Mailers' Groups Blast NALC Deal

Three mailers' organizations blasted a labor deal with the National Association of Letter Carriers today as proof that the “spendthrift monopolist” U.S. Postal Service “cannot be counted on to control its costs or prices.”

“Rather than bringing compensation more in line with the private sector – as required by postal law – the tentative agreement with NALC worsens the problem,” said a joint statement from Postcom—The Association for Postal Commerce, MPA—The Association of Magazine Media, and the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers.

In defending the current inflation-based price cap on most postal rates, the statement said, the coalition has presented expert testimony showing "that postal workers are paid nearly twice what the private sector pays for similar work."

“The NALC contract confirms that the Postal Service cannot be trusted to make the tough decisions needed to control its own costs.”

The collective bargaining agreement released May 12 would give career letter carriers three pay raises totaling 4.7% over the 40-month life of the contract in addition to seven cost-of-living adjustments. The three mailers groups indicated that the Postal Service didn’t get anything in return for the generous pay package, such as the ability to save money by filling openings with more low-paid non-career employees.

Keeping the cap on CCAs
“Instead of continuing a shift to lower-cost employees, the agreement converts many City Carrier Assistants (“CCAs”) to career status and preserves existing narrow limits on the total number of CCAs that the Postal Service may employ,” the statement said.

“The NALC deal is only one of a recent series of collective bargaining agreements that widen the postal employee compensation premium rather than narrowing it.” The NALC says the contract would cover 213,000 active employees if the union’s members ratify it.

“It is commendable that USPS provides stable, middle-class employment for a large number of employees, but substantially over-compensating them, and paying for this with above-inflation rate increases for mailers, is inappropriate and jeopardizes the whole enterprise. There are proven ways to rein in excess labor costs without disrupting the lives of existing employees,” the coalition's statement said.

Postal officials are seeking legislative relief from the 10-year-old law that keeps rate increases proportional to changes in the Consumer Price Index. But the coalition, along with other mailers, argues that the cap has forced more financial discipline on the USPS and prevented it from imposing large rate increases that would hurt both mailers and the Postal Service itself.

Related articles:

• Why the Rate Cap Isn't Killing the Postal Service 
• Is the APWU Eating Its Young?
• USPS Cost Cutting Ain't Cuttin' It, Mailers Group Says

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

Is the Postal Service Primed for Amazon Prime Day?

Next Wednesday is Amazon Prime Day, a huge promotion that one postal expert predicts will overwhelm the U.S. Postal Service.

Amazon is celebrating its 20th anniversary on July 15 with a one-day online shopping event that will offer “more deals than Black Friday” to members of Amazon Prime, including those who sign up for a free 30-day trial membership.

“It will be interesting to see how USPS handles what is sure to be a major onslaught of Amazon package deliveries, with Amazon Prime two day shipping after the one day sale,” writes Lisa Bowes of Intelisent, a company that advises direct mailers. “Will Prime Day impact delivery for other classes of mail? My guess is – probably so…”

A look at the numbers indicates she is correct – that the Postal Service will struggle to handle the surge of Amazon packages without hurting delivery of other types of mail, even with massive overtime.

In a filing this week with the Postal Regulatory Commission, Amazon said it had 15 sortation centers at the end of 2014, with more on the way, that each prepare “tens of thousands” of packages per day to be handed off to the USPS for final delivery. That indicates that USPS delivers several hundred thousand “Parcel Select” packages to Amazon customers on a typical day. 

The e-commerce giant uses a variety of package-delivery services, but clearly the Postal Service is the favorite because of its ability to deliver to residential customers seven days a week at relatively low cost. Amazon has built an extensive logistics network that bypasses most of the Postal Service’s own network and delivers packages early every morning directly to the USPS’s destination delivery units (DDUs), where letter carriers pick up mail to be delivered later that day.

Membership: 30 million-plus and growing
An RBC Capital analyst estimated 10 months ago that Amazon had 30 to 40 million Prime members in the U.S. The numbers have probably been growing since then, and Prime Day seems likely to boost the membership roster.

Suppose that about 20% of existing U.S. Prime members take advantage of Prime Day and are joined by another 5 million who get a trial membership to take advantage of the deals. And suppose each Prime Day participant orders an average of two items, with half of them destined for “last-mile delivery” by the Postal Service.

That would mean letter carriers would handle 12 million packages, roughly 20 times their normal Amazon volume and more than double their normal daily volume for all Parcel Select packages. (That 12 million number is what we statistical experts call a SWAG, a Sophisticated Wild-Ass Guess. The actual numbers may be much higher or much lower, but with some reasonable – to me – assumptions, you can get a ballpark ideal of how Prime Day might affect postal operations.)

