According to this article in the MSP Business Journal’s Law Blog, the United States Postal Service has field suit against the American Postal Workers Union in order to block their demands to receive $200,000 in locker upgrades.
From the article:
In December, an arbitrator ordered management at the St. Paul Processing and Distribution Center in Eagan to install lockers at least as large as those at the facility that the new plant replaced.
After workers first staffed the building in August 2010, they found that their heavy winter clothing, boots and gear wouldn’t fit in the narrower, shorter lockers. The union filed a work condition grievance over the size of the lockers, which are provided to cold-weather-climate workers, when workers had to store their equipment in unsecured lockers.
The Postal Service argued that the $200,000 cost of larger lockers was prohibitive, but arbitrator Hamah King decided that the Postal Service violated its labor agreement by refusing to provide bigger lockers.
While some may side with the APWU workers here, many people will likely be vehemently against more of their tax dollars being thrown at an organization which may very well be on its way out due to the high costs associated with running the USPS. There are plenty of employees who work at non-union shops who do not have access to lockers, let alone large ones who are likely shaking their head about this fight.
How about you? Do you think it’s right for the APWU to require $200,000 in locker upgrades when the USPS itself is struggling financially? Do you, as an employee of whatever job you have, expect to receive certain perks as part of your job that you would be willing to fight like this over? Do you think it’s fair for a public sector organization to take tax dollars for these sorts of issues? Whatever you have to say about this one go ahead and comment on as I’d love to hear what you have to say.
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March 7th, 2012 at 7:56 am
How about they quit delivering my mail to my neighbor and my neighbor’s mail to me, deliver the mail before 5, and manage to do so as quickly as private delivery services. Then maybe I will think about giving them their lockers. Then again, if they stepped it up and provided the same levels of customer service and satisfaction as the private companies, they might not be in such dire straights (get your money for nothing and your chicks for free) and might become a carrier of choice.
March 7th, 2012 at 8:03 am
*sigh*
Hard to be supportive when they pick this sort of thing to get bent about. The entire post office is about to go out of business altogether and this is where they want to pick their shots?
Again private sector this wouldn’t be an issue. My office in the winter looks like a hurricane blew through because I don’t have anywhere to hang things except on the back of chairs and across tables.
Lets get a grip peeps.
March 7th, 2012 at 8:04 am
I’m gonna take the safe lane right down the middle and ask: Why the fuck does it take $200,000 to appropriate some lockers that are large enough to be worth a shit?
March 7th, 2012 at 8:37 am
Why didn’t the USPS just reinstall the old lockers? It sounds as though they tossed out the good ones and bought new crappy ones.
How much is fighting this in court going to cost the USPS in legal fees versus just doing what the arbitrator already ruled? After all, their contract with the union specified the kind of lockers they were to get and the USPS didn’t fulfill the contract.
Inquiring minds want to know this stuff.
Bill, no tax dollars are going to go for lockers. The USPS stopped getting tax money for this sort of thing about 30 years ago.
March 7th, 2012 at 8:50 am
Big business, and/or big government screwing over the peons is not news – it’s SOP. Since the goal of this facility is state-of-the-art automation who needs to think about the worker-bees? …they’ve been replaced by the machine. If the power structure didn’t live up to their agreed upon obligations make ‘em do it right – that’s what the agreement says.
March 7th, 2012 at 8:52 am
Ozzie, if they spend $200,000 here, that’s $200,000 less they have from user fees.
March 7th, 2012 at 9:03 am
$200,000 for something as trivial as lockers seems ridiculous. Why couldn’t they re-use the lockers from the previous building? Throw a coat of paint on them and be happy with that.
March 7th, 2012 at 9:48 am
lockers too small for boots? in my former life we left ‘em by the door on the way in. and our lockers were two tier’e for snail mail or revisions. give them the ‘oversize’ lockers and next they’ll want 100,000 a year to have a cleaning service take care of the sand and salt.
bb
btw, i drove by the post office ‘down here’ last monday early morning and one of the intrepid employees was in the parking lot polishing his mustang:) hello…
March 7th, 2012 at 10:11 am
I’d like to bring up the fact that if the USPS wasn’t being forced to fund it’s pension plan by congress (somewhere around 4 billion per year), it wouldn’t be losing money (or at least not so much as they are now).
While this looks like another “oh look this is why unions are evil” story, I would submit that this is the contractor’s fault for not vetting all of the specs. If they would have purchased the correct size to begin with, nobody would have known about this.
March 7th, 2012 at 10:13 am
“How about they quit delivering my mail to my neighbor and my neighbor’s mail to me, deliver the mail before 5, and manage to do so as quickly as private delivery services.”
