Not the only idle ones
The U.S. Postal Service may be best known as the beloved government agency of Newman and Berkowitz, and for losing that $12 check your Grandma sent you for your birthday. But according to a rather amazing report in the Federal Times, that might not be all the Post Office is known for pretty soon.
Employees of the U.S. Postal Service, an agency facing a $7 billion deficit this year, average a whopping 45,000 hours of idle time every week—at an annual cost of about $50 million. The reason for this sudden influx of downtime? That would be a combination of a 12.6% drop in mail volume over the past year, and a collective bargaining agreement that prohibits postal workers from being laid off or reassigned.
"Standby time," as it is commonly known, is a practice that allows the USPS to keep employees on the clock and fulfill their contractual obligations. "Volume has dropped, we don't get the same mail receipts we used to get, and our overtime is already pretty much nil," Edward Jackson, a Washington, D.C. mail plant supervisor told the Federal Times. "But we still have to keep [employees] in a pay status. So we put them in standby rooms."
Now you're probably wondering what a "standby room" is exactly. The truth is that it can be anything from an empty conference room to a 12-by-8 foot storage closet used as an area to contain employees who are on standby. "It's just a small empty room... It's awful," one employee said. "Most of us bring books, word puzzles. Sometimes we just sleep."
The standby practice has most directly affected the 220,000 members of the American Postal Workers Union, a union made up mainly of clerks and maintenance workers at post offices and processing centers, whose contract with the USPS forbids employees with more than six years experience to be laid off. The same contract also contains a clause guaranteeing "eight hours' pay for eight hours' work."
The USPS is left in the position of having too many workers for too little an amount of mail, and nothing to do with them except put them off to the side. Employees on standby are still technically available to work while on the clock, but days can sometimes go by before their assistance is needed, the story said.
It isn't exactly like the standby employees are thrilled about this arrangement either; this is not a classic case of "lazy government workers" slacking off on the job. "They just instruct employees to report to these holding areas," APWU President William Burrus tells the Times. "The Employees resent it. They can't work, they can't read, they just sit there."
Employees are forbidden to engage in any activity that they wouldn't do while performing normal work, this includes everything from listening to music to reading a book. "We want to make sure they uphold the rules and regulations of the Postal Service," Edward Jackson explained to the Times.
Knowing that many employees resent being put on standby, some supervisors have taken the process as an opportunity to punish employees. Bob Patterson, an APWU official from Oregon, told the Times of a case of a USPS being put on standby in a 12-by-8 storage closet as punishment for complaining about working conditions. "There was productive work she could be performing," Patterson contended.
While the USPS claims that it is being forced to implement standby time by burdensome union contracts (again, it must be noted that these are contract terms the USPS management agreed to), some employees are beginning to suspect that management is trying to get them to resign in protest rather then continue to work under these conditions. "I think they're trying to prove that they don't need people in the stations," Florida APWU representative Sam Wood told the Times. "Management says, ‘We can do without these employees.'"
Wood went on to claim that one Florida mail processing plant told its employees that 10% of their workforce (58 workers) would be placed on standby until they could be reassigned to another location. Meanwhile, the reassignment process can take up to several months.
So what is to be done? One solution being floated is a $15,000 buyout package for USPS employees not yet ready to retire. The postal service, which introduced the plan in August, is hoping that 30,000 of their 636,000 employees accept the offer. Even the APWU's President admits that something must be done. "[Standby time] is clear evidence that we have a surplus of employees," Burrus told the Times. "I hope our people accept the buyouts."
While the USPS and the APWU try to sort through this situation no one has seemed to have asked the public what they think of the dilemma. The USPS—agency of the aforementioned $7 billion deficit and the nationwide hiring freeze—is apparently operating under the assumption that their decisions are made in a vacuum. In reality they are operating under a $78 billion publicly funded budget. Spending $50 million a year so employees who are willing and able to work can sit in a closet and stare at a wall is a little bit of a problem.
Time will only tell if the postal service and the APWU will get their acts together, but at this point they're looking less reliable than the pony express.