Amazon will have its own logistical challenges but also has opportunities to ease the pain. If the items likely to be hot sellers are spread throughout its network of distribution centers, it can probably hand off many of them to the Postal Service on Thursday, the day after Prime Day, rather than hitting the agency with one big wave on Friday the 17th.

It can also pull other levers, such as making exceptions to the two-day guarantee for certain items, especially those ordered late on Prime Day. And it can highlight deals on digital downloads (e.g. movies, music, e-books) instead of those requiring physical delivery.

The Postal Service has limited ability to handle a huge one-day surge, especially at what is usually a slow time of year when many career employees are on vacation and there are fewer temporary and part-time workers than during the Christmas rush.

Amazon Prime Day and its aftermath may be a challenging test of the Postal Service’s efforts to play in the e-commerce big leagues while still providing traditional mail delivery.

Related articles:

• Why Letter Carriers Are Not an Endangered Species
• Third Bush on the Right, Please: USPS Grocery Deliveries Would Need Lots of TLC from Carriers
• Frenemies: The Love-Hate Relationship Between UPS and the Postal Service Blossoms

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

Tasers on Stun: 9 New Business Ideas for the U.S. Postal Service

Postal officials are taking a close look at the value of the U.S. Postal Service brand and how the agency can capitalize on it. That will inevitably lead to proposals for new products like toy postal delivery trucks and USPS-branded packing supplies.

BOR-ing!

To make some real dough, the folks at L’Enfant Plaza will need to use some creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. Just imagine the following USPS-branded ventures that would build on the unique strengths of a proud organization that can trace its roots back to Benjamin Franklin:

1) Cash Flow Management

How do postal officials do it? USPS loses billions of dollars every year, receives no subsidies, and yet never misses a delivery. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, turn to the folks who have to dig into the cookie jar a couple of times a month to cover 600,000 paychecks.

With USPS BS (Bankruptcy-Avoidance Services) at your side, you’ll be able to live beyond your means year after year without being able to borrow a dime. Let their creative accountants handle all aspects of your personal or business finances. (Except your retirement plan. Congress has been known to “borrow” retirement funds from the Postal Service.)

Legal Eagle

2) Traffic Court Lawyers

Got a parking ticket? Do what the Postal Service does: Don’t pay it! For a reasonable hourly fee,USPS’s Blue Eagle Legal Services will help you claim immunity, dodge local traffic laws, and double-park wherever you want. (Disclosure: Blue Eagle performs no work on Sundays, unless your name is “Amazon.”)

3)  Let's Play Post Office!

Even little kids know what a post office is, so why not capitalize on that brand identity with a series of postal-themed games, like Find the Mailbox in the Dark or Decipher the Scribbled Address?

Angry Birds? Wait until you see Angry Shop Stewards. And for big laughs at birthday parties, don’t forget Pin the Grievance on the Supervisor.

4) Post Office – The Adult Edition

Let’s not leave out the grown-ups. They can get in on the postal-themed fun with hot games like Lick My Stamp and Fifty Shades of LiteBlue!

5) Fast Shredding System

Ready to shred

Here are the facts: 1) People trust the Postal Service. 2) Shredding documents is a boring, thankless task. 3) USPS has 100 giant Flats Sequencing System (FSS) machines that haven’t succeeded in lowering the agency’s costs but do a great job of ripping covers off of magazines and catalogs.

That’s an opportunity for USPS to enter the field of secure document destruction. Just leave your sensitive papers in a specially marked package to be picked up by your trusty letter carrier. It will make its through the Postal System until it's fed into one of the football-field-sized Fast Shredding System machines, which will chew up the pages faster than you can say “For this the Postal Service spent $1.4 billion?”

6) Management Consulting

Let’s face it folks, American businesses have gotten soft, what with all this employee empowerment, sensitivity training, and Kumbaya singing.

If your employees are on the verge of actually liking their jobs, it’s time to bring in a Tiger Team of Postal Service managers to remind your staff that it’s not supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be work, dammit. They’ll show your managers how to set unrealistic goals and then scream at employees  who won’t comply.

Are your first-line supervisors showing disrespect for upper management? The USPS experts will teach them the proper brown-nosing techniques. Or get them filling out enough meaningless reports to prevent them from doing any harm.

And don’t forget that the U.S. Postal Service has probably subjected more employees than any other organization in the world to the cult of Lean Six Sigma management. USPS has even developed the Six-Sigmoidoscope, which can probe your employees to determine which of them has drunk the Kool-Aid and is a potential Black Belt of BS.

Priority Male

7) Male Strippers

Move over, Chippendales, the Postal Service’s own First-Class Males are in the house. USPS has recently brought in thousands of young City Carrier Assistants and put them through their paces working 60 hours a week on walking routes.

