Post office wanting to stop Saturday mail delivery

[Lady's Human]

Am I correct that the unions are not willing to make any concessions?

Do the unions ever do without? Have they cut their payroll and pensions and lifetime health coverage?

These are sincere questions for which I have no answers. This isn't intended to start any arguments!

Concessions?

In the last contracts the Unions agreed to an expanded temp workforce, doubling the allowance as a percentage of the workforce (from 5% to 10%) and changed their terms of employment from 90 day contracts to 365 day contracts.

In the last APWU contract the union agreed to a 1% raise with quarterly COLAs, which is the lowest pay increases by any federal workforce.

Over the last 10 years the USPS has cut the workforce by almost 200,000 craft employees.....while the ranks of management have actually risen. Fewer employees=more management? They forecast shedding another 30,000 employees this year, with no cuts to management ranks. As a glaring example, right now I'm fighting a staffing cut in the department I represent from 41 employees to 29 employees.......yet the FOUR supervisors stay in place.


In the last contract the APWU changed the formula for the health cost allocation.

Lifetime health care? It's part of the federal pension system, which, being government employees, we have the same right to access as any other federal employee.

So yes, the postal unions have made concessions, but they still sounds the drumbeat of labor costs when they go in front of congress.

The USPS continues to give major mailers an over 50% discount on first class bulk mail......they pay between 7 and 20 cents per piece for mail. I don't have the precise figures in front of me, but the cost to the postal service to barcode and do the primary sortation on mail is far, far less than the 50-75% discount they give the mailers. To add to that, a fair percentage of their barcodes are out of spec, so we wind up barcoding the mail for them anyway.

Follow the executive trail....look up where retiring postal service executives go, and in one glaring case, where they come from. One of the current Postal Veeps still serves as a corporate officer for a bulk mailer.....but there's no conflict of interest there at all.

In 2005 the Postal service stated crying poverty because of the cost of fuel, yet continues to make "network adjustments" which do nothing more than increase their fuel costs.......in the case of consolidating some mail from the plant I work in to another plant, they assumed a static fuel cost, and still calculated that the move would cost them $140,000 more in fuel annually.

We're required to buy supplies from single vendors where possible, theoretically to control costs, yet when I notified management that they were getting raked over the coals on the cost of one item, nothing was done. $700 hammers for the military? Try $700 rolls of network cable.......that I can buy for 1/5 the cost.


I could go on, as I said, for pages, but I'll end this here for now.