Postal Service Sees Workers Holding Key to Its Survival : Mail: With changing marketplace, the focus is on a more productive, motivated labor force. But progress is limited.

The gleaming, graffiti-free facade of the world’s largest single-story mail sorting plant dominates South Central Avenue near Gage Avenue, rising temple-like amid used furniture stores, struggling recycling plants and the shells of long-gone factories.

With a work space larger than 10 football fields, the mail-pumping heart of the Los Angeles Postal District hums with the industrial music of automatic address scanners, keyboard operated sorters and two miles of conveyer belts that carry more than 8 million pieces of mail a day.

But, critical as the machines are, it is the nearly 800,000 members of the nation’s largest civilian work force--as diverse as any in America--that makes the difference in whether the mail arrives on time at the right house.

“We have some eye-popping automation,” said David Mazer, a Postal Service spokesman in Los Angeles.

“But when all is said and done, it is a man or a woman at the end of the line who takes the mail out on the street and puts it in your box,” Mazer said.

Getting those carriers, clerks and sorters to work harder and smarter--to exert “discretionary effort,” in agency argot--is a major push of the Postal Service these days.

A more productive and motivated work force is essential to the agency’s very survival in a rapidly changing marketplace where customers increasingly have quicker and more reliable alternatives. Rising wages and benefits now account for more than 80% of the Postal Service’s costs.

Postmaster General Marvin T. Runyon Jr., who took over the agency in 1992 with orders to cut costs and boost productivity, has sought a bolder and more elusive goal: to foster teamwork and creativity throughout a sprawling organization that for decades has sought improvement through punishment.

Yet progress so far has been scant. Union officials said the only change they notice is that workers are pushed harder than ever. Some bosses still base sensitive personnel decisions solely on financial considerations. Carriers and clerks feel demeaned when they are hassled into working when they are legitimately sick. Minority groups are squabbling over promotions and their rightful place in an agency that has a long record of affirmative action.

Worries About Stress

Three-quarters of the Los Angeles district’s employees surveyed in 1992 said the relationship between unionized workers and their supervisors deteriorated in the past five years, with fewer than a third saying they were treated with “dignity and respect” and the majority saying they worry about on-the-job stress.

For most Americans, a mail carrier is the only federal employee with whom we will ever have a first-name relationship, the only one we will ever tip at Christmas. As a result, the delivery of the mail provides a barometer of the nation’s ability to provide an important service at a reasonable cost.

And many postal workers, from those casing the mail to top officials, contend by that measure they are doing a good job. They say they are proud of what they do and embarrassed or even offended by criticism--often unfounded, they argue--from the public.

“These employees are really conscientious,” said Joyce E. Turner, a supervisor in the Los Angeles Mail Processing and Distribution Center. “But . . . all we hear is that some disgruntled employee got ticked off and shot everybody.”

For many African Americans, the Postal Service has long stood for such quintessential American ideals as opportunity and upward mobility. And with the average unionized postal worker earning $43,000 a year, including benefits, for tasks that generally require few skills, the agency has long been considered a point of entry into the American middle class.

A job there has made distant dreams attainable. James Smith, for example, was just out of high school and fresh from picking cotton when he became a temporary carrier 30 years ago.

Now, he and his siblings have college degrees, which he helped finance. All of it, he said, “started with the post office.”

Yet, the Postal Service has become better known in recent years for the corrosive tension between workers and their bosses than for the opportunities it offers.

A wave of post office gun violence that claimed 34 lives and left 20 people wounded nationally between 1983 and 1993 shocked Americans and left the agency with an unshakable and macabre reputation for hiring psychotic gunslingers.

Those tragedies prompted Congress to focus on problems within the agency. The General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm, concluded in a report this fall that the Postal Service is saddled with a “dysfunctional organizational culture.” Mistrust separates autocratic managers from adversarial workers and their unions, the GAO said.

The report, which occasioned a Senate committee hearing last month, also concluded that:

* The morale of postal employees has suffered because hard workers go unrewarded, poor ones are ignored and all non-managers are kept out of the loop when it comes to important decisions. Meanwhile, a rising tide of mail and staff reductions in an ill-considered 1992 early retirement plan has forced workers to put in ever more hours of overtime.