Now they’re buffed up enough to put the UPS guys to shame. And boy do they have some packages! Ladies, be sure to bring plenty of bills to stuff into their satchels.

8) Dog Obedience Training

Who knows more about handling unruly dogs than longtime letter carriers? Get your tickets now for Naughty Dog Night at your local post office, where moonlighting postal workers will show you how to stare down a snarling canine, outrun a vicious pack, and pepper spray a pesky pooch. And get 20% off your purchase of a USPS Old Blue Taser, for those times when Rover needs a little extra reminder to obey.

(Warning: U.S. Postal Service Dog Obedience products should not be used in conjunction with Fifty Shades of LiteBlue.)

IMb

9) We-Deliver Obstetric Centers

Why have your baby at a giant, soul-less hospital when she could enter the world in an historic former post office? Turn to the folks who've been handling America's special deliveries for over 200 years.

At We-Deliver, every baby boy gets his very own Intelligent Male barcode!. (Yes, the politically correct Postal Service also offers Intelligent Female barcodes and Intelligent Transgender barcodes.)

For further reading:

• USPS Needs a Plan B for Flat Mail, Coalition Says 
• Nine Ways the Postal Service Is Not Like a Real Business
• 17 More Ways USPS Is Not Like a Real Business
• Ten Ways to Celebrate International Print Day

 

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

 

 

Donahoe Signals Change of Heart on Weekend Deliveries

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made a statement this week demonstrating that postal executives’ views about weekend delivery of packages have changed significantly in the past four years.

"The future will be a seven-day package world and a five-day mail world," a USA Today article quoted Donahoe as saying.

In 2010, the U.S. Postal Service released its “action plan for the future” that called for elimination of Saturday delivery, with no exceptions. But, responding to concerns about delayed deliveries of prescriptions and other vital parcels, postal officials acquiesced and changed their plan to include Saturday delivery of packages.

No one – not even the most ardent advocates of postal service or even the postal unions – was talking about adding Sunday delivery of any kind.

But in recent months, weekend delivery of parcels has gone from obligation to opportunity. The Postal Service is delivering Amazon packages in a growing number of urban markets. In San Francisco, it is testing same-day, seven-days-a-week delivery for multiple retailers and today added early-morning grocery deliveries to its test offerings in that city.

Donahoe’s comment to the newspaper suggests that the long-term plan is for Sunday to become just another day of delivery as far as parcels are concerned.

Why the change of heart?
Why are postal executives who wanted to eliminate a day of parcel delivery barely four years ago now trying to add a day?

They are seeing huge potential in the e-commerce boom, which is fueling rapid growth in business-to-residence deliveries. And they are recognizing where the much-maligned USPS has competitive advantages over its private competitors.

United Parcel Service, for example, is seeing 60+% annual growth in UPS SurePost, its low-priced option that turns packages over to the Postal Service for final delivery. FedEx’s SmartPost similarly relies on the Postal Service to for “the last mile” delivery to residential customers. Neither company can deliver to residential customers as efficiently as USPS can.

In a move to cut out those middlemen and grab more of the e-commerce dollars, the Postal Service recently reduced Priority Mail parcel rates for big mailers by as much as 55%.

Changes in its workforce have also enabled USPS to reduce its delivery costs. The average hourly rate for the city-carrier force, for example, dropped 5% in the past year as the Postal Service increasingly relied on city carrier assistants (CCAs) and other non-career employees. The agency plans to have only CCAs delivering groceries in the San Francisco test.

What’s also changing is the Postal Service’s strategic focus. The same electronic media that are cutting into USPS’s traditional bread and butter – delivering letters – are also creating profitable growth opportunities in the package business. That’s why it wants to give short shrift to traditional mail while expanding service in the package realm.

Unlike letter delivery, USPS doesn’t have a monopoly in the parcel world. But its massive delivery network and unique ability to reach every address in the country every day of the week may give it a virtual monopoly in certain types of package delivery.

Related articles:

• Frenemies: The Love-Hate Relationship Between UPS and the Postal Service Blossoms
• Third Bush on the Right, Please: USPS Grocery Deliveries Would Need Lots of TLC from Carriers
• How USPS Could Bypass Congress on Saturday Delivery

 

Third Bush on the Right, Please: USPS Grocery Deliveries Would Need Lots of TLC from Carriers

Mail carrier was recently named the most endangered job in the U.S., but the U.S. Postal Service seems to have other ideas. Its plan to deliver groceries to households in major metropolitan areas is the latest among several strategic moves that would mean more work for employees who handle the "last mile" of delivery.

Please, Mr. Postman, look and see,
Are there some groceries in a tote for me?

