Notes from the P. O.

[millring]

Interesting, sort of whooda thunk it? tidbit:

It isn't even close. Our post office delivers our local newspaper. And far and away the most subscribers to the newspaper per square mile are on route 74 and go to the folks who attend the most Bible-believing churches -- churches at the intersection of where the vestigial Fundamentalism of the 60s morphed into the Evangelicalism of the 70s -- folks at what most here would consider the extreme end of Christianity wherein the folks believe in the actual, physical resurrection of Jesus (that he is alive today)....many believe in a young earth (after all, the local college was one of the principle birthplaces of that movement)...many believe in the supernatural world and believe they will either go to heaven and/or end up on a new earth some day.

That's not what you'd think. You'd suppose (given their religious beliefs) that they'd be more on the borderline of illiterate instead of the most newspaper-reading in the whole city/county.

Wanna come work for the P.O.? We're at the point of virtually begging you to come. All over the country. The regulars (10 years or more experience) are retiring and the way the routes have evolved over time have made learning them something perilously close to impossible. Warsaw's 2020 recruiting year was a bust. Of the 8 hires, I'm the only one still standing. And I still can't complete a whole route.

What happened is this (pared down and somewhat simplified): Between 15-20 years ago the P.O. digitized their sorting system. With machines nearly as long as a football field, they can now sort the bulk of all the mail sent nationwide. The machines can, with amazing accuracy, decipher everything from type faces to hand writing, assign the proper address and (and this is the big one) put it in the actual running order of every mail route in the country.

Ever wondered about the "add 4" zip? It tells the side of street you're on in code.

So, now most of the MAIL comes in trays that city carriers don't even touch until they are out on the street. Rural carriers still mostly put them up in the cases (the three walled shelving unit with cubby holes that line up with their route's running order so they can sort the mail, the magazines, the catalogues, and yes, even the junk mail), but again, most of the mail comes pre-sorted and arranged.

Well, when that happened, the management suddenly realized that the experienced carriers had next to nothing to do with the sometimes merely one, but often up to 3-4 hours of time per day they used to be occupied with casing the mail manually. That being the case, they realized that they really didn't need the size of mail delivering force they previously needed. Suddenly it was possible for one person to deliver the mail that it used to take 2 or 3 people to do. And the routes became MAMMOTH. Seriously. Some of our routes cover more than 50 miles with between 400-500 stops.

But all the while it has become possible for those with experience to still deliver the mail on those huge routes. In fact, the "perk" for the rural carrier (the city carriers have different contracts with different perks) is the unspoken part of the contract wherein the regulars are paid by the route, the route is rated by the hours it could/should take to complete, and it favors the faster carriers because at the extreme end of things, they can do a route rated at 8.5 hours in sometimes as little as 4 hours (usually, I'm guessing, about 6).

They are constantly re-evaluating the route times, and management wants to get more of their money's value back. It seems on the face of it that the PO is getting screwed out of 3-4 hours of work by these super-fast rural carriers, forgetting that:

1. that was their unspoken "perk" in the first place. They were SUPPOSED to see the value in working fast and getting that bonus of shorter work days. and
2. Management shouldn't look at it so short-sightedly. That is, they should be looking at those fast carriers with a mind toward realizing something akin to "replacement cost" when evaluating their pay. The reality is that those faster carriers are nearly irreplaceable. Sure, THEY can do the job in 4 hours....but very few other people they ever try to hire can match those speeds. Which brings me to ....

And so they hire folks like me on. And the daunting task of trying to learn a super-sized route is sometimes simply overwhelming. As i said, all of the local hires are gone but me. They couldn't do it. They couldn't take the pressure. Some walked off in rather dramatic fashion. Others just stayed home and didn't answer the phone. They just never came back.

And the subs we have from last year's hire are working 12 hour days with me. Some of them can do several of our routes by themselves. At my level, that is still mind-blowing. I kind of get what creates the speed -- familiarity, practice, technique -- but they all elude me and may always elude me. That's the nature of the beast. They can't fire me because our need for manpower is so strong that my ability to do parcels, carry half-routes, and problem solve my way through routes wherein a VERY big share of the houses and mailboxes are numberless. Even ME they can't easily replace.

And the elephant in the room is that on top of delivering mail, we are also doing as much or more parcel delivery than UPS or FedEx. And we are doing it out of crowded cases in too-small offices wherein we have to sort the boxes on the floor. No sorting tables. No stacking room. You just push things aside and try to find room to work on the floor -- sometimes in a corner of the office where you can find a spot 30 feet from your case.

Young Daniel observed (and I think he's right) that with these super-sized routes, any one of us subs (me included) could deliver the MAIL on any of the routes. It might take us the better part of the day on some of them (we wouldn't get the experienced workers bonus of free hours) but we could could get them done. But with parcels added to the burden wherein we dismount from the mail truck as many as 75 times a route (I delivered parcels on route 6 last Tuesday -- over 200) it's much closer to impossible. Many days it is proven so as many of us work the 12 hour days to complete the parcel delivery by 8PM.

But here's the (obvious) thing. An entity as huge as the post office can't do anything about the parcels except keep slogging through. There's talk about developing a parcel division to the post office, but we all know that's not going to happen. They're not going to move to bigger buildings and set up tables with room to work with boxes. They're not going to suddenly purchase the wheeled carts that would work for moving boxes around (In the past few weeks I've delivered several 75 lb boxes and even one box that was 7-8 feet long).

