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.

A couple of interesting things I heard:

There may be a proposal floating around out there somewhere that would have city letter carriers work four-ten hour days if the USPS went to five-day delivery. Under the proposal, T-6s would work the fifth day of the week. A few notes about the proposal:

- In order to get congressional approval for five-day delivery, the USPS needs the unions on board because of the Democrat controlled executive and legislative branches. Making a deal with NALC that might be viewed favorably by carriers and NALC, that would preserve T-6 positions and include a new no-layoff clause might be the only way to get NALC on board.
- T-6s would have four routes in their setup, instead of five.
- It would take more annual or sick leave to get a day off (10 hours), but would still be 40 hours for a week.
- There would be no overtime past 8 hours (up to ten), but the proposal includes the possibility for carriers to work their day off, which would not be possible with a traditional five-day workweek.

I also heard today that a certain postal uniform company is holding ordered uniform items until the USPS pays up. Possible cash flow problems for the USPS?

As for the documentary Murder by Proxy (see the Home page at PostalMag.com), I've heard there are crime-scene photos taken 30 minutes after the postal shootings. There's also a segment about how the USPS allegedly tried to cover up intimidation and harassment by USPS management of at least one of the postal employees who "went postal." And there's supposedly a segment on how Postal Inspectors allegedly altered a tape recording to help the USPS cover up mistreatment of employees that could have led to the shootings.

Everyone has heard the saying "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." Carriers at my post office aren't about to be fooled again in the second round of minor route adjustments, though they'll probably get the shaft anyway.

Today the station manager called carriers into the office to discuss the second round of minor route adjustments. The first thing she asked was the notorious question "how long is your time in the office and how long is your time on the street." Now, the station manager already has months worth of data to show exactly how long these are for every carrier. But as carriers learned during the first round of adjustments, this question was a trick gimmick to perhaps get a carrier to say a time that was shorter than the "computer's time," and that time, whether correct or not would instead be used to adjust the route. As for the street time the first time (first route adjustments) carriers were led to believe the time they gave management was without lunch time. Yet, according to feedback, management took another thirty minutes out for lunch anyway, thereby making many routes out of adjustment by thirty minutes from the start. So in this second round, some carriers I've talked to are either not answering this question or giving an answer that doesn't include time.

I know this question and answer thing sounds a little silly, but my point in all of this is that NALC negotiated this Minor Route Adjustment process in good faith, yet, some carriers feel they are not being treated in good faith by the other side in this process. But national NALC continues to go along with these onerous route adjustments, despite much negative feedback about the process. One only has to look in the back of NALC's Postal Record Magazine in the notes from the branches section to see how NALC members are very unhappy with many aspects of the adjustments. It seems to me there is a big disconnect with rank and file union carriers and NALC officials, and not just with national NALC. Here in Dallas for example there is much distrust of the minor route adjustment program and process. Yet, the local union official "in charge of" minor route adjustments on the union side said recently in the branch newsletter that perhaps more minor route adjustments will be needed in the future. Unbelievable! I don't mind someone saying that (for example if they are in management), but if I'm paying dues so that a union official can represent me then that is something they shouldn't be saying. By now, having supposedly learned lessons from the first round of adjustments, that is the last thing the union official should be saying.

There have been a couple of technical problems with PostalMag.com in the past week that I would like to address.

The first problem happened for users who use www.postalworkersonline.com or www.postalrecord.com to access www.postalmag.com. PostalMag.com is the primary domain. The other two domains were "parked" at postalmag.com, meaning users could use those domains and still arrive at postalmag.com. However, the new comments feature (Echo by Haloscan) only works for one domain (postalmag.com). For the other two domains, there were formatting issues that rendered the homepage unusable. I have changed the way postalworkersonline.com is forwarded to postalmag.com and there should be no further technical issues. I have developed a landing page for postalrecord.com. However, users are urged to use the primary domain www.postalmag.com.

The other problem arose sometime early Saturday morning. The hosting service experienced some technical difficulties and it was necessary to reinstall all files. That is a timely process, as many websites were affected, and should be handled by the end of the weekend. This outage is unusual for the hosting service as they are usually very reliable. Fortunately, I have already been able to restore the homepage.

Another issue I would like to address is the new Echo comments feature by Haloscan. These comments are found with news stories and allows PostalMag.com users to comment on these stories. HaloScan is ending its JS-Kit comments service that has been used for many years now, and replacing it with Echo. Echo, actually, is an upgrade that has several options and features not found with JS-Kit. I've seen a couple of comments that users will be going elsewhere because of the comments. However, other sites using JS-Kit will be required to upgrade shortly also.

Overall, these are minor issues that are easily fixed. I just wanted to let you know that I am always working to maintain and improve PostalMag.com. If you have any suggestions or comments please let me know. I appreciate the postalworkersonline.com user who called me about the problem with that domain. I wouldn't have known about it because I use www.postalmag.com to access the site. So if you see a problem please let me know at militarynetwork@gmail.com or 469-360-9134.

Thanks,

Tom Wakefield
PostalMag.com