U.S. Postal Service, Unions Approve 4-Year Labor Pact

The U.S. Postal Service and labor unions representing 560,000 workers Wednesday accepted a four-year contract drawn up by an arbitration panel, ending a seven-month impasse that had threatened to mushroom into a major dispute.

In the agreement, salaries for mail carriers and postal clerks will rise about 6% over the life of the contract, an increase that Postmaster General Anthony M. Frank said should not affect postal rates.

“We believe that this decision is responsive to the concerns expressed by our customers,” Frank said. “We also feel that our employees are receiving a good package of wages and benefits.”

When Postal Service contracts lapsed last November, leaders of the American Postal Workers Union and the National Assn. of Letter Carriers demanded an 8% wage increase for 1991 and 7% increases for 1992 and 1993. Postal Service administrators, however, claimed that giving in to those demands eventually would force the price for mailing a first-class letter to as much as 50 cents from the price of 29 cents now.

The new contract also allows for the hiring of more temporary and part-time workers while the Postal Service completes an automation system. The agreement says that up to one-fifth of all postal workers now can be hired on this “non-career” basis. Part-time and temporary employees previously made up 12% of the Postal Service work force.

“You win some; you lose some,” Vincent Sombrotto, president of the National Assn. of Letter Carriers, said of the unions’ improvement on wages but setback on the part-time worker issue.

Frank said, however, that the agency needs the flexibility of hiring non-career workers because an increasing number of postal jobs will be phased out in the next four years as work once done by employees is taken over by machines.

The contract ruling provides annual base-pay increases, beginning with a 1.2% increase effective Saturday. Workers also will receive a $351 payment to make up for the last seven months, since the contract is retroactive to last November.