career letter carriers – but without most of the benefits and at barely half the pay.

“We hired over 80,000 non-career employees in FY2014 including PSEs [Postal Support Employees], CCAs [City Carriers Assistants] and MHAs [Mail Handler Assistants],” says the Postal Service's Annual Report to Congress. “In addition to trying to hire up to our contractual limits of non-careers, we also experienced a high turnover rate (in excess of 40 percent) for CCAs.”

With savings come new costs
“The non-career employees are generating significant rate savings, but are costing additional hours in hiring and training them, as well as in developing needed delivery experience.”

A major reason the Flats Sequencing System’s productivity dropped during FY2014, according to a recent USPS filing, was high turnover among supervisors and front-line employees. USPS recently responded with stepped-up training for supervisors in FSS operations.

Across the agency last year, other new training programs were rolled out, and the amount of time employees spent in e-learning programs nearly doubled. Now the Postal Service is scaling up its new-employee orientation program, with plans to “engage employees before their first day of work.”

A 12% increase in work-related injuries last year is causing USPS to “increase focus on at-risk employees and those who are new to the organization and less familiar with safe work practices,” says the Report to Congress.

The report also cites “the hiring, training and replacement (due to turnover) of many new employees” as a major reason it has missed its service (day-of-delivery) targets for First-Class Mail several years in a row.

In general, recent USPS communications indicate the agency was caught off guard by, but is now trying to come to grips with, the challenges of relying more heavily on non-career employees.

Related articles:

•  New Postal Hires Mean More 'Return To Sender' Mail
•  Lower Pay Rates Are Boosting USPS's Finances
•  Postal Workforce Is Both Shrinking and Growing
•  8 Reasons USPS Productivity Is Declining: The Employees Speak Out

 

 

USPS Employment Levels Have Stabilized

After years of massive downsizing, the U.S. Postal Service’s workforce has stopped shrinking, at least temporarily.

USPS recently reported having 616,025 active employees, just 362 fewer than a year ago. The number of full-timers actually inched up by 1,464, to 467,844.

That’s a far cry from the previous six years, when the annual workforce reductions ranged from 13,000 to nearly 53,000. Automation, facility closures, declining mail volumes, and a series of early-retirement offers reduced the number of postal workers by 183,000 from 2005 to 2013.

In presenting USPS’s “Plan to Profitability” to Congress in March 2012, Postmaster General Pat Donahoe testified, “The Postal Service projects a further reduction of the equivalent of 155,000 full-time career employees by 2016, which we plan to achieve largely through attrition as half of our career employees are eligible for optional or early retirement.”

But USPS employs only 34,000 fewer full-timers than it did when Donahoe presented that plan. Congress has blocked or slowed such postal “right-sizing” proposals as curtailing Saturday delivery, consolidating the mail-processing network, and closing unprofitable post offices.

Downsizing of the postal workforce seems likely to resume soon, however. USPS is moving forward with a plan to close about 80 processing centers in the next few months, which could lead to a reduction of 15,000 jobs. A recent effort to block the plan in Congress has apparently fizzled out, as have numerous proposals to reform the laws that have pushed the agency into the red.

Related articles:

• USPS Seeks 'Soft Landing' For Downsized Employees, Donahoe Says 
• Why Mailers Support Radical Downsizing of the Postal Service
• Postal Workforce Is Both Shrinking and Growing 
• Lower Pay Rates Are Boosting USPS's Finances

 

People vs. Computers: What's the Best Way To Fix Bad Mailing Addresses?

The U.S. Postal Service’s traditional reliance on “carrier knowledge” to deliver mis-addressed mail is breaking down. But is that good news or bad news?

A USPS executive recently warned that the shift to more non-career carriers is likely to reduce the chances that mail with incomplete or incorrect addresses will be delivered correctly. Comments from both front-line employees and mailers confirm that the trouble has already started.

“Up until about five years ago there was always one carrier on one route meaning that every route was staffed properly,” a 27-year veteran letter carrier commented recently on my article New Postal Hires Mean More 'Return To Sender' Mail. “Plus, we had ‘fixed’ floaters for our days off. This
ensured that the mail was delivered with adequate knowledge. Now, every day is nothing short of chaos. Carriers are scrambling around the office to ‘case up’ vacant routes then doing a two- or three-hour split in addition to your own route. It’s a recipe for failure.”

