Stress Takes Toll : Grievances Load Down Mailbags

Donald Mace chose to take his life in his U.S. Postal Service uniform.

His handwritten letters to the news media had been mailed. “By the time you receive this,” they began, “I should be dead.”

He gave the exact day and place of his demise: Saturday, March 25, 1989, at the U.S. Post Office in Poway, the San Diego County community where he had worked for more than a decade.

Then the 44-year-old letter carrier, who complained of medical and financial problems as well as harassment by his postal supervisors, walked into the post office and put a .38-caliber revolver to his head.

One of a String

Mace’s death, which has generated strong criticism of the Postal Service in San Diego, is only one in a string of tragic incidents involving workers in the huge agency. During the last decade, dozens of people--ranging from postmasters to carriers--have been murdered or wounded by their co-workers at postal facilities. And in the last 3 1/2 years, the Postal Service has recorded 355 instances where employees assaulted supervisors and 183 where supervisors assaulted employees.

Critics of the Postal Service--including postal workers, union officials, litigants and relatives of some victims of work-related suicides and assaults--say the violence provides testimony that the agency, as it struggles to cope with a volume that last year totaled 160 billion pieces of mail, has extracted an unknown human toll on its employees and their families.

“Stress on the job is a big factor these days,” said Moe Biller, president of the American Postal Workers Union. “I think you’ll find that postal work is a highly tense and dangerous type of employment.”

It is a toll reflected not only in police records and coroners’ reports, the critics claim, but also in worker-management disputes that result in job-related grievances and disciplinary actions.

Number of Grievances

A combined total of 151,730 worker grievances reached the regional arbitration level in fiscal years 1987 and 1988, according to Postal Service statistics. The American Postal Workers Union, which represents the clerks, offers a much bigger number, claiming that more than 281,000 grievances were arbitrated in those years, while about an equal number of lower-level complaints also were filed. The Postal Service has about 650,000 union employees.

The agency, while conceding there is a problem with excessive grievances, nonetheless maintains that employee violence--from suicide to murder--is no greater in the Postal Service than in other sectors of the business world.

“We don’t have any more or any less problems than face society today, whether we’re talking about drugs or just plain bad temper,” said Lou Eberhardt, a Postal Service spokesman in Washington.

Postal officials note that people line up in droves to apply for postal jobs, which pay roughly in the $27,000 to $30,000 range, and those who make it through a probationary period usually want to stay.

At the same time, however, the Postal Service has launched a nationwide effort with the cooperation of the union that represents letter carriers to cut in half the number of grievances reaching regional arbitration.

The struggle to reduce workplace tensions comes at a time of financial uncertainty for the Postal Service, which last year had operating revenues of $35 billion.

Once an official part of the federal government called the Post Office Department, the agency was reorganized in 1971 as a semiprivate company called the U.S. Postal Service. Most of its employees are unionized, but are forbidden to strike.

The agency is required by law to break even financially over the long run. During the current fiscal year, it expects to finish in the black, officials said, but with a significantly smaller margin than had been planned. Since October, it has taken in $104 million less than expected.

Only a year after a major rate increase, Postmaster Gen. Anthony M. Frank said, the agency faces serious financial problems. Expenses are up. Revenues, workload and productivity are down. And many of the agency’s biggest customers are deeply concerned about possible new rate increases and are testing alternatives.

Loss of Business

The Postal Service has lost more than 96% of the parcel post business, is losing a share of the growing international mail business and has only 12% of the Express Mail business--which it originated 19 years ago.

As a result, it is trying to boost productivity while keeping costs down.

Some union leaders complain that in striving to meet these goals, postal supervisors are placing added pressures on workers, resulting in discipline and worker complaints--and worse.

“Discipline is rampant,” said Mike Ganino, president of the clerks union in Stamford, Conn. “People call in sick and it’s the immediate hammer. Management is pushing to be more productive and we’ve noticed a dramatic upswing in the last eight or nine months in verbal, and sometimes physical, altercations on the workroom floor.”

Three years ago, the nation was stunned when part-time mail carrier Patrick Sherrill massacred 14 co-workers, wounded six others and then committed suicide at the post office in Edmond, Okla. Sherrill, a man with an unstable personal history, had often talked about getting revenge on his bosses, who considered his work unsatisfactory.

The Postal Service said events like Edmond could happen anywhere in society.

“Dealing with people who have a psychosis is not very simple and that seems to be one of those cases,” said agency spokesman Eberhardt. “People who have problems in general in their lives will transfer it to a work situation if they don’t get their way.”

