The controversial proposed labor contract between the U.S. Postal Service and the American Postal Workers Union includes an unusual bonus for the world’s largest postal union: a USPS-funded incentive of up to $7,000 annually for thousands of “non-career” employees to join APWU.
The incentive would come in the form of a health-insurance benefit for “postal support employees” – the new name for casual and temporary workers. After one year on the job, they could sign up for employer-sponsored health insurance, with USPS paying 75% of the premium if they choose the "APWU Consumer Driven Health Plan". (See pages 173-174 of the contract for details.)
Only APWU members can sign up for the APWU health plan.
For an employee buying family coverage, the Postal Service share of the premium would cost $6,817 at current insurance rates, according to a union presentation. For employee-only coverage, USPS would pay $3,030.
Federal agencies are not allowed to encourage or discourage their employees from joining unions. Postal executives presumably believe that the indirect nature of the proposed incentive would not violate union-neutrality rules.
The proposed 4 ½-year contract, which faces a ratification vote next week, would allow significant increases in the number of PSEs so that they eventually might constitute nearly 20% of bargaining-unit employees. That means the healthcare provision could end up applying to about 30,000 workers.
The healthcare provision would give the APWU a way to gain new members from a group of employees who rarely join, helping to counter its membership losses from the Postal Service's elimination of career positions via retirements. It was part of the price postal executives are willing to pay for some valuable concessions it would gain from APWU, such as lower pay for new employees (See Is the APWU Eating Its Young?) and a greater ability to match staffing to fluctuating mail volumes.
The proposed contract has been attacked from both sides. Former APWU President William Burrus and others have criticized current APWU leadership for caving in to postal management and big mailers and for selling out future employees. Meanwhile, Republican Congressmen have labeled the deal as a giveaway to the APWU and have scheduled a hearing on the proposal.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that the proposed contract resulted from some extreme “horse trading”. The question is which side got the better horses.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
USPS Retirement Mess: A Major Barrier To Downsizing
Here's one way labor unions are hindering staff reductions at the U.S. Postal Service -- telling their members the truth about the challenges of retiring from USPS.
Consider this statement from a recent article for members of the National Association of Letter Carriers:
"The Office of Personnel Management continues to struggle with timely completion of new retirees’ annuities," writes Ernest Kirkland, NALC Director of Retired Members. "Again, each member who is considering retirement should try to have a five-month reserve of his or her anticipated retirement income available prior to retiring. Saving 440 hours of annual leave for payment at retirement will be a great start toward that goal."
Kirkland also told Federal Times a few days ago week that the union is getting an increasing number of calls from recently retired members who are getting lower pension payments than they should while the Office of Personnel Management calculates their correct payments. The interim payments are sometimes half of what the retirees are supposed to be paid, according to the Federal Times' Stephen Losey.
The cash-strapped Postal Service hopes to reduce employment by 30,000 people this year, mostly through retirement, helped in some cases by early-retirement incentives. But how many more would retire if the process were smoother -- for example, as straightforward as it usually is for large private employers? (After all, influential Congressman Darrell Issa, R-CA, says USPS could stand to lose 200,000 employees.)
NALC has filed a grievance against the Postal Service for failing to provide retirement counseling to employees as required by law. And officials of the American Postal Workers Union have warned about USPS providing pension estimates to employees that were too low or just plain wrong.
The irony here is that union officials have a vested interest in discouraging retirements to prevent reductions in the number of active, dues-paying members, and yet they are trying to smooth the retirement process for employees. Meanwhile, the politicians and postal executives who are so eager to cut the Postal Service's workforce seem to have been silent on these hurdles in the retirement process.
Fortunately, the OPM is battling the backlog of retirement applications from federal and USPS employees by hiring new claims processors and having them work overtime. Let's hope it can clean up the process before the Postal Service runs out of money.
Update: This article wasn't as clear as it could have been, which caused some people to misinterpret my view and think that I am blaming the unions. I was being sarcastic; I certainly don't blame the postal unions for telling the truth. I was trying to point out that the unions are addressing a problem that management should be eager to solve.
Other articles on the Postal Service's problems with retirement benefits include:
Consider this statement from a recent article for members of the National Association of Letter Carriers:
"The Office of Personnel Management continues to struggle with timely completion of new retirees’ annuities," writes Ernest Kirkland, NALC Director of Retired Members. "Again, each member who is considering retirement should try to have a five-month reserve of his or her anticipated retirement income available prior to retiring. Saving 440 hours of annual leave for payment at retirement will be a great start toward that goal."
Kirkland also told Federal Times a few days ago week that the union is getting an increasing number of calls from recently retired members who are getting lower pension payments than they should while the Office of Personnel Management calculates their correct payments. The interim payments are sometimes half of what the retirees are supposed to be paid, according to the Federal Times' Stephen Losey.
The cash-strapped Postal Service hopes to reduce employment by 30,000 people this year, mostly through retirement, helped in some cases by early-retirement incentives. But how many more would retire if the process were smoother -- for example, as straightforward as it usually is for large private employers? (After all, influential Congressman Darrell Issa, R-CA, says USPS could stand to lose 200,000 employees.)
NALC has filed a grievance against the Postal Service for failing to provide retirement counseling to employees as required by law. And officials of the American Postal Workers Union have warned about USPS providing pension estimates to employees that were too low or just plain wrong.
The irony here is that union officials have a vested interest in discouraging retirements to prevent reductions in the number of active, dues-paying members, and yet they are trying to smooth the retirement process for employees. Meanwhile, the politicians and postal executives who are so eager to cut the Postal Service's workforce seem to have been silent on these hurdles in the retirement process.
