Job Stress Gets Part of Blame for Violence

Tom Fahey has seen it before. “You never get used to this, but you get numb, shellshocked,” said Fahey, a national spokesman for the American Postal Workers Union. “The public must wonder what in the hell is going on in the Postal Service.”

When Charles T. Barbagallo, a mail carrier, was shot to death Thursday in the Dana Point post office, he became the 34th to die in 12 such bloody outbursts over the past 10 years. Twenty more carriers have been shot but survived. The usual killer has been a present or former postal employee.

The accused Dana Point gunman, Mark Richard Hilbun, had been angry over being fired for stalking a former co-worker. Only hours before that shooting, a postal worker in Dearborn, Mich., was slain by a colleague upset at not getting a promotion. Although it is uncertain what frustrations triggered the separate incidents, the slayings spotlighted nagging questions about post office violence.

Is it the job, which Fahey described as “stressful, tedious, well-paying but extremely thankless”? Fahey thinks that’s part of the reason.

The violence, he says, is bred by “a combination of extremely high-stress, machine-paced work environment managed by supervisors who are of the paramilitary, do-it-my-way-or-else school of thought. It always has been this way, but now we’re in a time when people are venting their grievances with firearms.”

Don’t expect outright denials from postal authorities. Postmaster Gen. Marvin T. Runyon, pointing out that workplace violence happens elsewhere as well, conceded after last week’s killings in Dana Point and Dearborn that “our management style is too authoritarian--something most of us knew already.”

And at the huge mail processing center in Santa Ana, manager Bob Gillis said, “We’re getting away from the authoritative style of management that characterized the postal service for so long.”

He said that while stress among his 1,200 postal workers, who handle 6 million pieces of mail each day, is probably no higher than in other industries, he’s collaborating with the local union to reduce stress.

Brett D. Baden, a letter sorter and union shop steward in the Santa Ana center, said gains are being made. But violence? What can you do?

“For 99% of the people that go off and do these things, it’s more than the job,” Baden said. “It’s things going on with them before they ever came to work here.

“We don’t worry about it too much because there are so many other things to worry about. We deal with a lot of toxic stuff going through the building, and we have the threat of a letter bomb. (Being shot) is not at the top of the list of things we worry about.”

The Postal Service is the largest civilian employer in the nation, with about 729,000 workers nationwide. In Orange County’s 112 postal facilities, about 10,000 employees handle about 11.5 million pieces of mail each day.

“Most people know two things about the Postal Service: They like their letter carrier and they don’t like to stand in line at the post office. That’s all they know,” Fahey said.

In reality, there are 23 job categories in the Postal Service, from postmaster general ($140,000 a year) to the beginning, lowest-level employees ($19,407 a year). For clerks and carriers with five years on the job, the salary rises to $31,000 a year. Among the benefits are health insurance, a retirement plan, two weeks’ vacation a year, rising to five weeks after 15 years, and job security.

The Postal Service gave questionnaires to all employees last spring, and about 80% returned them, said Sandra Stewart, a Postal Service spokeswoman. While most said that “it’s a good job; they loved working for the Postal Service,” about 61% complained about stress on the job. Employees at all levels complained about unfair supervisors.

The result, she said, is “we’re making treatment of people a very high priority in the selection and promotion of managers, and we’re basing compensation on how well the organization does as a whole.” The Postal Service will survey employees again this summer to see whether there has been any improvement.

“He (Runyon) is the first one in memory who’s talking about effecting fundamental change in the labor-management climate,” Fahey said. “And he seems to be a man who acts when he speaks instead of just issuing press releases.”

Lori Gilbert used to be a letter carrier in four different offices. Now she’s a custodian in the Santa Ana center.

“They’re so concerned with productivity and numbers. It’s too high a stress job, so I decided to do something else,” Gilbert said. “Maybe a person will go up to a supervisor and say they’re not feeling well, that they’re dizzy or sick, and the supervisor will send them out in the field anyway. And it’s because the supervisors are just as stressed.

“Some of the supervisors are on a power trip, and they want things done their way, even if it’s not the best thing for the customer or the employee. And they’ll have a carrier that’s been here 10 or 15 years, and if they complain about something they’ll say, ‘If you don’t like the job, leave.’ ”

But, she added, “a lot of people in this office are making an honest effort to make it better.”

At the Fountain Valley post office, Brian Grode, a carrier for 10 years, remembers bosses “who are constantly on your back. If you’re a good worker, they want more. There was also a lot of pressure; you couldn’t do enough.”

But he, too, detects a change in the wind. The present manager is “the best we’ve ever had. He deals with people a lot better. He doesn’t treat you like a second-class citizen, a slave. He’s truly concerned about our welfare.”

At the Laguna Niguel post office, former carrier Debbie Rikli now schedules staff and transportation. “I might complain all day long, but it really is a good job,” she said.

