Poor Employee Relations, Rigid Work Rules Impair Improvement in Mail Service

The scene is Columbia Heights Post Office in Washington, D.C. It is Thursday afternoon, one hour before closing time. Seven people are in line.

A chatty clerk is admiring the new gold belt that a friend is dangling before the cloudy plastic window that separates clerks from the public. “What are you doing this weekend?” she asks. “Nothing,” her buddy replies.

At the next window, a co-worker weighs a brown paper package and tosses it at the parcel cart, missing on the first try.

At the third window, a customer taps her yellow pick-up slip on the counter as the voices of clerks in the rear office seep through the walls.

“All Services,” the signs at each window position read. No service, the Rev. Alfred Owens fumes as he stomps out of line and out the door.

“You would think you would have more people. It makes me angry!” he says. “Once you get to the window, you have no problem, but I never wait over 10 minutes. I leave and come back. . . . I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Window clerk is a coveted position among the U.S. Postal Service’s 800,000 employees. It gives the public a regular glimpse into the workplace culture of one of the nation’s largest employers.

Postal officials, fellow employees and outside experts agree that the service needs to adapt to technology and change the way its employees interact if productivity is to improve and financial disaster is to be avoided.

So far, old habits appear to be holding on.

Although the post office has spent more than $500 million on automation in the last year, it has not saved money or improved services. This failure raises questions about whether its rule-bound work force can be turned around fast enough, or at all.

This semi-governmental bureaucracy is organized along military hierarchical lines. Postal work is characterized by strong unions, rigid work rules and powerful seniority rights. It is carried on in an antiquated factory atmosphere that attempts each day to serve millions of customers for about 25 cents per transaction.

“The more centralized an organization is, the more it takes a first-class upheaval to change it,” said Harrison Trice, professor of organizational behavior at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.

The current impetus for change is simmering discontent at all levels and an atmosphere of entrenched habits and attitudes on the part of both management and employees.

The disciplinary and grievance procedures outlined in the largest union’s contract have become a main channel of workplace communication, which at times seems absurd. In Falls Church, Va., a letter carrier received this written warning:

“On Jan. 9, 1988, you were instructed to have your mail ready at each delivery, to take all obvious shortcuts and to walk with a normal gait; not to take ‘little baby steps.’ On Jan. 21, 1988, you failed to do so.”

In Philadelphia, a new postmaster tried to reduce absenteeism by taking across-the-board action against workers who were out more than three times in 12 months. When one clerk died on the job, union activists blamed his death on the postmaster’s work rules. It was later determined that the employee had died of a drug overdose.

In Indianapolis, the postmaster ordered injured employees who returned to work but asked for light duty to sit in a large, glass-enclosed room in the middle of the work floor and read mail manuals--an apparent effort to humiliate them into returning to regular duty.

In northern Virginia, American Postal Workers Union local president John C. Clements wrote members of his chapter last April: “I have noticed a disturbing trend developing--that desire to ‘quietly’ resolve out our problems. . . . At the risk of sounding hard core, I must make the following statement: Labor peace is management’s goal, not the union’s!”

The posture of the two largest postal unions regarding change are as different as their two leaders.

Morris (Moe) Biller, 74, president of the 370,000-member American Postal Workers Union since 1980, is an old-line fighter who has refused to let his rank-and-file participate in employee involvement groups, which are supposed to give workers a say in problem-solving and management of their jobs.

Likewise, when the Postal Service announced that Sears, Roebuck & Co. would operate mini-post offices in its stores, Biller called out the troops. Union members mailed Sears thousands of letters of protest, some of which contained torn credit cards. In July, the Postal Service relented.

By contrast, Vincent Sombrotto, 66, president of the 315,000-member National Assn. of Letter Carriers since 1978, is known as a reformer. He has embraced attempts to involve employees directly in decision-making about their jobs.