The Postal Service’s proposed market test of same-day grocery deliveries, apparently in partnership with Amazon, would require even more TLC on the part of USPS’s carrier force than normal deliveries, the agency revealed this week in filings with the Postal Regulatory Commission.

“All Customized Delivery items will be transported directly to a customer’s door and will be delivered [between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m.] without disturbing the recipient,” USPS revealed to the PRC. “Customized Delivery also will allow recipients to provide specific delivery instructions.”

Back door man
“Carriers would need to go to each delivery door and manage customer specific delivery instructions.” To avoid theft of the early-morning deliveries, such “special delivery instructions” could conceivably include placing the special grocery-filled totes at back doors, in hallways, into parked cars, or even behind bushes. Undeliverable totes would be returned to the shipper.

“Participants will pay a fee for the Customized Delivery Service,” USPS wrote. UPS is reportedly close to rolling out a service that, for a $5 fee or a $40 annual membership, would deliver someone’s packages to a nearby store instead of to the home.

The Postal Service has recently been encouraged to enter a wide variety of new ventures, most notably providing banking services to the poor and to rural residents. But postal executives’ new-revenue plans are all focused on leveraging the agency’s massive, every-address delivery network: not only by serving the grocery business but also with Sunday deliveries for Amazon, aggressive price cuts on lightweight packages sent by large mailers, and seeking legislative approval to deliver wine and beer.

All of those growth efforts are far more labor intensive – and higher priced – than USPS’s traditional job of delivering letters. The Postal Service is also adding thousands of new delivery points every day, requiring more travel time for carriers even if mail volumes don't grow. So it's premature to assume that letter carriers will soon go the way of buggy-whip makers.

Market disruption? 
To gain the PRC’s approval for its proposed two-year “Customized Delivery” market test of grocery delivery, USPS must show that the venture would not disrupt existing markets or rely on “unfair” competitive advantages over private businesses.

Starting later this month, USPS wants “to test and develop a long-term, scalable solution to enable expansion of customized delivery to additional major metropolitan markets across the nation.” It might also test other delivery times during the day.

“The Postal Service will negotiate price with each customer [presumably the grocer, not the consumer], in part, based on the pickup schedules specific to each customer.” USPS also hopes the test will determine “the optimal pricing structure for this type of service.”

San Francisco test  
The agency recently conducted a smaller-scale test of grocery delivery in the San Francisco area. City carrier assistants – non-career postal employees – delivered about 160 totes per day to 38 ZIP codes, according to postal officials.

“In the current process,” USPS told the PRC, “the retailer brings groceries already packed into retailer-branded totes, some of which are chilled or include freezer packs, directly into Postal Service destination delivery units (DDUs) between 1:30 a.m. and 2:30 a.m."

“The totes are all the same size and color, and have a QR code on the outside. The Postal Service receives a manifest file from the retailer containing the address and QR code number for each tote. This file is used by the Postal Service to dynamically route totes and create a line of travel for each route.”

“These deliveries are unattended — the CCA will not ring the doorbell or knock on the door. The carrier places the totes in a location designated by the consumer for delivery.

“Totes are scanned [sometimes with an iPhone] at key steps in the process to provide tracking and visibility through to delivery. CCAs wear postal uniforms and lighted caps as a safety measure and for easy recognition by the public.”

[Editor’s note: Perhaps such lighted caps should also be provided to carriers who have to make normal deliveries after sunset during the winter months.]

Related articles:

• USPS Employment Levels Have Stabilized 
• Frenemies: The Love-Hate Relationship Between UPS and the Postal Service Blossoms 
• How About A Drug-Sniffing, Meter-Reading, Photo-Taking, Bug-Spraying Postal Service?

Are USPS Changes Leading to More Work-Related Injuries?

Letter carriers and other postal employees have been saying for several years that changes at the Postal Service would lead to more job-related injuries. A new report suggests they may be right.

"Despite the Postal Service’s efforts to decrease the number of employees [by 19% since 2008], its workers’ compensation costs have increased 35 percent,” the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General noted in a report last week.

The OIG pointed out that USPS’s workers compensation costs per work hour are now 59% higher than those of comparable private-industry workforces. But it offered no data that would help explain the dramatic increases, which led to $1.3 billion in workers compensation claims from July 2012 to June 2013.

The report speculated as to the causes, but most of its guesses seem off the mark: Older workforce? (Nope, it’s not much older on average than it was in 2008.) Cost-of-living adjustments? (Average hourly pay at the Postal Service is up only 7% since 2008.) Workers compensation fraud? (You mean that didn’t exist in 2008?)