But Postal Service critics contend that the Edmond carnage merely exposed the agency’s inability to deal with employee discontent.

“The Postal Service has been pushing employees around for so long that they found one they pushed too far,” said Steven Angel, an Oklahoma City lawyer who represented relatives of some slain postal workers in Edmond. “They couldn’t envision pushing someone over the edge.”

Strict Stand

In the days after the shootings, sympathy cards arrived at the station and were tacked up on a bulletin board. Supervisors, however, warned employees not to read them on company time.

A floral arrangement claiming to represent “the letter carriers of Irving, Texas” arrived and were sent to killer Sherrill’s grave. Union officials said at the time they had no idea who sent them.

The note accompanying the spray of red carnations read: “From those who understood what he went through as a carrier. No one will ever know how far he was pushed to do what he did.”

The tragedy in Edmond, while sensational, was not isolated. Among others:

- Eight years earlier in New Orleans, postal worker Curtis Collins sprayed his supervisor with shots from a .30-caliber carbine, killing the woman and wounding a security guard.

Collins believed that the supervisor was responsible for lowering his rating for an unexcused absence from work and was afraid he would lose his job, news reports at the time said. Two days before the shooting, after being given a letter of reprimand, he slashed the tires on the supervisor’s car.

- In Johnston, S.C., a shotgun-wielding postal worker, who had quit a month earlier after more than 20 years on the job, lined up seven co-workers in the post office in 1983 and told them to pray. After employees fled in all directions, Perry B. Smith found the postmaster hiding in a nearby convenience store.

“He just told the postmaster, ‘I told you I was going to kill you,’ ” recalled carrier Monroe Kneece, a 27-year veteran carrier who was shot in the right eye and forehead in the attack. “He walked in the back of the pantry where the postmaster was hiding behind some boxes, put a 12-gauge shotgun in his stomach and pulled the trigger. He shot him twice.”

Before the assault, Smith had been suspended twice for insubordination.

“The guy he killed had written him up for excessive talking to patrons,” said Gaston Fairey, Smith’s defense attorney. “He also had been written up for being about 30 seconds or a minute late from lunch. . . . This postmaster was sort of an efficiency expert who followed my client around with a stopwatch.”

- In 1983, in Anniston, Ala., James Howard Brooks fatally shot the postmaster and wounded a supervisor. “It just boiled down to an employee disgruntled with overtime pay given to other people,” recalled Anniston Police Officer Ken Murphy, who helped arrest the killer.

- In 1985, in New York City, a letter sorter upset about losing his job pulled a rifle from a U.S. mailbag, shot a co-worker in a postal facility and held a supervisor hostage for two hours in 1985. The employee, according to subsequent news accounts of the incident, had faced dismissal over a series of incidents including tardiness and conduct unbecoming a postal worker.

- In 1986, in Dallas, a mail sorting clerk, who moments earlier was handed a letter of suspension, beat his supervisor unconscious. The assault reportedly came less than a week after at least six Dallas-area postal workers were suspended and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation for making violent threats against co-workers.

- Last June, in Chelsea, Mass., postal clerk Lisa M. Bruni was shot to death in the parking lot of a mail facility by a fellow worker, who later committed suicide. In June, Bruni wrote a letter complaining of harassment by the co-worker and asking supervisors to intervene.

“I greatly fear an incident similar to the one in Oklahoma is possible here at the (mail facility),” she wrote the day before her death. “I am not the only employee here to make this sad observation.”

- And on May 9, in Boston, a distraught mail handler was charged with killing his ex-wife, stealing a single-engine plane and then buzzing the city. During his three-hour flight of terror, he strafed various high-rises and streets with an AK-47 assault rifle.

Fires at Postal Facility

The pilot dived the plane at the downtown general mail facility where he worked, firing at the loading dock. The exact motives for the sky sniping, which followed a marital dispute in court, are under investigation, and the suspect is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Union leaders say that employee violence may often be triggered by problems outside work, but they also blame Postal Service’s management style.

“There’s stress involved in postal activity, particularly in the style of management they employ--it’s autocratic,” said William Burrus, executive vice president of the American Postal Workers Union. “On occasion, it bubbles over into violence. A lot of (the violence) is determined by outside factors, but employers are not helping it by this attitude.”

Burrus said an accurate gauge of employee morale is reflected in the number of grievances that have flooded the system in recent years.

“It indicates you have management not concerned with complying with the contract or interacting with employees,” he said, adding that he knows of no other industry with such a high ratio of grievances.

More than 45,000 grievances, for example, were filed in the Los Angeles, Van Nuys, Santa Ana, Long Beach and San Diego postal divisions during an 18-month period ending last March, the agency said.