At the local level, managers see first-hand the lack of communication between supervisors and employees. Part of the problem, postal and union officials say, is that citing one of the thousands of rules in the official work manuals often takes the place of reasonable discussion.

“Supervisors don’t know how to make decisions unless they can find it in a book,” said Phillip Tabbita, special assistant to the president of the American Postal Workers Union. “Common sense goes out the window and good relations go out the window.”

Tabbita cited as an example the way budget-related mandates get translated into work orders. For example, if headquarters decides that cost constraints force it to keep sick leave down to 3% of any work week, officials will send that directive down the line. At the end, the message goes out to supervisors on the work floor that they must keep the sick leave taken by the crew on each of their shifts within that limit. If someone is on maternity leave and someone else has an accident, the allotment for the entire crew is used up.

Management “tortures the supervisors in the process, and they torture our people,” Tabbita said.

“In my opinion, the line supervisor can never stand alone and take the blame for poor relations with their employees,” Rubin Handelman, president of the National Postal Supervisors Assn., wrote supervisors in September. “The blame must also be pointed toward a supervisor’s boss.”

Visits to mail-processing facilities and post offices in Washington and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, in Philadelphia and in San Diego and New Orleans, pointed up that, at its core, the Postal Service provides factory jobs to baby boomers in a white-collar era.

The workplace, for most, is a noisy, drab assembly line for getting someone else’s personal belongings--the mail--in and out the door.

To get through their shifts, some employees said, they mentally remove themselves from their work, which is limited to tasks strictly defined in the labor contract.

“I think of my business I have on the side, or what the stocks are doing,” said Chuck Muller, 33, who sorts mail by hand in San Diego. “. . . I’m not even here when I’m at the (work station).”

Felicia McFail, a window clerk at the main post office in Alexandria whose supervisor described her as “the best in the business,” lights up when she talks about the professional calligraphy she does on the side.

Recently, a visitor clocked McFail and two other clerks at the window: 12 transactions in 15 minutes.

The pace was slower in the back room, where mail is sorted. One clerk was re-sorting miss-sorted mail. One was hand-counting pieces of stamped business-reply mail for refunds of excess postage to the recipient. Another was trying to trace missing packages. Another was hand-stamping letters, “Insufficient address.”

Work life is complicated because the postal hierarchy is superimposed over workers who have more formal education than their predecessors and may feel they have a right to more direct control of their workday.

“Back in the 1970s, we never told the union anything other than what we were required to do,” said Deputy Postmaster General Michael S. Coughlin.

The Letter Carriers’ Sombrotto said that in the past, “Management had goals and objectives. They sprung it on you, you grieved, went to arbitration and litigation; ultimately, they won if they were right.”

To try to overcome the us-versus-them attitude, the Postal Service set up what it calls employee involvement teams. There are also management involvement groups for supervisors.

But progress has been uneven.

The process, said William Burrus, American Postal Workers Union executive vice president, is an instrument to weaken the bond between employee and union, and “a way to get around the collective bargaining process by talking directly to employees.”

Post offices and union locals have found ways to cooperate.

It was the union that pushed for and won training for new window clerks, and that set up a nationwide task force on child care.

In San Diego and northern Virginia, the local presidents meet regularly with top managers and join in occasional pep talks or gripe sessions on the work floor.

Since 1982, the National Assn. of Letter Carriers has allowed its rank and file to participate in employee involvement groups, of which there are now about 5,000. The number of grievances has been dramatically reduced.

While the major contribution of some of these groups has been as simple as getting microwave ovens for post offices, there are also experiments in self-managed work.

At one Washington post office, employee teams have taken on the jobs of their supervisors. For a year, employees have come up with work schedules and monitored daily performance and the general administration. Their post office was recently honored as the only one in the district to have twice exceeded minimum postal standards for productivity, overtime reduction and safety.

“It’s working well,” said Joseph Henry of the union’s involvement team. “The whole process of changing human behavior is a long-term process. We’re probably still looking four to five years away.”