refuse_resist
17th October 2004, 19:58
Fighting Postal Abuse
The United States Postal Service announced the creation of a commission to investigate violence and safety issues in the workplace Oct. 6. This five-person panel will report to Postmaster General William Henderson, who was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that "no responsible employer can ignore [the] reality" of violence at the workplace. But what happens when the "responsible" employer is also the party responsible for instigating or perpetrating violence?
This is not the first time that USPS management has taken a step to address the problem of violence. However, their clumsiness and downright contempt for workers' rights does not bode well for the Postmaster General's ability to respond to the basic need for dignity which is connected to so many postal violence incidents.
When there is an violent incident, past practice has been to put a blanket on the issue, send some counsellors to hush everyone up and maneuver to restore the status quo. Sometimes it's a party, sometimes it's a feel-good sign. But it is never a fair hearing or an honest look into the conditions that the USPS imposes on its employees.
October 10, 1991: Joseph Harris, a postal clerk, shot his former supervisor, her boyfriend, and two mail handlers. Harris was fired in April 1990, his union could not get him reinstated. Harris, like many other postal workers, was ordered to take a "fitness for duty" psychological exam performed by a doctor who would be chosen and paid for by the Postal Service. When he refused the terms of this arrangement, proceedings were initiated which resulted in his firing. After the incident, the Post Office opened as soon as the blood could be cleaned up, and posted a sign in the lobby that instructed customers to "not ask the workers any questions regarding the events of yesterday."
November 8, 1991: letter carrier Thomas McIlvane lost his final appeal for reinstatement to his job at the Royal Oak post office in suburban Detroit. (He was fired for alleged insubordination.) Six days later, McIlvane walked across the loading dock of his former workplace with a sawed-off .22 Ruger Rimfire rifle. He entered the sorting room, grabbed a hostage, and went through to the office, where he wounded four people, and killed a former supervisor, the labor arbitrator who turned down his appeal, two other workers, and then finally himself.
Shortly after these two incidents, the USPS set up a nationwide 1-800 number for employees to report potentially violent co-workers. But instead of calls from workers suspicious of their friends and co-workers, postal workers called in to report abuse by management. The post office shut down the number after it was overloaded with these complaints and did nothing to address the concern.
Union stewards who try to use the grievance procedure have been met with discipline and ridicule by their superiors. In 1993, John Ring, a letter carrier from Queens, N.Y., was ordered to undergo psychiatric examinations for filing too many grievances for violations of the union contract. The psychiatrist he saw, a political refugee from Russia, gave Ring a clean bill of psychological health and wrote that the incident reminded him of the way Soviet rulers used psychiatry to discredit and suppress dissidents. In Illinois, a clerk who filed grievances retired. On her last day at work, management gave her a "present" of a box of stems and thorns, with a card which read "From those of us who love you."
On my trips to the National Labor Relations Board, I always page through the docket recording all the unfair labor practices filed that month. Nine times out of ten, the most outrageous and depressing charges come from the post office. And by the time an Unfair Labor Practice charge gets to the Board, chances are the grievance procedure outlined in their contract has been tried, and has failed to bring justice for the workers.
Over the summer, I met an American Postal Workers Union steward who was in the NLRB office to file a charge because their supervisor came into the union office and removed the blinds from the window in the door. This supervisor had previously accused workers of going in the union office to escape their duties. The union filed a complaint that workers were entitled to check in with their shop steward on occasion, and that such accusations would have a chilling effect on the union's ability to hear their concerns. Further, the supervisor had no evidence to back his claim. So the supervisor, in a fit of rage at having his conduct corrected by the union, took the blinds off the door so that he could observe workers meeting with their union stewards. The charge is still pending.
Unilateral actions are nothing new in the USPS, either. Under then-Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, management unilaterally withdrew from a process called Employee Involvement in early 1997. EI, created in 1983, provided a way for workers, union reps and postal bosses to get together to discuss concerns outside of the grievance process. Most unionists will agree that these kinds of caucuses can not replace a grievance procedure, but if an arrangement can be worked out without having to push through a formal procedure, matters can be settled quickly in a mutually agreeable way. The USPS sent a clear message by withdrawing from the EI program: We are not talking to unions and workers any more. In October 1997, Congress' auditing agency reported that "little progress has been made in improving the persistent labor-management relations problems." Indeed, there is now an unprecedented backlog of employee grievances. The Congressional report revealed that the employee grievance backlog rose from 65,000 to 90,000 since 1994.