Union officials are not shy in attempting to blame their supervisors for the volume of grievances, and in some cases for violent incidents, and management officials caution that much of the criticism can be attributed to the standard posturing that takes place in any labor-management environment.

Nonetheless, at least in terms of grievances, Postal Service officials concede that the volume can be seen as a symptom of deeper troubles within the organization.

L.A. Postmaster’s View

“There are not that many companies as large as the U.S. Postal Service,” said Los Angeles Postmaster Charles King. “But I don’t know of any company that has the amount of grievances we have.”

King said grievance complaints can range from sick leave usage or lack of promotions to “My supervisor doesn’t like me.” But King complained that the unions have abused the process by filing complaints that are never upheld.

“Under our national agreement,” he said, “you can aggrieve almost anything.”

The acrimonious paper work flows both ways. Nationwide figures show that the Postal Service issued 42,733 letters of warning to employees in the 18-month period ending last March. It also handed employees 28,240 suspensions--hich can range from one to 30 days without pay--and there were 6,679 terminations.

Workers often complain that they can be disciplined for infractions that border on the seemingly ridiculous.

In eastern Los Angeles County, union officials said, one carrier was reprimanded for injuring herself by tripping on the sidewalk while another was disciplined for making “excessive motion” when he sorted his mail for delivery. Others have been reprimanded for talking too long with patrons along their routes.

“There is constant harassment,” said Omar M. Gonzalez, president of the Los Angeles clerks union. “We have sometimes as many as four supervisors for eight employees. We’ve had a lot of open hostility and a lot of threats because the level of frustration has just gotten to the point that supervisors have no respect for employees. As summer comes, it’s going to get hot.”

Union executive Burrus said that one reason for so many grievances is the Postal Service’s structure.

“The Postal Service operates like a quasi-military organization,” Burrus said. “They have all the trappings of the military--uniforms; they are a monopoly; they are immune from general laws that govern all other workers in the country. Workers can’t strike.

“Individuals that I represent,” he said, “are under constant supervision. Any time you have constant interface between employees and supervisors, you’re going to have conflicts.”

Like the military, decisions come down from the postmaster general in Washington. His marching orders then go out to five regional postmasters general and they, in turn, pass them along to the heads of 75 divisions throughout the United States. Each division head has half a dozen directors under him who, in turn, have managers under them. Next come tour superintendents, who manage the three work shifts, followed by general supervisors, plain supervisors, line foremen and finally the clerks, carriers and mail handlers.

Like workers under them, postal supervisors also face daily stresses keeping their bosses happy.

“There is great pressure (on supervisors),” said Rubin Handelman, president of the National Assn. of Postal Supervisors, a Washington-based consulting group. “Besides getting the mail out, they are getting pressures from the unions. . . . They are sort of in the middle getting squeezed. Those are guys, like myself, who have lost their hair.”

Postmaster Gen. Frank conceded that some of his managers have a “kick-tail-and-take-names philosophy,” but added that discipline is sometimes necessary.

In Philadelphia, for example, Frank said, one in 10 employees were not showing up for work every day so he brought in a “very dynamic” new postmaster who said that “three unauthorized absences and you’re out of there.” The postmaster also transferred about 150 senior day-shift workers to the night shift, which prompted the unions to set up pickets.

Frank said distrust and friction, whether real or imagined, have built up over the years between the postal unions and management. To reduce these frictions, Frank forged an agreement last year with the letter carriers to cut regional grievances in half. Such cases have fallen nearly 52% since October, his office said.

Houston Grievances

In Houston, where a few years ago a female carrier committed suicide and a probationary carrier slipped into a coma and died of heat exhaustion while frantically trying to make his rounds, grievances that had run into the thousands each year are now down 70%.

Better employee-management relations also are reported in St. Louis and Miami. Even in tragedy-scarred Edmond, Okla., things are said to have improved.

“I think there is a good attitude,” said Edmond Postmaster John Barmann, who transferred there a year after the shootings. “I haven’t had any grievances this year. I talk to the employees and I think everything can be worked out.”

However, the service’s claim that it is lowering dramatically the number of grievances handled at the regional level is challenged as deceptive by the postal clerks union. Union leaders contend that there has been no substantial reduction and that cases are merely being arbitrated locally rather than at the regional level.

Postal clerks and carriers say that their job routines are stressful: “It is a labor-intensive, repetitive job and in some cases you are working on a machine and working at a machine’s pace, not yours,” said Lawrence Bocchiere, northeast regional coordinator for the clerks union.