* Disputes over those issues often result in formal discipline charges, which unions counter by filing grievances. In 1992 alone, according to the report, the Postal Service spent $200 million processing those complaints.

* Yet labor negotiations tend to focus on traditional union concerns of job security, wages and benefits and on management’s desire for leverage to control costs. The current round of agency-union negotiations has gone to arbitration over just those issues.

At the Senate hearing, Runyon proposed forming a joint union-management committee to quickly convert a corporate culture he has characterized as “operation-driven, cost-driven, authoritarian” to one that is “success-oriented, people-oriented and customer-driven.”

The atmosphere is most tense in the giant, factory-like processing plants, such as the one on South Central Avenue.

The three daily “tours” there move to the rhythms of the time clock and the precise schedule of dispatches and arrivals at more than 140 truck bays. Letter-sorter operators type zip codes at the wrist-wrecking rate of one per second for 45 minutes without a break and optical scanner operators have to move so fast they are prone to back injuries.

The American Postal Workers Union, which represents clerks and mail sorters, contends the machines are dangerous and has persuaded the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to conduct a study.

Until recently, Debra Brewster was an air mail record processor at the Worldway mail center at Los Angeles International Airport, another vast and bustling processing plant. Now, she is on a stress disability leave.

“We’re always told that we have to get so much mail out, that we have to meet this quota,” she said. “If a piece of mail falls under a machine, they say: ‘Leave it there because it will slow your productivity down.’ ”

The situation is somewhat better in post offices themselves. Carriers spend the early part of their shift “casing” the mail--tossing it into wooden cubbyholes that correspond to individual addresses--just as they have done for decades.

But disputes arise when carriers wind up with more mail for their routes than the maximum they are required to carry, as happens several days a week in most parts of Los Angeles. Supervisors have to either authorize overtime to get the extra delivered or leave it for the next day.

Nancy Vargas, a carrier in the East Los Angeles station who tried to work out a solution to that dilemma with her supervisor, said she was rebuffed and told: “It’s our job to manage the mail.”

Leave Policy Hit

One major source of complaints and grievances is the agency’s restrictive leave policy. Many managers are loath to let workers take a day off, unless it has been approved well in advance. As a result, some workers claim to be sick, when they’re not.

“I can’t afford the luxury of an employee calling in just because they don’t want to come in that morning,” said Charlesetta Chavez, a Rancho Park supervisor who heads the Los Angeles chapter of the National Assn. of Postal Supervisors.

She said she is expected to discipline those with a pattern of absenteeism and to justify overtime, while meeting service goals. Many supervisors feel caught between recalcitrant workers and demanding bosses. And Chavez said more of her members than ever before have themselves been disciplined in recent years.

Charles W. King, who retired in 1992 after 16 years as the Los Angeles postmaster, said: “Postal supervisors have always been under pressure to meet budgets and get the mail out whether or not they had the necessary resources to do it.”

To cope, he said, “you do everything you can to pressure” carriers and sorters.

Despite all the problems, as a group, workers are proud to wear the stylized eagle of the Postal Service.

More than 8 in 10 unionized workers in the Los Angeles district said in the 1992 survey that they were proud of their jobs. Despite the complaints, the overwhelming majority also said they liked their work, pay and benefits and were “committed to the success of the Postal Service.”

And, perhaps as a reflection of Southern California’s still-weak economy, the jobs are in great demand.

In February, the Los Angeles district advertised upcoming employment tests only by word-of- mouth and flyers at a few post offices. Yet, 33,000 people applied and 8,000 eventually took the tests for what will be only 600 to 700 jobs.

Also testifying to the desirability of the jobs is that they have become the focus of a growing inter-ethnic competition. During the 1940s and 1950s, postal service jobs paid relatively poorly and, with the postwar economy booming, attracted few whites or even Latinos. African Americans, however, were still being denied jobs in the private sector.

Postal workers alerted family members of upcoming tests or brought in relatives for temporary jobs. Later, African Americans with seniority and college degrees benefited from affirmative action and began getting promotions.