The OIG put forth one plausible explanation – “the reduced number of light/limited duty positions available because of automation and lower mail volume.” But it didn’t consider several other possibilities, most of which have been put forward by front-line employees:

• Increased street time: Delivery-point sequencing of letters – and, for some areas, flat mail – have meant carriers spend less time in the office sorting mail and more time delivering. That’s likely to lead to repetitive-strain injuries, especially on walking routes, for carriers who are delivering to more addresses than ever. 
• Longer hours: The proportion of overtime hours is up 80% for mailhandlers and 30% for letter carriers so far this fiscal year versus the same period in FY2008. That may also lead to more repetitive-strain injuries. 
• Night-time deliveries: Reports of carriers working their routes after dark, especially during the winter in northern parts of the country, have grown dramatically in the past couple of years. That seems to be a combination of longer routes and of mail arriving at the delivery units later than in the past. In any case, having carriers negotiating icy sidewalks at night is a prescription for more slips, falls, and fractures. 
• More uninsured employees: USPS has reduced its costs the past few years partly by replacing retirees with lower-paid, often younger non-career employees. Such employees are more likely to report a pinched nerve or sore knee as a work-related injury, since many have little or no health insurance. 
• More parcels: Letter volume is declining, but postal employees are handling and delivering more packages than ever -- often using delivery vehicles not suited to the purpose. The higher proportion of heavy and oversized mail pieces may be causing more injuries.

The Postal Service can’t address the troubling workers compensation trend without understanding the causes. And the way to get at the causes is not with speculation but with actual data – for example, trends in injuries by occupation, age, and type.

To be fair, the OIG report does offer viable ways for USPS to manage its workers compensation costs better and for overhauling the relevant laws. It notes that the agency is paying workers compensation to two “active” employees who are more than 100 years old – certainly a sign that something is amiss.

Related articles:

• Flexible Workforce Lowers USPS Wages -- and Hurts Productivity 
• 8 Reasons USPS Productivity Is Declining: The Employees Speak Out 
• Postal Service Trial of '100 Percent Street Time' Fails
• USPS Overtime on the Rise

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."

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

 

5 Myths of Saturday Mail Delivery

Misunderstandings abound regarding the U.S. Postal Service’s proposal to end Saturday delivery of all mail except parcels later this year. Here some of the most common myths:

1) Congress recently put a stop to the plan. That’s the story told by the news media, Congress, and the Government Accountability Office, but it’s not necessarily true. Congress did indeed put the requirement to continue six-day mail delivery into a recently approved appropriations bill. But the USPS’s Office of Inspector General says that if the Postal Service merely refuses the pittance in such appropriations (which are mostly for free mail for the blind), it would not be blocked from ending Saturday delivery. And it’s not even clear whether USPS’s plan – which would continue Saturday delivery of certain types of mail – would violate the legislation.

2) Ending Saturday delivery would save USPS $2 billion per year. Even the Postal Service talks about $2 billion in savings, but in reality its position is that its profitability (cost savings minus lost revenue) would grow by $2 billion. The calculations have been subject to debate and competing interpretations, partly because of different assumptions about how much business would be lost. Also, the $2 billion estimate was for full cessation of Saturday delivery, not for the latest plan to have mostly non-career employees delivering profitable parcels on Saturday.

3) The loss of customers would hurt the Postal Service. Actually, it could be a blessing. The customers who care most about Saturday delivery are daily newspapers and certain weekly publications; few other mailers care so much about getting delivery on a specific day of the week. Newspapers may be USPS’s most unprofitable product because they are often inefficiently prepared for mailing, can be difficult to sort, and sometimes get special treatment. Even highly presorted and dropshipped weekly magazines – though not as unprofitable as USPS alleges – are no big money maker. And most will survive without Saturday delivery.

4) Letter carriers oppose ending Saturday delivery. Yes, the main carrier’s union, the National Association of Letter Carriers, is vehemently opposed to the Postal Service’s plan. But many rank-and-file carriers would be happy to get Saturdays off. The NALC is “fighting a battle the majority of its members do not want,” writes Tom Wakefield, a city carrier and NALC member who runs PostalMag.com.“Five-day would be such a benefit to letter carriers. Today, because of shortages of letter carriers in many districts, many, many carriers are being mandated to work on their days off against their wishes, often with less than 24 hours notice,” adds Wakefield, mirroring frequent comments by rank-and-file carriers to Dead Tree Edition and other sites. “Today, the ‘daily grind’ is stretched to six days, with a Sunday off and one day during the week for many carriers. Five-day would allow two days off in a row and the daily grind would only be five days.” Many carriers are also hoping that five-day delivery would cause USPS to thin its carrier ranks by offering retirement incentives.