For example, at the Los Angeles general mail facility--a building so huge that it could hold 10 football fields--crews of 12 clerks sit at consoles operating 13 letter-sorting machines.

Each worker processes one letter a second. As the letters drop before their eyes, they must spot the Zip Codes and then punch a keyboard to instantly sort the mail.

The clerks sit at stretches of 30 or 45 minutes performing this procedure, then go behind the machines and remove letters for 15 minutes. Then they repeat the process throughout their shift, stopping for two breaks and lunch.

“One of our biggest complaints is that postal management will speed up the machines to pick up production,” said Gonzalez of the Los Angeles clerks union. Management denies this.

About twice an hour, operators are given computerized “EDIT” tests to see how well they perform on these machines. A supervisor sitting at a computer screen can automatically see if they are falling below the allowable 5% error rate. If they mess up after 10 tests, they are talked to and retrained. If that doesn’t work, they are disciplined.

The carriers have their own daily routines.

At about 6 a.m., carriers begin their shift by sorting the mail that they will deliver that day. Called “casing,” this involves placing the letters and other materials into slots arranged by address so that they can walk from house to house.

Carriers are expected to sort a minimum of 18 letters and eight “flats” (magazines, newspapers and the like) a minute. In Postal Service jargon, this is called “18 and 8.”

The amount of mail each carrier handles is counted in feet, not pieces. There are roughly 300 pieces of mail a foot. Carriers say sorting can amount to about 30 feet of mail and takes two or three hours to complete.

Efficiency is so prized, one carrier recalled, that he was once evaluated as he sorted 1,000 pieces of mail. The man doing the evaluation wrote that the carrier wasted 13 seconds because he had glanced twice at seven letters.

When the sorting is finished, carriers drive to their assigned routes. Theoretically, the carriers can complete their routes before their day is done. With any time left over they return and sort their third-class mail and magazines for the next day’s delivery.

But union leaders complain that many routes have not been changed for years to compensate for different traffic patterns, new developments or similar significant alterations in the course. As a result, carriers are hard-pressed to complete their deliveries on time. Occasionally, some say, carriers simply dump their mail and return, an offense that will get them fired.

Carriers are timed in the field to ensure they are completing their rounds within a prescribed period.

“They’re always looking over your shoulder,” complained ex-carrier Rick Adams, who until 1987 worked in Poway, where Donald Mace committed suicide in March.

In the weeks that followed Mace’s suicide, his angered relatives said the medal-winning Vietnam veteran had suffered repeated harassment on the job after a 1979 car accident that plunged him into physical and financial ruin.

“Mace and I had a happy marriage until the pressures of the post office were more than he could cope with,” said his former wife, Shirley.

She recalled going home to have lunch with her husband two weeks after they were married in 1982.

“Standing outside in the driveway was a man clocking my husband,” Shirley Mace said. “He (Mace) said, ‘Oh, he won’t bother you. They’re just checking up on me. They’re playing silly little games.’

“Then they told him in writing that he was to go to the bathroom on his own time, not their time,” she recalled. “I was absolutely appalled. I could not believe that in this society this was existing.”

As his mental state deteriorated, Mace grew violent one day, trashing their house, smashing a wine rack through a sliding glass door and holding a broken wine bottle at his wife’s throat. They divorced in 1986.

Mace declared bankruptcy because of his mounting bills. The “final thing that did me in,” he wrote, came when the Postal Service notified him that he had been overpaid nearly $1,500.

“They took $122 every two weeks out of his wages,” said Norman Kersh of Escondido, his brother-in-law. “We figured out somewhere along the line that between his bills and losing that money, we figure he was living on $8 a day.”

San Diego Postal Service spokesman Mike Cannone said Mace’s suicide was an “unfortunate incident” but maintained that the agency was not to blame. “His problems continued through three different officers in charge of that post office,” Cannone said. The spokesman added that Mace had a “disciplinary history,” but said he was not permitted to make it public.

“The post office is trying to push the fact that he was crazy,” Kersh said. “When Don first started, he loved his job. But it got to the point he had so many pressures on him. . . . He went down there in his uniform to make a statement.”

A month after Mace’s suicide, San Diego Postmaster Margaret Sellers sent a letter to Kersh’s wife, Dorothy, saying she regretted “the unfortunate circumstance of the death of your brother, Donald Mace. Please accept my sincere sympathy on behalf of the Postal Service.”

Included with the letter was a certificate which read: “To Donald Martin Mace, in grateful appreciation for 22 years of dedicated service to the government of the United States, given posthumously by the United States Postal Service.”

It was dated March 25--the day Mace shot himself.