Do what my parent did. Take a big red pen and start writing MISDELIVERED on it in capital letters. That should get their attention real quick.
March 7th, 2012 at 10:33 am
My last company provided a coat closet at every cube. My current company doesn’t. People seem just fine with slinging their coat over the back of their chair or on their desk. What’s next, a complaint when they change the number of microwaves available in the lunch room? It’s amazing to me to see the issues that are even considered issues in first world countries. I can just hear the USPS employee in their next job interview: “Well, they chamged our locker sizes, so I’m looking for other opportunities.” I get that it sucks for the employees, but it doesn’t $200,000 suck.
March 7th, 2012 at 10:45 am
It’s just a matter of time until this email fad is over and the USPS will be returned to its glory.
March 7th, 2012 at 11:05 am
Ozzie, not sure how this is paid for, if not tax dollars. The place is loosing money, so any additional money they spend comes from taxes.
I do think if they are required to wear certain clothing in cold weather that it would be reasonable that they have some place to put it, but have to agree that the old lockers should have been reused.
March 7th, 2012 at 11:08 am
We are talking about the huge bulk mail center here, not a post office. Hundreds of employees that work in a large open area where personal effects can obstruct the work flow. Considering that it takes at least a 100 dollar bill to buy what a 10 dollar bill bought just 30 years ago, $200,000 for a whole lot of large lockers does not seem out of line. Hopefully they are Made in the USA lockers. Locker cost plus shipping plus, I am sure, Union labor to install them, and it sounds reasonable to me. I am no fan of the lousy service they provide or the great hours they give to themselves, but in this case, they deserve decent lockers per their contract. Even a new recruit gets a locker and a new lock for it in any branch of the military. It is a fact of life that there are people who will steal from other people.
What chaps my hide the most is how we could go fifty years or more with a 1¢ rate for post cards, excluding about two years in 1918-20 when they tried a 2¢ rate and the people rebelled and made Congress go back to the 1¢ rate and now it takes about 29 or 30 cents for a post card. There used to be neighborhood boxes with regular pickups and now you have to mail by 4:15 at Rosemount and 5pm at Apple Valley. If they want the business they need to provide the service that working people need. We should not have to spend up to a half hour in line to mail a package while often being treatly rudely.
March 7th, 2012 at 11:11 am
Instead of lockers being a part of their contract the USPS should have negotiated with the APWU to provide an acceptable service level to the customer.
March 7th, 2012 at 11:15 am
I guess I was a little unclear in my last post. As to the service and hours, I was referring to local post offices, not the bulk mail center. Even the Airport PO has no outgoing pickup posted from 1pm Saturdays to monday mornings. Mail used to go out hourly from that post office.
March 7th, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Nurd, I don’t think it is fair to blame the contractor.
Would the contractor be responsible for reading the union contract? Someone at the USPS ulitamately must have signed off on the plans.
March 7th, 2012 at 9:59 pm
The USPS would be fine if certain groups weren’t trying to destroy it (as they are trying to destroy public education). Here’s a good example:
Feb. 9, 2012 — Statement by Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, on the USPS financial report for the first quarter of FY 2012:
Despite the headline on its press release, the U.S. Postal Service announced today a net operating profit of $200 million delivering the mail in the first quarter of FY 2012—an impressive achievement given the current economy. (Postal Service Chief Financial Officer Joe Corbett announced this profit on a conference call with reporters today.)
As the USPS notes, its performance was boosted by record employee productivity and by “stronger-than expected holiday shopping activity, driven by strong growth in online merchandise sales”—up 7 percent over the first quarter of the previous year. That shows the potential for growth offered by the Internet.
The record productivity and the strong growth in the shipping business show that the Postal Service can be a successful organization if freed from the unwarranted and uniquely onerous pre-funding burden placed on it by Congress.
The operational profit turns into red ink only when an external factor unrelated to mail delivery is considered—the 2006 congressional mandate that requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its future retiree health benefits over the next 75 years within a decade. That, along with a non-cash actuarial adjustment to the Postal Service’s workers’ compensation costs, is entirely responsible for the $3.3 billion “loss.” The pre-funding alone accounts for $3.1 billion of the quarter’s “loss.”
These results reveal the need for Congress to remove the crushing burden of the pre-funding payments, which the USPS is compelled to make, as its press release notes, “at rates not assessed any other entity in the United States.”