5) Ending Saturday delivery is the key to saving the Postal Service. No one who has looked at USPS’s finances believes five-day delivery is a cure-all, regardless of their position on the Postal Service’s plan. Because of declining mail volumes, $2 billion alone is not enough turn around the Postal Service even if the accounting games with postal pensions and “pre-funded” retiree benefits are corrected. More cost cuts or, less likely, significant new revenue sources are needed to keep USPS afloat.

Related articles:

• The Law Is On Donahoe's Side Regarding Saturday Delivery 
• How USPS Could Bypass Congress on Saturday Delivery  
• Is the Postal Service Really Broke?  
• Do Postal Execs Want To Lose Money on Periodicals?

USPS Could Save $1 Billion By Combining Delivery Operations, Study Says

The U.S. Postal Service could save about $1 billion annually by closing nearly 10,000 postal facilities that house both retail and carrier functions, according to a study released today.

A plan presented by the USPS’s Office of Inspector General would mean fewer clerks and postmasters but increased labor costs for letter carriers.

"These consolidations [would] reduce facility space costs by $817 million and support labor costs by $566 million, but they also come with additional carrier travel costs of $374 million to obtain the net cost reduction of $1 billion.”

“The greatest opportunities for facility consolidation are with the highest-density ZIP Codes where the space per route is high and other units are nearby,” the report says. That’s in apparent contrast to the Postal Service’s own approach to closing post offices, which critics claim overwhelmingly focuses on sparsely populated rural areas.

The OIG’s elaborate costing model shows that “delivery support” performed by clerks and postmasters is most efficient in offices with at least five carrier routes.

Equivalent to 7,000 employees
“The model predicts a significant potential savings of 13.6 million delivery support labor hours,” the report says. Those labor savings, roughly the equivalent of 7,000 full-time employees, “are associated primarily with the consolidation of labor hours of small office postmasters and clerks at the smaller delivery units.”

Postal Service Trial of '100 Percent Street Time' Fails

The U.S. Postal Service recently experimented with “100 Percent Street Time” – assigning some carriers only to prep mail and others only to deliver – then abandoned the project because it didn’t save money. But the concept is not completely dead.

Yesterday’s Dead Tree Edition article, 8 Reasons USPS Productivity Is Declining: The Employees Speak Out, erred when it stated that nothing more has been heard “about a 2010 USPS proposal to have some carriers making deliveries all day."

In fact, in a report with the nap-inducing title of City Delivery Route Optimization Pilot Initiative, the USPS Office of Inspector General revealed two weeks ago that the Postal Service canceled a months-long 100 Percent Street Time experiment on June 30.

The OIG agreed with the cancellation because "there is an unfavorable business case for proceeding with the pilot. For the eight sites we reviewed during the pilot, office and street workhours increased with no efficiency improvements."

Workhour savings did not occur
“Area and district officials stated that workhour savings did not occur due to the learning curve for carriers casing multiple routes,” the OIG report said. “In both phases [the first in areas served by Flats Sequencing System machines, the second in non-FSS areas], casers received assistance from deliverers to complete casing duties timely.”

“Our review found an increase in carrier street workhours and overtime, amounting to no savings in both phases of the pilot. Management expected to expand street time by creating full-time street assignments and anticipated more consistent delivery times through reductions in overtime and delivery inconsistencies associated with splitting routes among several carriers in the unit.”

“Management stated that increased workhours and overtime were due to carrier sick leave, increases in office time, errors in Carrier Optimal Route adjustments, vacant routes, and some carriers protesting the concept by deliberately performing less efficiently, and lack of management oversight at the unit level.”

“Carriers filed grievances for out-of-schedule premium pay due to time worked outside of their regularly scheduled workday, which may result in additional pay to these carriers.”

More labor flexibility needed
“There is potential for the pilot concept to achieve significant savings if the Postal Service had more workforce flexibility built into the labor agreement,” citing one district where the experiment saved $611,000 on an annualized basis because of an unusually flexible workforce.

“The Postal Service could maximize workhour savings by using part-time letter carriers for office assignments and full-time carriers for street assignments.”

With that concept, part-time casers would start work at 6 a.m. and spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes casing mail for several carrier routes. After that, they might help carriers make deliveries. “Deliverers” would start work between 8:40 and 9 a.m., load up their trucks, and spend an average of 7½ hours making deliveries.

The concept raises some questions, some of which Dead Tree Edition asked back in 2010, such as:

• Who can case a route more efficiently, a person who delivers the route regularly or a specialized caser who has never seen the route? 
• Other than requiring fewer delivery vehicles, how would the concept save money? In other words, how would divvying up the work differently actually change the number of hours required to do the work? (There might be savings from using more part-time carriers, but that doesn't require splitting the roles of caser and deliverer.)
• Do postal officials think deliverers on walking routes would be able to handle a full shift on the street without their productivity suffereing? How about on peak-volume days when that “average” of 7 ½ hours might become 10 or more? 
• How would other USPS operations (such as processing and distribution centers) be affected if mail has to be at the delivery units by 6 a.m.? How would service be affected?

