The U.S. Postal Service and the American Postal Workers Union have agreed to keep negotiating until Dec. 1, following the expiration of an earlier extension of contract talks at noon today, USPS spokesman Mark Saunders said this afternoon. In a release posted soon after on the union’s web site, APWU President Cliff Guffey confirmed the extension and said that bargaining would resume Monday. The union remains hopeful that a settlement can be reached, he reiterated. The union’s contract had originally been set to expire at midnight Saturday, but both sides had agreed to the initial Tuesday extension. An impasse has…
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After an initial bargaining deadline passed Saturday, the U.S. Postal Service will keep talking to the American Postal Workers Union for at least another two days, but said that negotiations with the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association had reached an impasse, thereby potentially leaving it up to arbitration to decide the outcome, according to a USPS news release. Contracts with both unions had been set to expire at midnight Saturday, but the Postal Service and the APWU agreed to an extension until noon Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, the union said in its own release. “We do not have a new contract,…
None too soon for the Obama administration, Jack Lew was sworn in early Friday afternoon as Office of Management and Budget director after winning Senate confirmation the preceding evening, according to a spokesman. Lawmakers acted Thursday after Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., dropped a hold placed on Lew’s nomination in late September in a bid to force the administration to end a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration yielded more than a month ago, but Landrieu had continued the hold, saying she wanted an “action plan” for putting the industry back to work. In a news…
The Transportation Security Administration is digging in its heels over the new patdown procedures for airline passengers who don’t want to go through revealing — and possibly radiation-exposing — scans. But the agency is losing the battle for public opinion — fast. And the American Federation of Government Employees — one of two major unions vying to represent TSA — is worried the backlash could come down hard on screeners. There’s already been a few physical altercations between screeners and angry passengers, including an incident where a traveler in Indianapolis punched a screener. “TSA must do a better job explaining…
Remember Attorney General Eric Holder’s memo last year stating that agencies should administer the Freedom of Information Act with a presumption in favor of disclosure? One private research organization is wondering whether some of Holder’s subordinates got the message, based on their attempt to thwart full release of a report detailing Nazi-hunting efforts in the United States. “Here you’ve got the Justice Department flouting the direct guidance of the attorney general,” Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, based at The George Washington University, said Wednesday in a phone interview. “Holder should be outraged.” The report is a history…
Do you want to save the planet and reduce emissions, but are unsure of how to gloat about it to your friends? Well now you have a Facebook game that will put the “win” into dwindling resources, and its brought to you by the federal government. DoSomething.org and the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star program yesterday announced the launch of eMission, a unique Facebook game with a social mission―to increase energy efficiency and fight climate change offline. The idea is that you get points for environmentally sustainable acts offline that are translated into points in the game.…
The U.S. Postal Service may be struggling, but outgoing Postmaster General John Potter can count on a comfortable array of benefits to sustain him after he steps down Dec. 3, according to a rundown included in the U.S. Postal Service’s 10-K report made public Monday. Chief among them is almost $3.1 million in pension benefits accumulated during his 32 years with the Postal Service. In that respect, Potter would appear to be no different from any other USPS employee with a similar salary history and tenure in the Civil Service Retirement System. But he will also be able to tap…
Congrats to Trudy Givens of Portage, Wisconsin. The long-time Bureau of Prisons employee is this year’s SAVE award winner for her suggestion that the government stop printing and mailing daily hard copies of the Federal Register to almost 10,000 federal employees who are probably using the on-line version anyway. Givens won out over three other finalists with almost 20,000 votes, according to a blog post Monday by Acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeffrey Zients. The runners-up were Agriculture Department employee Marjorie Cook, Pat Behe of the Department of Homeland Security, and Thomas Koenning from the Department of Labor.…
The U.S. Postal Service’s net losses widened to $8.5 billion in fiscal 2010, more than twice the total for the preceding year, according to figures released at Friday’s board of governors meeting. Of that amount, $2.5 billion stemmed from accounting adjustments related to workers compensation liability. The remaining $6 billion is identical to a preliminary figure cited by outgoing Postmaster General John Potter at a news conference last month. For fiscal 2010, operating revenue totaled $67.1 billion, down $1 billion from the preceding year. Overall mail volume fell from 176.7 billion to 170.6 billion pieces. In fiscal 2011, the agency…
The Tri-City Herald in Washington state this morning reports about a sticky situation emerging at an Energy Department facility. A radioactive rabbit has been caught at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Richland, Wash., and state health workers are now combing nearby grounds for — yes — radioactive rabbit droppings. The scary thing is, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Hanford had another mutant bunny emergency last year, and flew helicopters above the grounds to locate the radioactive poop, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And in much less cute news, the Seattle Times reported in 2009 that Hanford was…