A study by the Postal Inspection Service said that documented attacks by supervisors and managers upon employees hit a record high of 53 last year, and it looks as if this record could be matched again in 1998. Meanwhile, violence and threats by workers against management and worker on worker violence have both declined.
Micromanagement of every second of the day of post office workers is well known. A recent example of this is case of Martha Cherry, a letter carrier in Mount Vernon, New York, who was dismissed last year after efficiency experts monitored her stride while she delivered mail. In the letter notifying her that she was being fired, she was told that "at each step, the heel of your leading foot did not pass the toe of the trailing foot by more than one inch." Try this move yourself and you'll understand what a ridiculous accusation it is. When Cherry attempted to show an Associated Press reporter what it would look like, she nearly fell over because it is almost impossible to balance by walking the way the post office alleged. Rounds would never be finished, not in eight hours, not in 24 hours.
"Baby steps" are what the Postal Service said Cherry was taking. Cherry had worked at the post office for 18 years, and was well known by the people she delivered mail to. Over forty residents on her route signed a petition calling for her reinstatement, and her union eventually reached a settlement reinstating Cherry as a window clerk. Cherry, who is 5-foot-5, battled it out with the Postal Service for more than seven years on efficiency issues. Two previous suspensions for slow deliveries were upheld by arbitrators. But Cherry told me that despite the USPS' insistence on efficiency, management would not provide her with a large enough mailbag or a mail cart. Instead, the supervisor expected her to carry a heavy sack, make do, and dart through her rounds.
Surveillance portholes overlooking sorting rooms, packing rooms and every work area - and now even employee breakrooms - add to the constant pressure on workers. On Christmas Eve of last year, an armed postal worker held seven people hostage in a postal facility in Denver, Colorado. During the nine and a half hour standoff, 75 workers were told to continue sorting mail in a different part of the building. And they stayed, sorting last-minute Christmas packages and letters.
Postal Service supervisors are so concerned with efficiency because they are awarded bonuses for efficiency under the Economic Value Added program, an incentive program instituted in 1994. Managers are put into competition with neighboring post offices, and also receive top-down pressure from their superiors. The Postal Record, the publication of the National Association of Letter Carriers, reported that three supervisors in a Texas post office each received a $2,500 bonus in December. And for the poor schleps who did the work? The 23 workers at the office got $199.66 to be divided among them, but with the stipulation that the money go to charity. Last year, the Postal Service paid upper management over $150 million in bonuses.
These bonuses and similar incentive programs, and just basic pressure, can be traced back to 1971, when Nixon took advantage of the political current to begin the rampage of privatization we see today in the form of the Postal Reorganization Act.
From 1960 to 1970, the amount of mail handled by the Post Office rose more than one third. The cost of handling that mail more than doubled. The Post Office was never a break-even proposition, but by 1969, the Post Office deficit was more than $1 billion a year. Several clumsy attempts to shift work from many hands into a few made it extremely difficult on postal workers. In the mid-'60s, the Post Office introduced new letter-sorting machines. A subsequent internal study revealed that the government was opening the door for repetitive stress injury claims. Instead of making new machines that could be operated safely and at a sane speed, Dr. Alton Wesley Baker, from the Department of Management of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who was commissioned by the Post Office to make the study, recommended physical and mental tests for all machine operators and excluding any worker over 45 from operating the machines. With experts like that, who needs enemies? The post office took the position of finding the strongest workhorses in its army and worked them like mad, because they would last longer on the crummy machines than older, weaker or already injured bodies. There was no doubt that the machines caused injuries.
Post offices were cramped, poorly heated and air conditioned facilities because they were generally built during the Depression and every corner was cut that might mean comfort to the workers. In 1969, Lonnie Johnson, president of the National Association of Post Office Mail Handlers, Watchmen, Messengers and Group Leaders told a House of Representatives committee: "The average mail handler working in one of these poorly lit, dirty, cluttered, depressing and inefficient operations, usually bears the brunt of the Post Office's backwardness... Many of our major post offices are so inadequate for today's needs that mail handlers and other postal employees are literally falling over one another trying to get their job done." Postal workers worked in the equivalent of veal calf stalls, hardly having enough room to move.