“The bottom line is to get the mail to the customers,” and “just one person calling in sick is enough to throw off a whole schedule.”

It’s difficult, she said, to motivate workers to do their same, stressful jobs every day. But the Postal Service seems to be abandoning its old, military style of management.

Fahey said it’s hard for an outsider to understand the stress in the sorting rooms not seen by the public. Not all postal jobs are stressful, but some are intensely so, he said.

“Behind those walls, particularly in large facilities, what you have are assembly-line, machine-paced, industrial job sites where, in some of these big facilities, thousands of people sit at machines to process mail.

“Rows of people sit at consoles. A letter pops up every second, and they key in the ZIP code. I mean that literally: one letter on every console every second. And you’d better keep up or you’re out of a job. That’s how you spend your workday.

“You got supervisors standing over these people, in some cases almost like a warden in a prison, cracking the whip, telling you to keep the production up. To go to the restroom, you have to raise your hand like you’re in elementary school. That’s how the mail gets processed.”

Most say the letter carriers, who once out on their routes are working independently, escape much of this stress, but not all of it.

Diane Visser, a carrier at the Fountain Valley office, said that at another post office she was rebuked by a supervisor for taking a day off to care for her son, who was sick. “He told me that my family was a second priority, that your job came first,” Visser said. “Being a single parent, my family comes first.”

She said the atmosphere is different in Fountain Valley. “We’re like family here.”

Peter Amat, a letter carrier at the Fountain Valley post office, has been in the Postal Service 25 years, and “I’ve never had any trouble at work.” After the Dana Point shooting, he said, he was touched by the concern expressed by his customers.

“They say, ‘We don’t want to lose you.’ They’ve been praying for us. . . . You can even see a tear in their eye. They’re very nice. It gives you a pat on the back and it boosts your morale, because it means they care.”

Recent shootings, however, have given a new meaning to the term job security. After the Dana Point slaying, postal police were stationed at some Orange County post offices, and others allowed their employees the options of staying home and, if they came to work, wearing civilian clothes rather than conspicuous postal uniforms.

But postal authorities said they have been trying to increase security in more lasting ways.

In 1991 after killings in the post office in Royal Oaks, Mich., the service’s 24-hour hot line was reorganized and re-advertised to solicit employee reports of threats or assaults. About 1,800 calls have been made, resulting in 145 arrests of postal employees and 63 transfers, authorities said.

Joe Mahon, the Postal Service’s vice president for labor relations, said the service will review its hiring practices with an eye toward weeding out people with histories of violence, but there are laws and regulations protecting privacy. Besides, he said, in most of the situations, “we’re not always dealing with employees who just have come on the rolls.”

He said there will be no wholesale review of personnel files, but “we do have mechanisms for the identification of problem employees, so that we can look into the backgrounds, see whether or not there were military history problems.”

Frank Brennan, manager of media relations for the Postal Service, said the agency does not routinely do psychological testing of job applicants. But employees may be tested, he said, “if we have reason to believe someone has a mental imbalance and could be a menace to themselves or to others and (the concern) is validated by a physician or professional law enforcement officer in conjunction with (post office) management.” In that case, he said, “we will schedule the employee for a fitness for duty physical that will include a psychiatric evaluation.”

Dan Mihalko, a postal inspector in Washington, said security measures in the past have been focused on keeping non-employees out of postal facilities. “To institute measures to keep postal employees out of postal facilities is a tremendous undertaking. Quite frankly, I don’t know what sort of measures would have prevented the situation in Dearborn.”

In Dana Point, a fired employee is charged with returning to the post office and shooting at employees. “If you have a person fired, how long do you monitor for them?” Mihalko said. “What kind of security do you have that would have prevented this? . . . When you are dealing with irrational people performing irrational acts, it’s really difficult to prevent that from happening no matter what type of security you have.”

Some postal workers say that they are worried about such outbreaks; others say they are unconcerned.

And others, such as Gilbert, don’t know what to think.

She said she recalled a co-worker in a different office who learned his mother was dying of cancer and asked for time off to visit her. The supervisor rebuked the man and denied the request, Gilbert said. A higher-ranking supervisor finally overruled the decision.

“I remember this guy saying he was going to come in with a baseball bat and take out (his supervisor) at the knees because of the whole thing,” she said.

“People say stuff like that all the time, but around these places, how are you going to know if maybe he’s serious?”

Times correspondents Geoff Boucher, Debra Cano and Anna Cekola, staff writers Leslie Berkman, Bill Billiter and David Reyes and researcher April Jackson contributed to this report.

Contributing to these reports were Times staff writers Leslie Berkman, Lily Dizon, Greg Hernandez, Matt Lait, Thuan Le, Dave Lesher, Eric Lichtblau, Davan Maharaj, Mark Platte, David Reyes, Jodi Wilgoren and Nancy Wride and correspondents Anna Cekola, Willson Cummer and Bob Elston.