United States Postal Service - Employment in The USPS

Employment in The USPS

The Postal Service is the USA's second-largest civilian employer. As of 2011, it employed 574,000 personnel, divided into offices, processing centers, and actual post offices. The United States Postal Service is a Fortune 500 company.

Labor unions representing USPS employees include: The American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which represents postal clerks and maintenance, motor vehicle, mail equipment shops, material distribution centers, and operating services and facilities services employees, postal nurses, and IT and accounting; the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), which represents city letter carriers; the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association (NRLCA), which represents rural letter carriers; and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU).

USPS employees are divided into three major crafts according to the work they engage in:

• Mail carriers, also referred to as mailmen or letter carriers, prepare and deliver mail and parcels. They are divided into two categories: City Letter Carriers, who are represented by the NALC, and Rural Letter Carriers, who are represented by the NRLCA. City Carriers are paid hourly with automatic overtime paid after 8 hours or 40 hours a week of duty. City Carriers are required to work in any kind of weather, daylight or dark and carry three bundles of mail (letters in one hand, magazines in the other and advertisements in a mailbag) in addition to parcels up to a total of 80 lbs. Mail routes are outfitted with a number of scanpoints (mailbox barcodes) on random streets every 30 to 40 minutes apart to keep track of the Carriers' whereabouts up until the last 5 minutes of any given workday. City Carriers are also subject to forced "undertime work" called Pivoting on a daily basis. This practice is when supervisors allege that a Carrier's assigned route will take less than 8 hours to complete. Management will then "pivot" the Carrier to work on another route to "create 8 hours or more workload" for that Carrier or, in most cases, work additional "unpaid overtime" on another route. If there is no undertime, management may still instruct the Carrier to "curtail and rotate" (set aside) bulk mail or third bundle carry-out advertisements for the following day to complete the pivot assignment. Pivoting is the most effective tool postal management uses to eliminate overtime costs, based on mail volume projections from the DOIS (Delivery Operations Information System) computer program. City Carrier routes are timed, inspected, adjusted and/ or eliminated based on that same information, controlled by this program and any current PS Form 3999 (office and/ or street observation by a Postal supervisor to determine accurate times spent on actual delivery of mail). With this program, there is no additional time allotted for travel time, bathroom breaks, prep time, select customer service needs and in some cases, lunch breaks. Even though a majority of supervisors have never carried mail, their input determines the daily workload reports of the routes. There are no consultations with the assigned Carriers on any eliminations or adjustments to the routes either before or after route inspectons.
• Rural carriers are under a form of salary called "evaluated hours", usually with overtime built in to their pay. The evaluated hours are created by having all mail counted for a period of two or four weeks, and a formula used to create the set dollar amount they will be paid for each day worked until the next time the route is counted.
• Mail handlers and processors, prepare, separate, load and unload mail and parcels, by delivery zipcode and station, for the clerks. They work almost exclusively at the plants or larger mail facilities now after having their duties excessed and reassigned to clerks in Post Offices and Station branches.
• Clerks, have a dual function by design of where their assignment is. Clerks directly handle customer service needs at the counter and also sort first class letters, standard and bulk-rate mail for the carriers on the workflooor. Data Conversion Operators, who encode address information at Remote Encoding Centers, are also members of the clerk craft.

Other non-managerial positions in the USPS include:

• Maintenance and custodians, who see to the overall operation and cleaning of mail sorting machines, work areas, public parking and general facility operations.
• Transitional employees (TEs), who are hired for terms of 360 days (with the option of appointment to another 360 day term after a 5 day break), are given the same hourly base pay as a Part Time Flexible carrier, but receive no benefits other than annual leave. Transitional employees may be released by the USPS upon completion of their 360 day term, lack of work, or for "just cause" and can be represented by the NALC.
• Career, Part Time Flexible and Transitional employees (Career, PTF & TE DCOs) at a remote encoding center are still under clerks category but under a different contract than a plant worker or mail carrier and, therefore, are also under a different union (APWU) than the above mentioned Career, TEs and PTFs. There are several differences between working as a carrier or plant worker VS. working at a REC. Even pay is different.

Though the USPS employs many individuals, as more Americans send information via email, fewer postal workers are needed to work dwindling amounts of mail. Post offices and mail facilities are constantly downsizing, replacing craft positions with new machines and consolidating mail routes through the MIARAP (Modified Interim Alternate Route Adjustment Process) agreement. A major round of job cuts, early retirements, and a construction freeze were announced on March 20, 2009.