On the heels of a remarkable seven-day wildcat strike in 1970 (worthy of an article all its own), Nixon attempted to push back the postal workers and government workers in general, and boost the private sector. Nixon's plan was approved in July of 1971. The Post Office Department became the United States Postal Service, a private non-profit corporation. The USPS is semi-independent from the Federal government. Workers' rights at the USPS are covered by the private sector National Labor Relations Board, but with a major caveat: no strikes. The USPS management structure was given corporate goals, borrowing authority to fund capital improvements and the usual catchwords of private sector management quickly became fashionable: cost-cutting, attrition, mechanization, productivity...
Today, private presorting companies handle more than half of all mail. These presort houses are extremely profitable, paying workers just over minimum wage. A Seattle postal official wrote a study, "Corporate Welfare, Sweatshops and the Post Office," which indicates that workers in presort operations earn about $6 an hour, usually with no benefits. While ridding itself of the responsibility of having its own employees, the USPS engages in corporate welfare by sub-contracting. Presorting allows high-volume (junk mail) mailers to send first class mail for 23 cents per piece, a savings of $90 per 1,000 pieces. Junk mailers run the presorting operations. According to USPS figures, it costs presorters between $4 and $20 to sort the mail, so the remaining $86 to $70 is a giveaway. Phone centers for questions and complaints are also run by a private company.
In May of this year, the U.S. Postal Service took another step towards privati-zation by signing a $1.8 billion contract with Emery Worldwide Airlines to move Priority Mail. USPS is also examining contracting out 21 bulk mail centers, together employing over 20,000 workers. "Casual" workers, hired six months a year without benefits by the USPS are sometimes worked six days a week with shifts lasting anywhere between nine to twelve hours.
When profit becomes the means and end of a public service, and high-dollar bonuses are coupled with competition and not cooperation, management is sure to drive wage slaves to their breaking points to satiate their greed. Postal workers in the '70s struck and won substantial wage increases and benefits, but their fight needs to go further. Government must be forced to curb their dogs, and stop punishing unions and workers from exercising their rights.
-- Alexis Buss
From The Industrial Worker (http://www.iww.org/~iw/)
Also read Postal Wage Slaves (http://rwor.org/a/v22/1060-69/1067/poffice.htm)
The United States Postal Service announced the creation of a commission to investigate violence and safety issues in the workplace Oct. 6. This five-person panel will report to Postmaster General William Henderson, who was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that "no responsible employer can ignore [the] reality" of violence at the workplace. But what happens when the "responsible" employer is also the party responsible for instigating or perpetrating violence?
This is not the first time that USPS management has taken a step to address the problem of violence. However, their clumsiness and downright contempt for workers' rights does not bode well for the Postmaster General's ability to respond to the basic need for dignity which is connected to so many postal violence incidents.
When there is an violent incident, past practice has been to put a blanket on the issue, send some counsellors to hush everyone up and maneuver to restore the status quo. Sometimes it's a party, sometimes it's a feel-good sign. But it is never a fair hearing or an honest look into the conditions that the USPS imposes on its employees.
October 10, 1991: Joseph Harris, a postal clerk, shot his former supervisor, her boyfriend, and two mail handlers. Harris was fired in April 1990, his union could not get him reinstated. Harris, like many other postal workers, was ordered to take a "fitness for duty" psychological exam performed by a doctor who would be chosen and paid for by the Postal Service. When he refused the terms of this arrangement, proceedings were initiated which resulted in his firing. After the incident, the Post Office opened as soon as the blood could be cleaned up, and posted a sign in the lobby that instructed customers to "not ask the workers any questions regarding the events of yesterday."
November 8, 1991: letter carrier Thomas McIlvane lost his final appeal for reinstatement to his job at the Royal Oak post office in suburban Detroit. (He was fired for alleged insubordination.) Six days later, McIlvane walked across the loading dock of his former workplace with a sawed-off .22 Ruger Rimfire rifle. He entered the sorting room, grabbed a hostage, and went through to the office, where he wounded four people, and killed a former supervisor, the labor arbitrator who turned down his appeal, two other workers, and then finally himself.
Shortly after these two incidents, the USPS set up a nationwide 1-800 number for employees to report potentially violent co-workers. But instead of calls from workers suspicious of their friends and co-workers, postal workers called in to report abuse by management. The post office shut down the number after it was overloaded with these complaints and did nothing to address the concern.