“I place a big VACANT sticker in my vacant boxes,” a letter carrier wrote on another web site. “Evidently every CCA [city carrier assistant] thinks this is the resident’s name because they stuff it with mail -- every one of ‘em.”

Some commenters believe that relying on carrier knowledge rather than good databases and systems is the real recipe for failure:

“My rural carriers have always re-routed mail because of their personal knowledge and it drives me nuts,” wrote a 20-year postmaster. “I don't condone it because when the sub works, mail gets RTS

[Return to Sender, address unknown. No such number, no such zone]. I can't help the sub, because I don't know either. You'd be a better carrier to push your customers to correct their mail pieces misaddressed, and put their house number on their mailboxes.”

“I could not believe the comments from USPS employees that seemed to be saying that the issue would at least be partially resolved if full time/career employees were the only ones delivering mail because they would know ‘where these people live’," one person commented in the Printing Impressions LinkedIn group for mailers.

“The mail should be addressed properly. That is the only way the system works and especially in a time when people are moving seemingly more frequently. No human can possibly keep track of this for a route of any size (I can barely do it for my family!!!). Address hygiene is key!”

Statistics vs. service
Some postal workers blame the growing delivery problems on postal management that is increasingly emphasizing statistics over service. Said one: “A missed scan point is so much more important to upper management than mis-delivered mail, undelivered mail, or even deliverable mail that ends up being returned to sender because carriers are not given time to properly deal with it.”

Postal workers also complain about businesses and other institutional mailers using outdated address databases. But even industry-standard address-hygiene practices don’t solve all problems.

People often move without notifying the Postal Service, especially since USPS made it harder to obtain the proper forms. And folks forget (or choose not) to share the new address with all of the other organizations with which they have regular dealings.It can take awhile to get updates into the USPS’s address-correction system and even longer to correct data that's just plain wrong.

Stir it up In the interest of stirring up discussion of this knotty problem, here is a selection of other comments made to Dead Tree Edition, other web sites, and LinkedIn groups: 

• "Hmmmmm, where I work many of the subs deliver everything because they're not given the time, they just don't care or they're too incompetent to figure out who does and doesn't live at a certain address."
• "We are not allowed to leave mail at the case for the regular carrier to look at the next day to review. 'There's no such thing as review mail!' So I'll send it to the forwarding system, if there is a change of address in the system it's forwarded, if not then it hopefully comes back when the regular will get a chance to check it. Inefficient, but have to follow bonehead instructions."
• “Maybe the USPS needs to use the new scanners/data collection devices to get real time info from those experienced carriers. Part of the USPS problem is not utilizing technology to the fullest.” 
• "A few tips: 1. The Processing Center I work for does NOT have nixie or uncoded clerks. This means mail without zip codes will be returned. 2. Mail with incorrect zip codes will be sent to the zip code on the mail. A letter sent to Los Angeles, Ca. 10010 will be sent to New York and then returned as undeliverable. 3. First class mail that is undeliverable and does not have a return address will go to the Mail Recovery Center and if no valid address can be determined the mail will be destroyed."
• "I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about returned mail from my customers lately. This is excellent info."
• "The worst part about this is that the USPS is too stupid and inept to create a return to sender shipping label that is trackable and machineable. So your return to sender Priority Mail package goes to a sorting center to be hand sorted and takes two weeks or more to get back to you."
• “It [mis-addressed mail] won`t be returned. It will be delivered. Many of our PTFs [Part-Time Flexible employees] just deliver the DPS [delivery-point sequenced] errors. They couldn`t care less if it goes to the wrong address.” To which someone responded, “Goes hand-in-hand with management that couldn't give a sh1t about the training of these subs......numbers and PFP [pay for performance] uber alles."

Lower Pay Rates Are Boosting USPS's Finances

Partly because of a shift to lower-paid employees, the U.S. Postal Service experienced a rare improvement in its business last year, according to a Postal Regulatory Commission analysis. But the PRC warned that USPS is still on shaky ground – losing money for the seventh year in a row, short on cash, and unable to borrow money or invest in new equipment.

In other words, the good ship Postal Service is still sinking, but it’s not taking on quite as much water as it used to.