Now, African Americans represent 62% of the Los Angeles district’s nearly 11,000 employees, although they constitute only 10% of the local civilian labor force. They hold 75% of the positions in middle management and three of five higher level jobs. Latinos represent 35% of the local civilian labor force but only 15% of all postal workers and an even smaller percentage of managers.

Citing those numbers, Dr. Tirso del Junco, a Los Angeles surgeon and an appointee to the agency’s Board of Governors, said last summer that African American managers should be doing more to “open the doors of opportunity to everyone.” African Americans said, in response, that they were being punished for their success.

Hiring is done fairly, postal officials said, and vowed to try to interest all groups in applying. “The marketplace has changed so that we have to be concerned with all kinds of people, not just Latinos,” said Los Angeles postmaster Jesse Durazo.

Today, postal workers just starting out in Los Angeles remain hopeful. Others feel their lives have been ruined by jobs that became nightmares. Some are frustrated to be still hoisting a heavy bag, as their bodies age. And others haven’t lost their desire to keep America’s letter boxes filled.

Here are four of their stories.

Camille Hill

By the time mail carrier Camille Hill hoisted her capacious leather bag from the back of her truck at 9:30 one recent morning, she’d been on the job for 3 1/2 hours, organizing the mass of political flyers, catalogues, credit card solicitations in the order of her East Los Angeles route.

Over the next five hours she would fill the bag 10 more times, hike 20 city blocks, drop off five parcels and exchange chitchat several dozen times. The routine is both legendary and mundane, and her presence was as much-awaited as a love letter and as taken-for-granted as a holiday merchandise catalogue.

Hill’s point of departure was the corner of Dangler Avenue and Fisher Street, in a neighborhood where dogs patrol tiny plots protected by patterned iron fences. She knows what to expect from every one, those that are overfed and lazy or those that are bony and hyperkinetic.

Like every mail carrier, Hill has dog stories. But she also has people stories, about the “customers” who look forward to seeing her five times a week. Although she does not speak Spanish, the primary language of virtually everyone she serves, Hill knows much about their lives--who has had babies, who has been on vacation, who is sick and who has died.

For some who are infirm and housebound, hers is the day’s only face, its only voice. She is a safety net of sorts, a quick-to-laugh link to the outside world that no communications system based on electronics or profit alone could provide.

As she put a bill and some advertisements into one mail slot she shouted a greeting at the screen door, knowing that just on the other side of it sits an unseen elderly arthritis sufferer.

“I try to holler at her every day and ask how she is because she’s home alone while her daughter is working,” Hill said.

Her customers know the mail will be late the day that Hill is off because it will be carried by someone who is working overtime or is unfamiliar with the route.

Hill, 48, and other carriers assigned to poorer neighborhoods are instructed to be particularly careful the first and third of every month, when robbers sometimes lay in wait to steal Social Security and welfare checks.

Carrier robberies in the Los Angeles district of the Postal Inspection Service, which covers most of Southern California, except San Diego, have more than tripled in the last three years to 139, the highest in the nation. Carriers have been attacked with knives, meat cleavers and pepper spray; they have been forced at the point of a shotgun to hand over their bags.

As many as 100 postal inspectors, police officers and sheriff’s deputies work under cover on those days. Hill said she relies on the people along her route to look out for her as well, making sure to park near houses where she knows people are at home.

Hill noted the Federal Express and United Parcel Service trucks she often sees making deliveries along her route and said she is aware of the competition. But, she said, she doesn’t feel threatened. “We have good mail service and I don’t feel like we have a problem,” she said. “I really don’t.”

Victor Delgado

Victor Delgado, a carrier for 15 years, believes the rungs have been cut from his career ladder. And he believes the reason is that he is Latino.

Delgado, 37, said he has taken all the steps--the practical as well as the purely political--to position himself for advancement.

He has helped train other carriers. He served on a special postal district committee to make sure Latinos were treated equally. He helped organize career awareness conferences and social events honoring the postmaster. He took college classes in labor relations. He even filled in as an acting supervisor.

But none of it helped. Every time Delgado applied to become a permanent manager he was rejected. And he believes it was because many of the district’s managers, including most of those who sat on promotions boards, are African American.

