Our delivery supervisor said on Saturday that Dallas post offices will soon be flooded with 85 RLCs (Relief Letter Carriers). For the past several months, former clerks and mail handlers turned letter carriers have been trickling in to area post offices, taking the last positions available (the routes no one wanted). But with vacant positions just about filled, it looks like the USPS has no choice but to make RLCs out of the new carriers.

My post office is in the middle of the interim route adjustment process. We just found out that we will be losing two routes from our current 34 or so routes. As always, the carriers who are most diligent had the most added to their routes. At some point, this flaw in the system that rewards slower carriers must be fixed for the union to stay relevant in the eyes of its more efficient workers. (By the way, there were a few efficient workers who saw their routes cuts or stayed the same.)

By the middle of August when the new routes take effect, we'll have two more extra carriers plus the new RCAs. I guess now that many of the routes will have more daily overtime (because the numbers don't look to be adding up in the carriers' favor), the extra carriers will be tasked with eliminating overtime.

There are a couple of problems with this for postal finances. First, many of these former clerks and mail handlers aren't exactly built for carrying mail. We have one poor lady, bless her heart, who has trouble even walking from the parking lot into the building in the morning. It takes her two or three times as long to carry pieces of routes than it does the regular carriers. Second, and this is the part that makes me wonder about the whole union helping the USPS route adjustment process, is that if there are the same number of carriers on the payroll as before the route adjustment process, then where are the savings for the USPS? Same number of employees, same payroll! There may be less routes, but same number of delivery points and same number of employees.

So I'm thinking it's high time for an incentivized early out so the USPS can match workload to staffing. Without one, I don't see how the USPS and union will realize meaningful savings from the onerous interim route adjustment process.