The PRC calculates that USPS’s financial loss from operations was “only” $1 billion in FY2013, down from nearly $2.5 billion the previous year. The PRC’s calculation excludes prepaid retiree health benefits (a budgeting gimmick created by Congress that USPS has stopped paying) and one-time accounting adjustments.

“The Postal Service reduced expenses in FY 2013” despite a minuscule decline in mail volume, says the PRC’s analysis of the Postal Service’s annual 10K financial report, released a few days ago. “Workhours and the average hourly compensation and benefits rate were both lower than last year. This indicates that the Postal Service’s finances may be improving.”

“Personnel expenses, including compensation and benefits expenses and systemwide benefit expenses, account for 78 percent of total expenses. The Postal Service reduced compensation and benefits almost $1 billion by increased use of non-career workforce and voluntary retirement incentives.”

Lower average pay rates
With the help of early-retirement incentives, the number of career employees declined by 37,000, all from attrition. In many cases, they were replaced by lower-paid non-career employees, especially because of a union contract allowing more hiring of non-career postal clerks. As a result, in most segments of the Postal Service the “productive hourly rate” of pay actually declined during FY2013.

On the negative side, fuel costs were higher, and USPS had to spend an additional $137 million on supplies when Express Mail was re-branded as Priority Mail Express.

Growth in packages and Standard Mail almost made up for the ongoing decline in First Class Mail. Boosted by price increases, revenue rose by $700 million (1.2%) during the year.

USPS’s strength in residential delivery could enable it to continue prospering from the growth of e-commerce, but the agency is not prepared for such growth, the PRC warned.

“For the burgeoning e-commerce market to become a viable option, the Postal Service needs to replace and improve its existing aging vehicles to accommodate the shift in mail mix toward a higher fraction of packages and to invest in new and efficient mail processing technologies and equipment. The Postal Service’s ability to make these investments is affected by the lack of available working capital.”

Related articles:

• Postal Workforce Is Both Shrinking and Growing 
• Flexible Workforce Lowers USPS Wages -- and Hurts Productivity  
• The United States Postal Service & Power Company?

New Postal Hires Mean More 'Return To Sender' Mail

The U.S. Postal Service’s shift to a more flexible workforce is likely to mean more mail pieces will be marked “return to sender,” according to postal officials.

USPS estimates it delivers at least 2.2 billion mail pieces annually that lack complete address information, according to information presented at a session of the recent National Postal Forum.

With intimate knowledge of their routes, letter carriers are often able to deliver mail pieces despite such problems as missing apartment and suite numbers, minor spelling and addressing errors, and changes of address. USPS says such special handling costs it an estimated $160 million annually, according to a recent Post Ops Update (available only to members of the Association for Postal Commerce).

An imperfect process
What carriers learn about problem addresses is supposed to be captured in the Postal Service's address-management database, but it's an imperfect process.

Because of greater use of “transitional” employees instead of career carriers to deliver the mail, it’s becoming increasingly likely that a poorly addressed letter will end up in the hands of a carrier who doesn’t know how to deliver it, a postal official acknowledged. Such recent hires are paid less than career carriers, and their hours can be adjusted more to match the peaks and valleys of mail volume.

Letter carriers point to another reason that “carrier knowledge” often fails to overcome addressing problems: Even career carriers are increasingly delivering mail to unfamiliar addresses, such as when several carriers work overtime to cover a vacant route after their usual deliveries are done.

USPS returned, forwarded, or destroyed nearly 7 billion “UAA” (Undeliverable As Addressed) mail pieces last year at a cost of more than $1.2 billion, not including the cost to mailers. The volume of UAA mail has generally been declining for years, thanks to stricter regulations on business mailers and greater use of address-correction software.

More than three-fourths of that UAA mail results from changes of address. But another surprisingly common issue is that many people don’t know their correct mailing address, especially for office buildings and college campuses.

Related articles:

• Flexible Workforce Lowers USPS Wages -- and Hurts Productivity
• Postal Workforce Is Both Shrinking and Growing 
• USPS Overtime on the Rise 
• Postal Service Plans to Use More Part-Time Employees

 

Layers of Redundant Management Have Been Eliminated, USPS Says

The U.S. Postal Service's public relations department responded last night to a recent Dead Tree Edition article. We are publishing the response in its entirety, without comment, except to note that article was based on a combination of verifiable facts and readers' opinions. We also note that many postal employees -- supervisors and "suits" as well as worker bees -- have complained vociferously about USPS's organizational structure. And that a significant overhaul of that structure would probably face legal hurdles.


