According to "scuttlebutt" received at Postalmag.com, a doctor who treats Limited Duty/Light Duty injured postal employees says the USPS is trying to shed (get rid of) an additional 10,000 injured postal employees this year.

During the last two years, the USPS has coaxed an unknown number of injured employees into retirement, disability retirement, into the Department of Labor's permanent workers comp program, or quitting during its first phase of the Postal Service's National Reassessment Program. Phase Two seeks to take 10,000 off the roles of the struggling agency this year.

At my post office, there have been a couple of employees who decided to take early retirement. Basically, they had heard "more drastic" measures would be used to get them off the rolls, so they decided to go ahead and retire and not deal with the coming hassles. Now, it appears, the Minor Route Adjustments are in some cases being used to shed workers. Some injured carriers who were on routes they could carry (like apartment routes) are now finding themselves with new route territories they are unable to carry or having their routes either dissolved or made into auxilliary routes. Without the job/bid protections of their routes, these employees will possibly be subject to unfavorable reassignments, new times, transfers, etc. in a further bid to coax them off the roles.

Here at the Lakewood PO in Dallas the carriers just received information about our second round of minor route adjustments. Here are a few observations:

Once again, they are not minor. Entire route territories have been changed, with nothing left from the old routes except the route numbers. In other cases, routes were returned back to their original conditions (an exercise in futility).

With that said, I don't understand why the union couldn't negotiate rebidding rights for carriers whose routes changed by more than 50% with this minor route adjustment process. That was the standard in the old process. Now, though I haven't seen the arb decision, the USPS doesn't have to rebid a route if just 1 delivery was left on the old route. But with two minor route adjustments in a row, it's possible that carriers are on entirely new territory with no rebidding rights. And in the case of retaliatory supervisors, some of these carriers (perhaps senior carriers) are on non-preferred territory that traditionally went to junior carriers. (At my PO the station manager has been nice enough to rebid routes. But I've heard from many carriers around the nation who were not allowed to rebid, despite having their routes adjusted up to 99%.)

The first route adjustment was done late last year. The mailers have finally changed their databases and we are finally receiving carrier routed mail to the correct route in the correct order. So now we will have new routes and the database changes were pretty much all for naught. New schemes will need to be relearned by the clerks and many mailpieces, mostly carrier routed flats, will be delayed due to resorting. And on the street, with carriers on new territory, service will suffer once again.

Earlier this week, my supervisor finally got around to asking me for my lunch locations and scan points, for my current-adjusted route. What a joke.

When I first started 20 years ago route changes came around every couple of years. In those days, carriers would be more inclined to help on undertime, knowing it wouldn't be used against them (in determining new routes) for a couple of years. Today, with route adjustments every couple of months, many carriers have slowed their work knowing full well any speed and haste will very soon be used to make their routes longer. In fact, this was true between the last route adjustment and the new one. Two routes were re-added to my station.

I say these things not to complain, but to point out that I don't think ongoing frequent "minor" route adjustments will be doing the Post Office much good. In fact, after this "minor" route adjustment, another route adjustment (perhaps this Summer) would relegate the entire process to the definition of the term "churning." Churning is the term for mixing something up over and over again and getting diminishing returns each time. That's where this process is headed.