USPS - Postal Service labor talks fail to reach pact

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The U.S. Postal Service said that its talks with two of its unions failed to reach a new labor accord but that it extended bargaining negotiations with one of them.

In a Sunday statement the USPS said negotiations with the National Rural Letter Carriers Association and the American Postal Workers Union expired at midnight Saturday U.S. Eastern Time.

The talks with the rural-carriers union reached an impasse, but the Postal Service said it would continue talking with the APWU through Tuesday at noon, the USPS said.

If the Postal Service and the unions can’t come to terms, an arbitrator may determine contract terms and work rules for the total 324,000 postal staffers that the two unions represent, the agency said.

Congress has prohibited Postal Service employees from striking, classifying mail delivery as an essential national service, the agency said.

The USPS said that because it must compete with private-sector package-delivery firms while remaining subject to government oversight, it needs “to control costs through a flexible workforce to adapt to the nation’s changing mailing trends.”

For fiscal 2010 ended Sept. 30, the Postal Service reported a net loss of $8.5 billion on revenue of $67.1 billion.

The agency said that in the most recent year it handled 170.6 billion piece of mail, down 20% from the peak of 213 billion in 2006. The slump was driven by economic weakness plus the use of digital communications, the USPS said.

The USPS’s contract with two other unions, the National Association of Letter Carriers and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, expires Nov. 20, 2011.

The agency and those two unions, which represent 205,000 and 48,000 staffers respectively, will start talks about 90 days before the contract ends, the USPS said.