To Dead Tree Edition

Your recent blog post, 17 More Ways USPS Is Not Like a Real Business, provides some good examples of how the Postal Service’s inflexible and outdated business model hinders our ability to compete in today’s marketplace and why there is an urgent need for passage of comprehensive postal reform legislation. We would, however, like to debunk a few myths in your list.

First, the claim that the Postal Service has “many layers of redundant management” and bureaucracy, is not true. In FY 2000, the Postal Service had 74,877 PCES [Postal Career Executive Service] and EAS [Executive and Administrative Schedule] employees. At the end of FY 2013, we only had 54,473. We have also reduced the number of Areas and Districts significantly, going from 10 Areas and over 100 District offices to 7 Areas and 74 Districts.

Regarding the item about electrical safety hazards, employee safety has always been a top priority of the Postal Service. Under terms of a recent settlement with OSHA, the Postal Service has agreed to modify its Electrical Work Plan Management Instruction and Maintenance Management Order so that significant amounts of personal protective equipment are purchased and significant hours of electrical safety training are administered. These changes are being phased in over a two-year period. We will be investing more than $5 million for 123,000 hours of training for nearly 20,000 maintenance employees. We also have distributed more than $2 million in protective safety gear.

As for the safety of our vehicle fleet, the Postal Service maintains a very stringent vehicle inspection program that requires a minimum of two comprehensive inspections performed each year. Inspections are performed by both contractors and USPS maintenance facilities.

The Postal Service operates under the laws that apply to it and does have the power to exercise eminent domain in the name of the United States. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have cited that power as evidence of how we are a government entity.

The Postal Service continues to take the responsible actions needed as outlined in our Five-Year Business Plan to return the organization to long-term financial stability. We need Congress to do its part by passing the legislative requirements in our plan so that the Postal Service can operate more like a “real business” and provide the mail and package service our customers expect and deserve for decades to come.

Sincerely,
Corporate Communications
U.S. Postal Service


Related articles:

• USPS Responds To Criticism of Its Annuity Estimates 
• USPS Has Too Many Supervisors And Too Many Employees, Congressman Says   
• Postal Service Has Too Many Employees and Pays Them Too Much, Mailer Groups Say

 

Postal Workforce Is Both Shrinking and Growing

The U.S. Postal Service added more than 4,000 jobs in February, but the postal workforce is actually shrinking.

USPS’s payroll had 607,600 people in February, up 4,600 from January, according to data released by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.

“The US Postal Service continues to lose money as it is bleeding cash,” responded Jon C. Ogg of 24/7 Wall St. “So can someone please manage to explain how the USPS added jobs at a time that Saturdays are being dumped for delivery days?”

Yes, I can explain: USPS hired the newbies to take up the slack from a massive wave of retirements. And perhaps to save money.

The Postal Service reports that it had 468,000 full-time employees in late

The Hidden Benefit of Postal Service Retirement

Question: When does $16,638 actually equal nearly $30,000?

Answer: When a U.S. Postal Service employee compares the retirement annuity the USPS says he will receive to the payments he will actually get. Ignorance of the additional payments has hindered employees from accepting early-retirement incentives that are so crucial to the Postal Service’s cost-cutting efforts.

Consider the case of “Joan”, an APWU member who is eligible for Voluntary Early Retirement (VERA) and a $15,000 incentive to quit as part of a major USPS downsizing effort. In early October, as part of the incentive program, USPS sent her a notice that her retirement annuity would be $16,638 annually.

After factoring in her other potential income sources, Joan at first decided she couldn’t afford to quit her $53,000-per-year job. But fortunately, she dug a little further and talked to experts in the arcane world of USPS retirement benefits.

An additional $13,000
That’s how Joan learned that if she took the VER she would be eligible for an additional “FERS annuity supplement” of $13,020 annually when she turns 56 in a few years, says Don Cheney, who for years has been helping fellow APWU members understand their various retirement benefits.

“With this new information, she is taking the VER,” Cheney says.