Fortunately, the OPM is battling the backlog of retirement applications from federal and USPS employees by hiring new claims processors and having them work overtime. Let's hope it can clean up the process before the Postal Service runs out of money.
Update: This article wasn't as clear as it could have been, which caused some people to misinterpret my view and think that I am blaming the unions. I was being sarcastic; I certainly don't blame the postal unions for telling the truth. I was trying to point out that the unions are addressing a problem that management should be eager to solve.
Other articles on the Postal Service's problems with retirement benefits include:
Saturday, March 26, 2011
The Google Panda Update Is a Change I Can Bear
Maybe my incompetence in search-engine optimization is paying off. Or maybe Google really has figured out how to make Web searches more relevant.
The Internet world has been all aflutter the past month because of changes Google made to its top-secret search algorithms that it says affected 11.8% of queries. Some publishers are indicating their Google traffic is up a bit, while other sites some with seemingly good content have seen Google traffic drop by 40% or more.
Officially called the Panda update but sometimes referred to as the Farmer update, the changes were meant, in Google’s words, to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
For Dead Tree Edition, the changes seem to have increased Google traffic by about 18%. I say “seem” because search traffic to this little blog fluctuates greatly – and generally constitutes less than 10% of total visitors.
Dead Tree Edition is on the first page of results for some really long-tail search terms like “son of black liquor”, “NewPage bankruptcy”, and – everyone’s favorite -- “cardboard porn”. But the most common search terms are variants of “dead tree”, such as “dead tree blog”, which suggest that people heard or read about an article but didn’t have a link to follow. Or maybe my regular readers haven’t figured out how to use bookmarks, Twitter, RSS, or LinkedIn.
Anyway, I figured the best way to assess Panda was to compare the traffic from Google searches to that for Yahoo! searches, under the assumption that Yahoo! has made no significant changes to its search methods.
During the month leading up to the change, which Google says it started rolling out on Feb. 23, there was an average of 5.61 visitors coming to this blog from Google for every one coming from Yahoo. So far this month, the average daily ratio is 6.61, an increase of 17.8%.
I ignored the Feb. 23-28 period because of reports that it took Google a few days to implement Panda completely. With slightly different assumptions about what periods to study, the increase in the Google-to-Yahoo ratio was never below 12% and was sometimes as high as 21%.
Of course I’m biased, but it makes sense to me that Google’s update would favor a site that publishes only original content and – because of my own ignorance and Blogger’s limitations -- doesn’t play any SEO games. I just hope Panda also punishes those sites that republish my articles without permission or attribution.
Other examples of the hopelessly out-of-date D. Eadward Tree, Dead Tree Edition's Chief Arborist, trying to explain the Internet include:
The Internet world has been all aflutter the past month because of changes Google made to its top-secret search algorithms that it says affected 11.8% of queries. Some publishers are indicating their Google traffic is up a bit, while other sites some with seemingly good content have seen Google traffic drop by 40% or more.
Officially called the Panda update but sometimes referred to as the Farmer update, the changes were meant, in Google’s words, to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
For Dead Tree Edition, the changes seem to have increased Google traffic by about 18%. I say “seem” because search traffic to this little blog fluctuates greatly – and generally constitutes less than 10% of total visitors.
Dead Tree Edition is on the first page of results for some really long-tail search terms like “son of black liquor”, “NewPage bankruptcy”, and – everyone’s favorite -- “cardboard porn”. But the most common search terms are variants of “dead tree”, such as “dead tree blog”, which suggest that people heard or read about an article but didn’t have a link to follow. Or maybe my regular readers haven’t figured out how to use bookmarks, Twitter, RSS, or LinkedIn.
Anyway, I figured the best way to assess Panda was to compare the traffic from Google searches to that for Yahoo! searches, under the assumption that Yahoo! has made no significant changes to its search methods.
During the month leading up to the change, which Google says it started rolling out on Feb. 23, there was an average of 5.61 visitors coming to this blog from Google for every one coming from Yahoo. So far this month, the average daily ratio is 6.61, an increase of 17.8%.
I ignored the Feb. 23-28 period because of reports that it took Google a few days to implement Panda completely. With slightly different assumptions about what periods to study, the increase in the Google-to-Yahoo ratio was never below 12% and was sometimes as high as 21%.
Of course I’m biased, but it makes sense to me that Google’s update would favor a site that publishes only original content and – because of my own ignorance and Blogger’s limitations -- doesn’t play any SEO games. I just hope Panda also punishes those sites that republish my articles without permission or attribution.
Other examples of the hopelessly out-of-date D. Eadward Tree, Dead Tree Edition's Chief Arborist, trying to explain the Internet include:
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Divided PRC Presents Its Opinion on Saturday Delivery
A divided Postal Regulatory Commission just issued (early afternoon Eastern time) its advisory opinion on whether the U.S. Postal Service should be allowed to discontinue Saturday delivery.
After a complex analysis, each commissioner wrote a separate opinion suggesting that the commissioners agreed that USPS's projections regarding cost savings are too rosy. But they could not agree on whether it should be allowed to switch to five-day delivery.
While agreeing on many points, "we did not agree on the broader policy concerns arising from the Postal Service Proposal," wrote PRC Chairwoman Ruth Goldway.
The Postalnews Blog has more details.
After a complex analysis, each commissioner wrote a separate opinion suggesting that the commissioners agreed that USPS's projections regarding cost savings are too rosy. But they could not agree on whether it should be allowed to switch to five-day delivery.
While agreeing on many points, "we did not agree on the broader policy concerns arising from the Postal Service Proposal," wrote PRC Chairwoman Ruth Goldway.
The Postalnews Blog has more details.
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