Some 15,600 U.S. Postal Service managers. supervisors and postmasters are getting notice this week that they qualify for the mail carrier’s latest early retirement offer. The offer applies to eligible field employees covered by the Executive and Administrative Schedule, USPS spokeswoman Patricia Licata said in reply to emailed questions from Federal Times. That figure (15,580, to be exact) represents about one-third of the 42,239 field EAS employees on the rolls as of last week. For the Postal Service as a whole, the ranks of the EAS workforce numbered 50,346, excluding the USPS inspector general’s office and the Postal Inspection Service.
Those who accept may opt to leave by the end of December or the end of January. The decision deadline is Nov. 29. The “voluntary early retirement” offer does not extend to Postal Career Executive Service members, Licata said, contrary to earlier assertions by the National Association of Postal Supervisors.
In an announcement posted on an internal employee website late last week, the Postal Service linked the offer to new mail processing plant rankings accompanied by changes to EAS staffing criteria. The “change process” could include a reduction-in-force, the announcement said.
The early-out “is only being offered to lessen the impact on employees who are potentially being impacted by organizational change,” Licata said. Asked whether the Postal Service has a target for the number of takers, she said that “employees make individual determinations to either accept or decline VER offers.”
Under the standard federal package, employees can retire early if they are at least 50 years old with a minimum of 20 years’ service or at any age with at least 25 years’ service. The offer does not include a financial incentive, aka “buyout.”
4 Comments
I wish you would quit saying mail carriers. They are not mail carriers, they are supervisors and managers. I am a mail carrier and have yet to ever see an offer on the table for an early out!
Hi Kathy:
I’m the reporter who wrote the FedLine post. In this case, “mail carrier” is just a shorthand way of referring to the Postal Service as a whole. It’s an alternative to using a boring word like “agency.”
Best,
Sean Reilly
Federal Times
Mail Carrier is a positon used for one of the craft used in the USPS so in this article we have to describe the right craft that is offer the early retirement…….
Never, never, confuse an EAS supervisory or management employee with hourly rated interval (craft) workers. Never, never, never, never…………………………never, do I make my point clear?