March 7th, 2012 at 10:07 pm
typical government idiocy. Why install lockers at all if you aren’t going to install ones that will meet the needs of those that use them? =
March 8th, 2012 at 9:52 pm
Ohhhhhkay. Whiny St. Paul P & D babies! I bet they saw the huge ol’ lockers on the other side of the wall at the NDC. Oh no! The NDC people can’t have something better than us! (Even if the lockers were installed in 1975, LOL). To be fair–I have not had a tour of the St. Paul side of the fence, so I can’t speak for size, placement or logistics when it comes to lockers and storage. For the most part it’s indoor work, but I’m betting the inbound and outbound dock areas are mighty cold in the winter like they are on the ‘dark side’…so yeah, there are some people who may need larger lockers for extra jackets and stuff.
(I spent 14 years on the NDC side, usually left my stuff out in the open all night in a break area, and in that time I had only ONE item go missing–a newspaper!)
March 11th, 2012 at 9:54 am
USPS does not receive any tax dollars. Its income is entirely from postage and other services. USPS is cutting in every place it can, so it’s not surprising it is fighting for $200,000.
March 11th, 2012 at 10:53 am
I have always thought that they should not have a junk mail rate. If a business wants to mail something to you that you don’t want in the first place, they should pay the full rate. If they only carried and delivered first class mail and got the full price for all the catalogs and other advertising crap, each carrier could have longer routes and be much more efficient. I understand that large mailers get discounts, but they also presort and agree to other conditions for that discount. About 80% of my mail goes straight into the trash each day. If you could see the area one UPS truck covers in a day compared to the area a USPS truck covers, you begin to see what I am referring to.
March 11th, 2012 at 11:33 am
But UPS doesn’t come and look in your mail box every day to see if you want to send something.
March 11th, 2012 at 11:37 am
JTL, aside from the occasional card for my parents’ birthdays, Christmas cards (which I have no interest in sending anyway) and Netflix discs (which we no longer do) I can’t tell you the last time I cared about sending something USPS and I’m not talking about packages (which I generally refuse to use USPS for being that the line is always out the door and costs just about the same as no-wait FedEx or UPS).
Just because they continue to mostly follow an outdated and unnecessary business model rooted in much history doesn’t mean that they should.
March 11th, 2012 at 12:32 pm
I buy and sell vintage post cards as a retirement hobby and thus must use the USPS daily. My letter carrier never comes to my door to see if I have outgoing mail even though the carrier knows that. Yet they used to bring all mail to a neighbor’s door daily even though she was ambulatory without any aids and drove a car daily. I am now totally disabled and can not even stand, let alone get into my car. I have been partially disabled since 1983. (hit by a semi doing 60+ while aiding a stranded motorist) Our neighborhood, like many today has a group cluster box for every so many homes. Ours has 16 slots, 15 for homes and 1 for outgoing mail. The slot is so small that I can not get a reinforced 5 x 7 mailer, a quarter inch thick, into it and must take it or them, usually, to a post office. There is no neighborhood drop box anywhere since 9-11. Any package over 13 ounces has to be handed to a postal employee, not deposited in the outdoor box of a post office. When I receive those small flat rate or priority mail boxes, the carrier always puts it or them in my slot first, guaranteeing that it will block the movement of the lock arm from turning enough to open the door. Many a cold day in winters past I have stood at my clusterbox fiddling with a wire or table knife trying to push back that package so the key will turn to get my mail out. The carriers never think to put packages in the designated package boxes next to the clusterbox and when I get lots of mail, rather than putting some in an unused package bin, they just cram it in my small clusterbox slot. Many times I have had to tear my mail badly just getting it out. Talking with the post office management does nothing. We and our neighbors routinely exchange mail that was put in the wrong slot. Watch the movie ‘Idiocracy’. We are nearly there.
March 11th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Well sure, if you give up universal delivery there are all kinds of things that could be changed. USPS is mandated to do things (by the postal regulatory commission (congress)) that other delivery services are not. While being required to fund itself.
I am sorry to hear about your situation Marty. Have you tried using carrier pickup?
March 11th, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Chad, regarding post 13.
You admit you don’t know how the USPS is funded but then you assume the more they spend, the more tax dollars they get.
This is simply not true. If it were, they wouldn’t be operating in the red.
March 12th, 2012 at 10:28 am
Ozzie, please enlighten me. Where is the money coming from, if not tax dollars.
I think you are the one who does not understand where the funding is coming from. Every single dollar they loose is made up for with tax dollars.
Thus, its an issue that they are operating in the red. If they were not taking tax dollars to make up for their losses, nobody would care, they would go bankrupt like a normal business, and another more efficient company would come in and pick up the pieces if there is a need for the business and its economically viable.
March 12th, 2012 at 10:41 am
Ozzie and JTL,
I will save you the trouble. I am sorry, I did not understand that the USPS no longer receives direct subsidies of tax dollars. That is clearly the case, so I stand corrected.
March 12th, 2012 at 2:34 pm
That’s big of you, Chad. Appreciate that.