Union stewards who try to use the grievance procedure have been met with discipline and ridicule by their superiors. In 1993, John Ring, a letter carrier from Queens, N.Y., was ordered to undergo psychiatric examinations for filing too many grievances for violations of the union contract. The psychiatrist he saw, a political refugee from Russia, gave Ring a clean bill of psychological health and wrote that the incident reminded him of the way Soviet rulers used psychiatry to discredit and suppress dissidents. In Illinois, a clerk who filed grievances retired. On her last day at work, management gave her a "present" of a box of stems and thorns, with a card which read "From those of us who love you."
On my trips to the National Labor Relations Board, I always page through the docket recording all the unfair labor practices filed that month. Nine times out of ten, the most outrageous and depressing charges come from the post office. And by the time an Unfair Labor Practice charge gets to the Board, chances are the grievance procedure outlined in their contract has been tried, and has failed to bring justice for the workers.
Over the summer, I met an American Postal Workers Union steward who was in the NLRB office to file a charge because their supervisor came into the union office and removed the blinds from the window in the door. This supervisor had previously accused workers of going in the union office to escape their duties. The union filed a complaint that workers were entitled to check in with their shop steward on occasion, and that such accusations would have a chilling effect on the union's ability to hear their concerns. Further, the supervisor had no evidence to back his claim. So the supervisor, in a fit of rage at having his conduct corrected by the union, took the blinds off the door so that he could observe workers meeting with their union stewards. The charge is still pending.
Unilateral actions are nothing new in the USPS, either. Under then-Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, management unilaterally withdrew from a process called Employee Involvement in early 1997. EI, created in 1983, provided a way for workers, union reps and postal bosses to get together to discuss concerns outside of the grievance process. Most unionists will agree that these kinds of caucuses can not replace a grievance procedure, but if an arrangement can be worked out without having to push through a formal procedure, matters can be settled quickly in a mutually agreeable way. The USPS sent a clear message by withdrawing from the EI program: We are not talking to unions and workers any more. In October 1997, Congress' auditing agency reported that "little progress has been made in improving the persistent labor-management relations problems." Indeed, there is now an unprecedented backlog of employee grievances. The Congressional report revealed that the employee grievance backlog rose from 65,000 to 90,000 since 1994.
A study by the Postal Inspection Service said that documented attacks by supervisors and managers upon employees hit a record high of 53 last year, and it looks as if this record could be matched again in 1998. Meanwhile, violence and threats by workers against management and worker on worker violence have both declined.
Micromanagement of every second of the day of post office workers is well known. A recent example of this is case of Martha Cherry, a letter carrier in Mount Vernon, New York, who was dismissed last year after efficiency experts monitored her stride while she delivered mail. In the letter notifying her that she was being fired, she was told that "at each step, the heel of your leading foot did not pass the toe of the trailing foot by more than one inch." Try this move yourself and you'll understand what a ridiculous accusation it is. When Cherry attempted to show an Associated Press reporter what it would look like, she nearly fell over because it is almost impossible to balance by walking the way the post office alleged. Rounds would never be finished, not in eight hours, not in 24 hours.
"Baby steps" are what the Postal Service said Cherry was taking. Cherry had worked at the post office for 18 years, and was well known by the people she delivered mail to. Over forty residents on her route signed a petition calling for her reinstatement, and her union eventually reached a settlement reinstating Cherry as a window clerk. Cherry, who is 5-foot-5, battled it out with the Postal Service for more than seven years on efficiency issues. Two previous suspensions for slow deliveries were upheld by arbitrators. But Cherry told me that despite the USPS' insistence on efficiency, management would not provide her with a large enough mailbag or a mail cart. Instead, the supervisor expected her to carry a heavy sack, make do, and dart through her rounds.
Surveillance portholes overlooking sorting rooms, packing rooms and every work area - and now even employee breakrooms - add to the constant pressure on workers. On Christmas Eve of last year, an armed postal worker held seven people hostage in a postal facility in Denver, Colorado. During the nine and a half hour standoff, 75 workers were told to continue sorting mail in a different part of the building. And they stayed, sorting last-minute Christmas packages and letters.