No, no meaningful adjustments are going to be made because nobody is certain of how long this onslaught of parcels is going to be with us. Here we are nearly a month from the holiday rush and yet last Tuesday was as big a parcel day as any before Christmas. This is in part because the shutdown resulted in the warehousing of millions of people's orders. States like California were shipping almost nothing of the orders that were stacking up in their warehouses. It will take a long time to finally work all that through the system.

And in part, one reason it is taking extra long to work all that through the system is that people keep ordering. Folks learned that they can order everything they used to go to the store for and the illusion that those goods arrive safer than if they picked them up is a strong one. ....and then there's the stimulus money. Mad money. People are probably spending it on stuff they can order online. As the bolus travels down the alimentary delivery system of the country, it just keeps getting bigger.

[theevan]

1. I love you, John.
2. Yes, it is an illusion.
3. I WISH my work would lend itself to what is essentially piecework. The route part does, and I do. So does the residential. But the rest does not. And that work, almost predictably, bogs down by comparison.

[RickW]

These are the kind of things that cause people to join/form unions, when people are forced to work ridiculous hours. There is nothing more joyous than working for a management group who “calculates” how hard you can work. It’s rampant in IT, but the pay is generally a lot better, so you get tons of money to eat stress. It’s not healthy long term.

[Marshall]

Yes, there's a seismic shift in how America shops. It ain't gonna get any slower. It's sort of like sausage. We all like it. But we don't ever think about how it is being made. But, most things I expect are like that.

Thanks, dude. Good luck.

[TKennedy]

It is always good to get inside information on services and professions we take for granted and think we know all about. We so often have quite dogmatic opinions on the delivery of these services based on highly flawed and woefully incomplete data.

In a perfect world we would be required to follow folks that work in these arenas around for at least a couple of weeks before voicing criticism. I would include professional journalists in this group. Perhaps even politicians. 😊

Thanks John. What would you see as a possible solution to the dilemma?

[Russell Letson]

One thing that occurs to me is that what John sees on the shop floor is the result of management-from-above. How many of the people who make the rules came up through the ranks and understand the hands-on practicalities of doing the jobs--as opposed to those who got management jobs because they had management degrees or credentials and experience from other industries?

Some of the problem could be scale--in a small factory or other enterprise, there can be an easy and obvious path from the shop floor to the manager's office. Or even in a big organization--my father wound up in a white-collar position, running a department that installed and maintained HVAC systems for GE, partly thanks to a personnel system that promoted from within (not unlike the Navy, where he followed a similar path to wind up a Chief Petty Officer). A rational organization recognizes the expertise of the hands-on crews and makes sure that the suit-level guys pay attention to them and to the non-coms who oversee day-to-day operations.

In the ed biz, that would mean that principals and deans and academic VPs come up from the classroom, not from ed-administration programs. And when the top ranks of admin are essentially management bureaucrats (or, worse yet, political appointees), you get management-by-spreadsheet, often accompanied by descriptions of the work and the workers that apply the wrong set of metaphors to the whole operation. (Students become customers; courses become products; productivity becomes completely quantitative; and so on.)

The postal service is a service, and its success is not measured by the same tools that apply to for-profit businesses. Which doesn't mean that it should not be run well, only that efficiency and effectiveness are not quite the same thing.

[Dave Poor]

John, thanks for this series.

It's always great to get some insight into another job. I've known one or two postal workers casually, but they never described their jobs anywhere near this clearly.

Thanks, too, for the "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night.." part of the job.

Dave

[millring]

Jan 22, 2021 11:12:32 GMT -5 TKennedy said:

Thanks John. What would you see as a possible solution to the dilemma?

I don't think there is one. I think we'll slog through this with a wait-and-see view toward the parcels. Maybe they'll slow down. If they don't, then maybe the P.O. will adjust slightly by hiring a workforce of folks like me who can do parcels but may never be fast enough to carry mail through a whole 50 mile, 500 stop route.

The post office is simply to big a ship to turn in this storm. There have been some rumblings from the unions about filing grievances -- a sort of "this isn't what we signed up for". But in the long term, I don't think that will do much good. The regulars who have been capable of handling the load for the most part don't see the problem, and would not really like to jeopardize what they see as pretty good pay. The ones who suffer the most are the most easily replaceable. Maybe. I'd have to think that one through.

I realize my views are shaded by my lack of experience. But as a neophyte, I actually have insights into how impossible the job has become. Even the subs who were hired in 2019 had the "luxury" of learning the routes without the burden of parcels. Trying to learn both simultaneously seems to me to be the nub of the problem in hiring.

[Village Idiot]

Says John:

And the elephant in the room is that on top of delivering mail, we are also doing as much or more parcel delivery than UPS or FedEx. And we are doing it out of crowded cases in too-small offices wherein we have to sort the boxes on the floor. No sorting tables. No stacking room. You just push things aside and try to find room to work on the floor -- sometimes in a corner of the office where you can find a spot 30 feet from your case.

I get it. I mailed a box of two dozen ears of corn last year halfway across the nation, and it only cost $12. That, in my mind, is much more than reasonable. Imagine, two dozen ears of corn shipped 1,000 miles for twelve bucks. Who can beat that? No one. But what you folks have to go through to make that happen saddens me.

I very much appreciate the postal service, as most of us do. You folks work hard to meet our demands, it's too bad that things are becoming so difficult.