Personnel officials said that district policy requires promotion boards to be racially diverse. But Sylvia Woodside, the district’s chief of personnel, said that she could not speak for how things were done before her arrival two years ago.

She acknowledged the perception by some Latinos that they are unwelcome. But she said efforts to change that are under way. Employee councils of every ethnicity are being formed. And the district plans to hire a Latino program specialist to “find employees that are qualified, eager and have potential” for advancement.

In 1989, Delgado filed an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint. “I said: ‘Something is wrong here. The station manager says I’m a superior carrier, and that I have all the qualifications, and writes me an excellent reference, and then my application comes back and it says I’m not good enough.’ ”

He later withdrew the complaint, fearing it would hurt his career. Soon after, he said that he was blackballed anyway. He was no longer invited to attend the career events, let alone help organize them. He was no longer asked to be an acting supervisor.

Now Delgado is trying to find a future outside the post office, or perhaps with the Postal Inspection Service. He delivers his route during the day and, when the Dodgers are in town, he moonlights as the manager of a concession stand at the stadium.

Becoming a supervisor in the post office “is out of the question,” he said.

Debra Brewster

Debra Brewster was overjoyed when she got a job at the post office 15 years ago. Now, she considers herself to be one of its victims.

Most recently a graveyard shift mail processor at the Los Angeles airport sorting facility, Brewster has been on stress leave since early October. That was when she says a supervisor she had been feuding with for seven months shook her by the arms and screamed at her.

The problems started, she said, when she injured her back last spring trying to guide a cart loaded with hundreds of pounds of mail. A doctor recommended that she be given a less physically demanding “detail,” as post office tasks are known, until her back healed completely.

But her supervisor accused her of being a slacker and wrote letters to oppose paying her worker’s compensation benefits. A federal claims examiner later ordered her paid.

She was assigned to another unit but Brewster claimed the same supervisor continued to harass her. Finally, she says, they tussled in a passageway, with the supervisor grabbing her arms and shaking her.

Brewster, 40, has been off ever since. She takes three types of tranquilizers to help her sleep. Even so, nighttime finds her pacing her apartment. The supervisor remains on the job.

“When I first came here I truly enjoyed working for the post office and . . . I took my job very seriously,” she said. “As time goes on, I’m in it just to survive, to send my son to college, to feed my kids.”

James Smith

For some, the Postal Service is an easy target for wry jokes. But James Smith reveres the agency he has spent nearly 30 years working for.

Before he became a temporary carrier, Smith had been picking cotton in Florida for $3 a day. Now 48 and a high-ranking executive, he drives a top-of-the-line BMW, owns a View Park home worth $500,000 and has a master’s degree from UCLA.

“This is not a job to me, it’s a career . . . that has allowed me to have a middle class way of life,” said Smith, one of the district’s top customer service executives.

But his success has not come without sacrifice. He distinguished himself early by working six or seven days a week, sometimes 16 hours a day, even though back then post office wages were low and there was no overtime pay. He said he’s never called in sick.

“The only job I’ve ever had is to make my boss look good” he said, adding that he has little patience with mediocrity.

Smith said he and other supervisors have long been accustomed to disciplining workers for their mistakes first and talking to them about it later. Now, he said, he realizes another approach is needed. He said he thinks the change in approach is healthy, but not easy.

“I have to learn . . . that others can’t always give 110%,” he said. “I have to understand that others can’t give what I give.”

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Delivering Southern California’s Mail

The U.S. Postal Service carries the mail to more than 10 million addresses in Southern California, a human and logistic task comparable only to waging war. Postal operations for the area stretching from San Luis Obispo to the Mexican border are divided between five districts, which together employ more than 49,000 workers.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA POSTAL OPERATIONS / LOS ANGELES POSTAL DISTRICT

1) The Los Angeles postal district covers the city of Los Angeles south of the Santa Monica Mountains and some unincorporated areas on the Eastside. It serves nearly 1 million residences and 100,000 businesses, divided into 1,800 delivery routes.