Postal Service supervisors are so concerned with efficiency because they are awarded bonuses for efficiency under the Economic Value Added program, an incentive program instituted in 1994. Managers are put into competition with neighboring post offices, and also receive top-down pressure from their superiors. The Postal Record, the publication of the National Association of Letter Carriers, reported that three supervisors in a Texas post office each received a $2,500 bonus in December. And for the poor schleps who did the work? The 23 workers at the office got $199.66 to be divided among them, but with the stipulation that the money go to charity. Last year, the Postal Service paid upper management over $150 million in bonuses.
These bonuses and similar incentive programs, and just basic pressure, can be traced back to 1971, when Nixon took advantage of the political current to begin the rampage of privatization we see today in the form of the Postal Reorganization Act.
From 1960 to 1970, the amount of mail handled by the Post Office rose more than one third. The cost of handling that mail more than doubled. The Post Office was never a break-even proposition, but by 1969, the Post Office deficit was more than $1 billion a year. Several clumsy attempts to shift work from many hands into a few made it extremely difficult on postal workers. In the mid-'60s, the Post Office introduced new letter-sorting machines. A subsequent internal study revealed that the government was opening the door for repetitive stress injury claims. Instead of making new machines that could be operated safely and at a sane speed, Dr. Alton Wesley Baker, from the Department of Management of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who was commissioned by the Post Office to make the study, recommended physical and mental tests for all machine operators and excluding any worker over 45 from operating the machines. With experts like that, who needs enemies? The post office took the position of finding the strongest workhorses in its army and worked them like mad, because they would last longer on the crummy machines than older, weaker or already injured bodies. There was no doubt that the machines caused injuries.
Post offices were cramped, poorly heated and air conditioned facilities because they were generally built during the Depression and every corner was cut that might mean comfort to the workers. In 1969, Lonnie Johnson, president of the National Association of Post Office Mail Handlers, Watchmen, Messengers and Group Leaders told a House of Representatives committee: "The average mail handler working in one of these poorly lit, dirty, cluttered, depressing and inefficient operations, usually bears the brunt of the Post Office's backwardness... Many of our major post offices are so inadequate for today's needs that mail handlers and other postal employees are literally falling over one another trying to get their job done." Postal workers worked in the equivalent of veal calf stalls, hardly having enough room to move.
On the heels of a remarkable seven-day wildcat strike in 1970 (worthy of an article all its own), Nixon attempted to push back the postal workers and government workers in general, and boost the private sector. Nixon's plan was approved in July of 1971. The Post Office Department became the United States Postal Service, a private non-profit corporation. The USPS is semi-independent from the Federal government. Workers' rights at the USPS are covered by the private sector National Labor Relations Board, but with a major caveat: no strikes. The USPS management structure was given corporate goals, borrowing authority to fund capital improvements and the usual catchwords of private sector management quickly became fashionable: cost-cutting, attrition, mechanization, productivity...
Today, private presorting companies handle more than half of all mail. These presort houses are extremely profitable, paying workers just over minimum wage. A Seattle postal official wrote a study, "Corporate Welfare, Sweatshops and the Post Office," which indicates that workers in presort operations earn about $6 an hour, usually with no benefits. While ridding itself of the responsibility of having its own employees, the USPS engages in corporate welfare by sub-contracting. Presorting allows high-volume (junk mail) mailers to send first class mail for 23 cents per piece, a savings of $90 per 1,000 pieces. Junk mailers run the presorting operations. According to USPS figures, it costs presorters between $4 and $20 to sort the mail, so the remaining $86 to $70 is a giveaway. Phone centers for questions and complaints are also run by a private company.
In May of this year, the U.S. Postal Service took another step towards privati-zation by signing a $1.8 billion contract with Emery Worldwide Airlines to move Priority Mail. USPS is also examining contracting out 21 bulk mail centers, together employing over 20,000 workers. "Casual" workers, hired six months a year without benefits by the USPS are sometimes worked six days a week with shifts lasting anywhere between nine to twelve hours.
When profit becomes the means and end of a public service, and high-dollar bonuses are coupled with competition and not cooperation, management is sure to drive wage slaves to their breaking points to satiate their greed. Postal workers in the '70s struck and won substantial wage increases and benefits, but their fight needs to go further. Government must be forced to curb their dogs, and stop punishing unions and workers from exercising their rights.
-- Alexis Buss
From The Industrial Worker (http://www.iww.org/~iw/)
Also read Postal Wage Slaves (http://rwor.org/a/v22/1060-69/1067/poffice.htm)