Hiding or destroying parcels just to cut costs?

[jemima]

From Las Vegas City Life

http://lvcitylife.com/articles/2008/04/ ... 103951.txt

"Pissed at the post office
Mail carriers say skewed system steals money out of their pockets

by JASON WHITED

EVERYONE KNOWS IT'S A FEDERAL OFFENSE to monkey with the U.S. mail, but the men and women who spend their careers ensuring its safe delivery are blowing the whistle on what they call a "routine, inside job" that hides or destroys parcels just to cut costs.

From Boulder City to Boston, rural mail carriers across America tell CityLife they're seething over a "fixed" evaluation system -- called, appropriately enough, the "mail count." This periodic process (held from late February to early March of this year) is an official accounting of each carrier's average mail volume so that post-office managers can reallocate workers and resources to routes that have grown the most and need more TLC. As you might imagine, with Las Vegas' rapidly shifting demographics, postal workers must constantly re-evaluate manpower needs and how to deploy them to maximum effect.

In reality, say rural mail carriers, postmasters and post office managers manipulate the mail count, either by hiding large volumes of mail until after the evaluation or straight up dumping tons of letters, bills and catalogs, to make it seem rural carriers aren't as busy as they've been in the past. This forces employees to accept fewer paid hours and thereby cuts overhead. By cooking the books this way, critics say postmasters and their staffs, with the tacit approval of postal leaders in Washington, D.C., hope to balance an inveterately unstable postal budget on their aching backs.

For almost two weeks, scores of these rural postmen have spilled their guts to CityLife. They might want to hide their identities, but they have no problem ripping back the veil on what they call a corporate culture of incompetence and ego that protects those who "play the game" while unloading satchels of payback onto whistleblowers. To hell with that, they say. If they don't speak up now, an already crumbling system is only going to get worse. As carriers' hours get cut, mail delivery will suffer. Customers, as shown by continued growth at United Parcel Service and other private carriers, will go elsewhere. Fewer customers spending fewer dollars at the post office could spell deeper trouble for a system that is often the most public domestic face of the United States government.

"Honestly, people here feel like they're backed into a corner. And a lot of us are afraid to speak out. You feel like you're stuck. It's not the job; the job, actually, is great. That is, if we didn't have to deal with management and the fact that our union isn't backing us at all. We feel like this is now a hostile work environment," said one veteran carrier who came armed with a 4-inch stack of internal postal service documents to back up his claims. "We now consider this a hostile work environment, and we are one fed-up group of people here."

For as long as most people can remember, the postal system has operated in debt. With a worldwide workforce of 785,000 people -- including about 350,000 city and rural mail carriers -- overhead has proved nearly impossible to overcome. Add to that a growing stable of highly efficient, private shipping companies, the explosion in e-mail volume and employee pension and health-care plans that will eat into the postal service's bottom line until at least 2017, and the post office is about $5.14 billion in the red, according to the agency's 2007 annual report. Now, after what they call "years of collusion" among local-level postmasters, station managers and a union they allege has been co-opted by powerful interests within the government, local rural mail carriers are talking revolution. This is not the kind of firebrand rhetoric you'd expect from a mild-mannered rank-and-file whose chief job description is that most of us barely notice them at all.

"The one thing they can't do is lay us off. But they can sure cut our hours. This is the worst thing they could do. They keep cutting our routes to where we keep working less and less. Or they'll cut days off. With the altered results of this bogus mail count, they can justify what they've planned to do all along. The post office talks about customer service, but they're cutting us off. They're cutting off that link to the customers. For years, this has consistently been an issue," says another local carrier, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his job.

Many of the hundreds of local rural carriers, who work outlying routes from Henderson to North Las Vegas and well beyond, say postal service leaders target their routes because the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, their union, is "much weaker" than the union covering city letter carriers. And because, insist these mail haulers, the rural union is in cahoots with postmasters across the country. They don't have the muscle to fight an inaccurate count on their own and say they are bearing the brunt of what most of them call specious cost-saving measures.

"Initially, a lot of us didn't want to get involved, but when we saw they s**t they're pulling we had to say something. I personally saw clerical personnel, in front of management, dump boxes -- I mean boxes -- of mailers instead of having them count toward our totals. Sometimes, these boxes will mysteriously reappear, but like I told everybody, 'Don't count on it,'" says one particularly irate mail carrier. Heads around the room nod in agreement. Calls of "damned right" and "they screwed me, too" swirl around the conversation.