Postal Facilities

The Los Angeles district has 43 neighborhood post offices, 19 postal counters (where stamps are sold and mail can be dropped off), 22 contract post offices (inside stores and other private locations) and three processing centers.

The Processing and Distribution Center opened in 1989 on the 74-acre site of a former Goodyear Tire plant in South Central Los Angeles. The 1.1-million square foot facility includes the district’s administrative offices, repair and maintenance facilities for a fleet of 2,700 cars, trucks and vans and the world’s largest single-story mail processing floor. That floor covers an area the size of 10 football fields; more than two miles of conveyer belts wind through it. Mail is received, processed and sent back out through more than 140 truck bays.

Mail Volume

About 8.4 million pieces of mail are delivered daily in the Los Angeles district, not including parcels; more than 3 billion pieces were delivered during 1992. The average customer receives 2,700 pieces of mail annually.

Financial Impact

The annual payroll of the Los Angeles district is $505 million; revenues for the year ended Sept. 30 were $456 million. If the district was a private employer, its payroll would rank as the 22nd largest in Los Angeles County.

Wages

Postal clerks, carriers and mail handlers earn an average of $32,458, or $15.60 per hour. With overtime and benefits, they average $42,711.

For comparison, United Parcel Service truck drivers earn an average of $33,930, or $18.85 per hour. With overtime and benefits, they earn an average of $43,821.

Employment

The district’s mail is sorted, trucked, moved, monitored and delivered by 10,750 clerks, carriers, handlers, supervisors and administrators.

The average Los Angeles district postal worker is 43 years old and has been on the job 18 years.

THE REST OF THE SOUTHLAND

The Los Angeles district’s efforts are replicated in four other Southern California postal districts.

Four other districts handle mail for the rest of Southern California:

2) Van Nuys, serving a U-shaped area that also takes in Mojave and Pasadena and swings up the coast to San Luis Obispo.

3) Santa Ana, encompassing Orange County and part of the San Gabriel Valley.

4) Long Beach, covering the cities and unincorporated areas of southern and western Los Angeles County, including Malibu, Beverly Hills, Torrance, Hawthorne, Gardena and many others.

5) San Diego, serving that city and sweeping east and north to San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

Postal Facilities: 976 post offices and related facilities / 10 processing plants

Addresses Served: 9.1 million, residential and commercial

Postal Routes: 12,747 postal routes

Mail Volume: 45.7 million pieces daily; 13.7 billion pieces annually

Employees: 38,348

DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE POSTAL WORK FORCE

The postal work force in Los Angeles differs dramatically from the larger civilian work force, with far higher percentages of both Anglo and Latino workers. For all Southern California, the makeup of the postal work force is much more like that of the labor force as a whole.

CIVILIAN LABOR FORCE IN LOS ANGELES Caucasian: 45% African American: 10% Latino: 35% Asian: 10% Native American: less than 1% ****

LOS ANGELES DISTRICT POSTAL WORKFORCE Gender All Employees Male: 58% Female: 42% Lower-level supervisors and managers Male: 51% Female: 49% Upper management Male: 66% Female: 34% Ethnicity All Employees Caucasian: 8% African American: 60% Latino: 16% Asian American: 15% Native American: less than 1% Lower-level Supervisors and managers Caucasian: 10% African American: 74% Latino: 10% Asian American: 6% Native American: less than 1% Upper-level management Caucasian: 15% African American: 60% Latino: 13% Asian American: 11% Native American: 1% ****

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA POSTAL WORKFORCE* Gender All Employees Male: 63% Female: 37% Lower-level supervisors and managers Male: 59% Female: 41% Upper management Male: 75% Female: 25% Ethnicity All Employees Caucasian: 40% African American: 13% Latino: 17% Asian American: 20% Native American: Less than 1% Lower-level supervisors and managers Caucasian: 44% African American: 32% Latino: 14% Asian American: 9% Native American: Less than 1% Upper management Caucasian: 57% African American: 23% Latino: 13% Asian American: 6% Native American: 1% * Including the Los Angeles District

Sources: U.S. Postal Service, United Parcel Service

Researched by NONA YATES AND RICHARD LEE COLVIN / Los Angeles Times