8 Reasons USPS Productivity Is Declining: The Employees Speak Out

News that the U.S. Postal Service’s productivity has taken a turn for the worse comes as no surprise to many USPS employees, especially letter carriers.

Many postal workers responded to last week’s article, USPS Productivity Has Declined This Year, about USPS delivering fewer mail pieces per work hour than it did a year ago. From the comments, on Dead Tree Edition and on other sites, come eight reasons for the USPS’s declining productivity:

1. Longer hours: “Perhaps if we weren't so short staffed and didn't have endless OT being forced upon us, our productivity would be better,” wrote one of several letter carriers who blamed declining productivity on fatigue caused by longer routes and work days. USPS statistics back up claims from the front line that overtime is increasing among carriers.


2. More street time: Not only are carriers working longer hours, automation has resulted in them spending more of their day actually delivering mail rather than preparing it for delivery. “I know I am nowhere near as fresh at hour 10 as I am when the day starts after walking in 90 plus heat and full humidity.” Automating the sequencing of mail had been contributing to rising productivity the past few years, but how much of those gains are being lost to burnout? (Which may be why we've heard nothing more about a 2010 USPS proposal to have some carriers making deliveries all day while others prepped mail full time. Aug. 5 update: Oops! USPS recently experimented with the concept, as discussed in Postal Service Trial of '100 Percent Street Time' Fails.)


3. Flats Sequencing System: And then there’s the issue of what happens when automation doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. “The billion-dollar wonder flat trashing machines are a nightmare on the street,” wrote one carrier. The huge machines’ erratic performance sometimes result in carriers spending just as much time preparing the mail, or even more, but now have more addresses to serve than in the past because of the expected productivity gains from FSS. Last winter, that led to many carriers delivering mail after dark – definitely not a high-productivity environment.


4. Shortage of postal clerks: “There are fewer clerks processing mail. It takes longer to get the mail to the carriers, so it takes longer for them to get it to the street,” said one employee. “For every one minute of delay on the workroom floor each morning, you lose (1) x the number of carriers,” noted another. “We have about 60 routes. We've had one clerk excessesd, one moved to the 'Concierge' position, etc. We lose the equivalent of 50-60 man hours nearly every day.”


5. More delivery points: “Adding millions of delivery points every year will always increase delivery costs,” wrote one commenter, “while increasing volumes (or decreasing volumes) will have little effect on delivery costs because most of the delivery cost (the cost of servicing a delivery point) is fixed while the marginal cost of delivering a mailpiece is darn near negligible in comparison to the fixed cost. In other words, the cost is in having the carrier walk up to the door; whether he is carrying 8 pieces or 3 pieces doesn't affect the cost of making that delivery.”


6. More parcels: “Parcels definitely take more time” than letters, noted one carrier. The Postal Service’s growing parcel business, coupled with the declining letter business, means fewer mail pieces can be delivered per work hour.


7. Management: The complaints about USPS having “too many supervisors who supervise the supervision of supervisors” are nothing new. But many employees believe that USPS’s recent downsizing efforts have focused too heavily on unionized employees and not enough on supervisors and administrators who never "touch the mail.”


8. Morale: Cutbacks, increased labor-management disputes, and USPS’s insolvency are discouraging postal workers and sapping their productivity, several have said. One put the situation succinctly: “Good news---> high morale---> high productivity. Bad news ---> low morale---> low productivity.”

FSS Machines Running Far Slower Than Planned

Flats Sequencing System machines continue to run much slower than their target speeds and aren't getting any faster. But they also aren't breaking down as often as they were last year, according to a Postal Service presentation.

From October through mid-February, the average number of pieces sequenced hourly ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 per week, well below the target of nearly 12,000. Throughputs so far this year have stabilized in the range of 8,000 to 9,000 per hour with a slightly downward trend, according to a presentation Megan J. Brennan, USPS's Chief Operation Officer, made at a recent Mailers Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) meeting.

But the "Mean Time Between Failure", a measure of how frequently the machines break down that was at about 10 for most of August and September, has been consistently above 13 recently. And the time it took to get a machine back online dropped by about one-third in a six-month period.

Bad Customer Service Is Built into the Design of U.S. Post Offices, Report Says

Have you ever stood in a long, slow-moving line at a post office and wondered why only one employee was helping customers?

The problem is the way the traditional U.S. post office is structured, with delivery and retail operations in the same building, according to an Inspector General’s report released today. It’s high time to separate those functions in many urban and suburban areas, says the report, entitled “Retail and Delivery: Decoupling Could Improve Service and Lower Costs.”