One of the most interesting aspects of this story is that no one at the union, literally, would speak to a reporter for more than 30 seconds on this topic. Rural union leaders wouldn't even confirm basic information, such as contact info for other union leaders or how many rural carriers comprised their national group. Hardly state secrets, say local rural carriers, but typical. The one rural union talking head who didn't immediately hang up the phone was Leo Root, the Nevada assistant state steward, who's supposed to ensure postmasters and their staffs don't skew mail count results by holding back, or hiding, vast tubs of mailers. "It's my right to not talk to you," he says before the click of a dead line.

Dozens of internal postal service documents shared with CityLife detail mail count battles between carriers and managers since at least the '90s. When pressed, post office spokesmen admit this recent count has drawn fire from carriers around the country. Already, negotiators from the post office and workers' representatives are haggling over a national-level grievance filed just this spring.

"Mail counts establish the official evaluation of a rural route and determine whether adjustment of the route is necessary. The compensation of rural letter carriers is based upon the evaluations that were established for their route during the latest mail count ... However, a primary component of a mail count is mail volume. The final parameters of the mail count (which, this year, were agreed to in advance by postal service negotiators and rural carriers themselves) determine the level of compensation issued to the employees servicing each route, and these results factor into the length of a route and its designation [which can affect the work schedule of the regular carrier]," says USPS spokesman Dave Partenheimer. Partenheimer declined to comment on allegations that mail was destroyed to skew the mail count.

Local carriers don't hold out much hope that the current dust-up will be solved to their satisfaction. Local carriers face less pay and fewer hours right now. "The last grievance took six years to settle, and we all got checks for something like $300. What kind of justice is that?" asks one carrier, before throwing up her hands in disgust and reaching for another beer.

Echoing every carrier CityLife has spoken to nationwide, one local rural carrier literally points to a paper detailing the financial hit he expects to take as a result of the latest count. "They held back 'tons' of tubs of my mail. Just hid it. What's happened to me since then? See for yourself," he says. He slides a finger down the federal mail-carrier pay scale. His mouth tightens as he, literally, fingers his latest pay cut. Stopping on one column, he turns and almost spits out, "I am gonna lose 10 grand because of this s**t." Yet again, heads around the room nod in agreement. "

[DGP1]

This sounds familiar!! Whenever there is a count of mail it always seems to be down.

[dvbuk55]

There was a topic of conversation on Friday when the Summer efficiency was being mentioned again. As everyone knows we used to weigh incoming mail BUT under the new regime we stopped late last year. The question was "is third party mail being measured for delivery purposes, although not processed at MCs" and I have to admit that I didn't know the answer BUT I became suspicious that it was scheme to show a fall in mail volumes which isn't justified from a delivery perspective.

Anyone else know the answer?

[norbert]

This sounds familiar!! Whenever there is a count of mail it always seems to be down.

interesting ,possibility of RM being underhand ? -well I never !

[F0zziebear]

As someone who used to weigh mail in I know inaccurate the whole thing is. RM has for years had discrepancies between what in weight in and out of the system.

The third party is mail characteristics survey, which is carried out by an independent research company paid for by RM. The results are used to calculate the postal volumes.

The cutting out of weighing is designed to cut cost in terms of management time and others wasted on this pointless activity.

The other way of working out mail volumes is to work out the financial revenues. The difference between this calculation and the weighing version was about £150M a year.

As for mail volumes declining or not. You just need to read my previous posts. Volumes fall disproportionately across the country and whilst one round's volumes might be rising they are declining elsewhere.

Whether you agree with this or not, the revenues coming into RM are going down. Less m,oney coming in, less money to pay for staff regardless of their grade.

F0zz

[Tman]

[

The question was "is third party mail being measured for delivery purposes, although not processed at MCs" and I have to admit that I didn't know the answer BUT I became suspicious that it was scheme to show a fall in mail volumes which isn't justified from a delivery perspective.

Anyone else know the answer?[

So you have an artic full of mail arriving at the MC, how do you suppose it is sorted into which DO/MC it's intended for if it isn't processed through the machines?
You think there's lots of blokes sitting at sorting frames or something?

[dvbuk55]

[

The question was "is third party mail being measured for delivery purposes, although not processed at MCs" and I have to admit that I didn't know the answer BUT I became suspicious that it was scheme to show a fall in mail volumes which isn't justified from a delivery perspective.

Anyone else know the answer?[

So you have an artic full of mail arriving at the MC, how do you suppose it is sorted into which DO/MC it's intended for if it isn't processed through the machines?
You think there's lots of blokes sitting at sorting frames or something?

Well plenty of third party walk sorted mail arrives is that processed too or just loaded on the relevant vehicle. TBH half the mail we get which is supposedly processed appears to be handled by knuckle shuffling chimps.