As early as this week, members of the National Association of Letter Carriers could get the terms of a new contract. Whatever a three-man arbitration panel decides, the outcome is sure to furnish fresh evidence of the painful tradeoffs facing labor as the embattled U.S. Postal Service presses to cut personnel costs. NALC members “understand that difficult things were necessary,” Jim Sauber, the union’s chief of staff, said in an interview today. “But on the other hand, we also want to reward the people who are working harder and have harder jobs.” The NALC, for example, is proposing to create a…
Browsing: Postal Service
It isn’t just your imagination—Congress really is spending more time on the urgent business of naming post offices. In an online article today, the Courier Express and Postal Observer runs the numbers from 1973 to the present and finds a startling increase both in the number of post office naming laws, and their share of the overall volume of legislation passed in each Congress. Although the totals have fallen the last four years, they remain way above the average for much of the period in question. The Observer attributes the trend largely to the post-9/11 desire to honor those who…
The chances of postal legislation clearing Congress this year are now zero following the House of Representatives’ abrupt decision to quit town Thursday night. A band of five retired and current postal workers nonetheless is nonetheless persevering in a hunger strike as scheduled through Saturday. “We’re maintaining our guard,” Jamie Partridge, a retired city letter carrier from Portland, Oregon, said in a phone interview this morning. The group, encamped on the National Mall in downtown Washington, began the six-day fast at 9 a.m. Monday to protest efforts to end most Saturday mail delivery; they will keep going on until tomorrow…
As the U.S. Postal Service’s problems grow, its governing board is shrinking. The board, which is supposed to have 11 members, currently has eight and will lose another next week when Chairman Thurgood Marshall Jr. steps down, leaving it with just one more body than the six needed for a quorum to conduct business. As of today, however, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hasn’t scheduled confirmation votes on three board nominations that have been awaiting action since summer. In an email, committee spokeswoman Leslie Phillips said she did not know the reason for the delay. Although there have…
The U.S. Postal Service may have its problems, but they evidently aren’t severe enough to persuade many supervisors and administrators to jump at an early retirement offer. Out of 3,594 Executive and Administrative Schedule employees eligible for the package, just 186 signed up by the Nov. 19 deadline, according to Postal Service figures provided today. The package—standard for the federal government–allows employees to retire early if they are at least 50 years old with a minimum of 20 years’ service, or any age with at least 25 years’ service. Unlike recent early retirement offers to postmasters, mail handlers and clerks,…
Organized labor may be hurting, but it would be hard to tell from the amount of money that the four big postal unions are spending on this year’s presidential and congressional races. According to their most recent disclosure reports filed earlier this month, the four–through their political action committees–had shoveled about $9.6 million into the 2012 election cycle, already ahead of the $8.9 million total for 2010, a non-presidential election year, according to data compiled by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. Accounting for more than half of the 2012 sum was the National Association of Letter Carriers, followed by the American Postal…
A polite tiff has broken out between the U.S. Postal Service and its inspector general over whether a pension should count in determining whether a top officer’s compensation exceeded a legal pay cap. The officer, who was not named in the report, but whom sources identified as Paul Vogel, president of digital solutions, made a total last year of $306,250 in annual salary, pension and bonus, IG auditors found in a newly released report. That would be well above the maximum pay limit of $276,840 for USPS executives holding specially designated “critical” positions, according to the audit, which said the Postal…
The U.S. Postal Service has lost round one of a court fight over information sought by a California watchdog agency in connection with a case of alleged electoral dirty tricks. In a ruling this month, Senior U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell said the mail carrier must tell the California Fair Political Practices Commission how many pieces of mail a former Los Angeles-area school board member sent out under his bulk mailing permit in late October 2008 as he faced a recall election. The Postal Service failed to show that the information was exempt from disclosure under the federal Freedom of…
Despite maxing out a $15 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury last month, the U.S. Postal Service can scrape by at least through March. That’s according to Ruth Goldway, chair of the Postal Regulatory Commission, the agency that oversees the Postal Service. The commission meets with USPS officials following the release of each quarterly financial report, the last of which was in August. In the ensuing review, the Postal Service “projected that they would be able to continue operating without disruption until at least midway through the fiscal year without any action by Congress,” Goldway said in a statement to…
The U.S. Postal Service is getting plenty of free media exposure today, but probably not the kind USPS execs were hoping for when they ponied up big bucks years ago to be a primary sponsor of cyclist Lance Armstrong’s team. Instead, this is how the organization appears in the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s statement on the results of its investigation into Armstrong’s alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs: “The evidence shows beyond any doubt that the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.” That should sell a lot of…