“Unlike most retail stores in the private sector where employees are called up from the back office when lines are long to serve the customer, the focus in Postal Service shared facilities is the exact opposite. A clerk’s first priority is often back room operational support activities — even if that means a retail customer waits longer in line.”

Managers of a typical post office “primarily focus on delivery performance and cost control over providing retail service or promoting revenue generation. In fact, their performance evaluations often guide them to focus on meeting delivery cost and service goals to the exclusion of retail service or revenue generation goals. “

“There is no inherent business need to have retail co-located with delivery. If reasonably increased workforce flexibility is allowed (by allowing some retail clerks to work a half day, for example), the business need for coupling could effectively disappear. The recently approved contract with the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) introduced new scheduling flexibility for career employees that might support this change.”

Twice as many U.S. postal facilities have both delivery and retail operations than have only retail operations, the report says. By contrast, private delivery companies and the best foreign postal services put delivery operations in commercial areas near major transportation hubs and retail operations close to where customers live and work.

Retail and delivery have been coupled in U.S. post offices for 150 years, the report says, but that model no longer makes sense in densely populated areas, according to the report.

“Carriers once spent more than half of their day manually sorting mail at the local carrier office before delivering it, but now devote slightly more than two hours per day to this function.”

“With carriers spending less time in the office, more mail can be delivered by each carrier and there is less need for letter carriers in each facility. With fewer carriers and the removal of local sorting equipment, there is idle floor space in facilities and less need for carrier vehicle parking.”

“The Postal Service could consolidate two nearby postal facilities into a single carrier-only facility and relocate it to a lower-cost facility with better connections to transportation links. This would produce savings by reducing both facility and transportation costs and by designing a space geared specifically toward efficient delivery operations.”

USPS Overtime on the Rise

Many Postal Service employees report working longer hours recently, and the statistics back them up: Overtime hours have increased more than 11% this fiscal year versus the same period last year even though the workforce is smaller.

Complaints about letter carriers out delivering mail until 8 p.m. may not be isolated cases. Payroll statistics the U.S. Postal Service released yesterday indicate that overtime hours per full-time city delivery carrier have increased more than 20% over last year.

Part-time city carriers are also keeping busy, working nearly one hour of overtime for every six of straight time from October of last year through Feb. 26. (Makes you wonder why they're called "part time".) Their overtime is up 8% this year even though their straight time hours are down 8%.

The trend of declining straight-time hours -- which indicates fewer employees -- coupled with more overtime shows up in other crafts, especially mail handlers (8% more OT) and clerks (up 5%).

For all bargaining-unit employees, overtime is up 12% even though straight time is down 4%. The typical bargaining-unit employee works one hour of overtime for every 10 of straight time.

Two areas of the Postal Service not showing net workforce reductions are Headquarters and "Area/Operations Offices"; total hours are up about 3% in both cases.

How About A Drug-Sniffing, Meter-Reading, Photo-Taking, Bug-Spraying Postal Service?

Now maybe we know what the head of the Postal Regulatory Commission means when she says the U.S. Postal Service has not pursued all of its possible business opportunities under current law.

What some view as the Postal Service’s ball and chain – the obligation to deliver to every address – could become a competitive advantage for a variety of businesses if mobile sensors were mounted on letter carriers’ trucks, according to Michael J. Ravnitzky, chief counsel to PRC chair Ruth Goldway.

“Mobile sensors mounted on postal trucks could collect and aggregate a variety of important data as a byproduct of postal delivery, taking advantage of efficiencies of scope and scale. The data collected might include, among others, air pollution levels, weather data, sensing of chemical and biological agents, and areas of weak cell phone service,” says a paper Ravnitzky recently presented.

They go everywhere
“Postal delivery trucks that go everywhere nearly every day offer a unique platform, and a valuable opportunity, to fulfill important additional national objectives. As postal trucks travel the neighborhoods of America (and other nations), they could also collect data important to the country’s safety, security, well-being and economic progress.”

Using existing technology, Ravnitzky writes, such sensors could also map potholes, sniff out methamphetamine labs and marijuana farms, read utility meters, scan license plates to identify stolen cars, take “street view” photos, and disperse “pheromones to disrupt and confuse the insect courtship and mating processes” of gypsy moths, mosquitoes, and other pests.” (Speaking of pest control, I know of some letter carriers who’d want a spray that keeps postal supervisors off their backs.)

The slide show accompanying Ravnitzky’s paper says the presentation represents his views and not those of his employer. But the paper was posted on the PRC’s Web site this week. And a previous Ravnitzky paper on electric delivery vehicles (See The United States Postal Service & Power Company?) grew out of a Goldway article and seemed to influence her statements on the subject.