A Common-Sense Plan to Save the Postal Service Pt. II

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

A Common-Sense Plan to Save the Postal Service Pt. II

It's very easy to criticize the postal service. Everyone does it, because much like congress, the agency has become so dysfunctional over the years that it's made itself an easy target. But it hasn't been my intent over the past nine months to drag the postal service through the mud just for the pure joy of it - in fact, it brings me very little joy. But I'm convinced that its important to every American that we shine a spotlight on the practices that this agency is engaged in, and that we all have a thorough understanding of why the agency is failing as a viable organization, because today it's postal workers who are being abused - they're being used as a test case - but tomorrow it will be American workers as a whole. We're already headed in that direction.

As we sit around comfortable in our complacency and telling jokes about "going postal," postal workers are literally drowning in a cesspool of injustice and corruption that's needlessly destroying their health, well being, and many of their home lives. While that may seem funny to some, the United States Postal Service signals a pronounced change in this nation's attitude toward poor and middle-class workers. And since it is a government agency, and both our president and the policing agencies mandated to protect our interests are completely ignoring the situation, the ramifications are chilling.

The postal service is engaged in the exact same behavior that led to the collapse of Wall Street. In its attempt to emulate private enterprise the postal service has only succeeded in embracing what makes private corporations most corrupt - instituting a bonus program to enrich its top executives while ensuring diminishing returns for not only the public that it's suppose to serve, but also, its employees, and the very viability of the agency itself.

Postal executves have managed to turned the agency into their own private piggy bank. How else can we explain former Postmaster General John Potter, supposedly a "public servant," walking away from a failing public agency as a multimillionaire? That sort of thing just doesn't happen in America. That's a scenario that only happens in third-world countries, but then, that's exactly what we're allowing America to become.

The fact is, the so-called pay-for-performance program has had a grossly negative impact on the very performance that it was designed to enhance. It has caused senior executives to become more focused on their own greed than on the agency's primary mission, to serve the public. At this point many of the top executives view the postal service as simply a vehicle designed to promote their personal wealth, while having to actually deliver the mail is looked upon as merely a distraction, or an unfortunate nuisance to be passed down to their subordinates.  In addition, the Inspector General's Office, which is suppose to police the agency, has become a collusive enabler of a dysfunctional status quo. Thus, the pay-for-performance program has turned the postal service into the ultimate old-boys club, so the program should be abolished.

Since executive bonuses are based primarily on the way they look on paper, the primary motivation of postal executives is to curtail customer service, steal wages from their employees, and then cook the books to reflect a totally fictitious reality.

One station manager complained that she arrived at a new station only to find that she was short supervisors, she didn't have enough clerks to process her box mail and get the mail distributed the carriers, and she didn't have enough carriers to cover the routes. So as a result of getting their mail late, and having to help put up the routes that didn't have a carrier assigned to them, her carriers couldn't get out on the street until after 12:00 noon. But in spite of that her superiors gave her a direct order to have her carriers back and off the clock by 5:00 p.m. or she would face disciplinary action.

She said:

"This is typical of what they call managing. Instead of trying to find a reasonable way of getting the mail delivered, they simply dictate instead of manage. They knew that the order that they gave me was physically impossible for me to carry out, but they don't worry about that - they just order you to do the impossible, then how you get it accomplished is your problem. What they actually want us to do is to either hide the mail, or work our employees several hours overtime and then go into the computer and not pay them for the time that they've worked. Then if there are repercussions, they act like they're shocked at what you've done. They're forcing us to cheat and steal, then avoiding responsibility for their actions."

So as a direct result of the self-serving policies of just a handful of greedy and corrupt executives, the postal service has lost the confidence of the public, lowered the morale of its employees, and has rendered itself completely dysfunctional. And since the agency's projections are based on the inaccurate data of books that are being routinely falsified, every year the situation gets worse. This has been going on for so many years now that the only way that management can keep its head above water is to lie, cheat, and steal, just to justify the lying, cheating and stealing that they did the previous year, or what they call "SPLY" (Same Period Last year).

This has led to a situation where management is having to live from hand-to-mouth, and all of their creativity is directed toward promoting their greed and covering their collective butts instead coming up with innovative ways to move the mail.

They're currently trying to find a way to lower the cost of labor, for example, but the way they're approaching the problem is like trying to grab a handful of water. In their attempt to try to save revenue, they're trumping up meaningless charges against some of their most experienced employees in an attempt to push them out the door. They're also violating their own regulations against the discrimination of employees with job-related disabilities. But most seriously, they're violating federal law by falsifying government documents to literally rob gainfully employed workers of their hard earned wages.

Even with all that, however, they're only managing to save enough revenue to get their hands wet, while most of the revenue that they'd hoped to save is dripping through their fingers. Their corrupt and shortsighted policies are draining the agency through the cost of EEO, MSPB, and grievance litigation; the loss of experienced personnel, and the costs related to poor employee morale such as higher sick leave usage, higher accident rates, a rise in inefficiency, and the unquantifiable cost of employee passive aggression.

If these postal executives were not so preoccupied with their greed and shortsighted penchant for simply getting by one day at a time, someone might have considered working out a plan that would allow experienced, retired managers and craft employees to come back and fill the void for half their salaries.

Retired employees would jump at the opportunity. Then, not only would the postal service benefit from the knowledge and expertise that's being wasted by many former employees in retirement, but the agency would save a tremendous amount of revenue by not having to pay any benefits. In addition, such a program would go a long way toward getting employees who are currently on the rolls to consider retirement.

Many employees would benefit greatly by drawing their retirement then coming back to work for half of their salary, and if they worked a three or four-day schedule they could enjoy the best of both worlds - a financial benefit, plus many of the joys of retirement.

A few kinks may have to be worked out, but the net effect would resolve several of the postal service's most severe problems. It would be a win-win situation. The postal service would benefit by lowering the cost of labor, and at the same time managing to maintain an experienced workforce.  The agency could employ two experienced workers for the cost of one inexperienced employee, and without having to pay benefits.

In part III we'll be discussing productivity and employee morale.


Eric L. Wattree
http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

A Common-Sense Plan to Save the Postal Service Pt. I

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

 

A Common-Sense Plan to Save the Postal Service Pt. I 

The United States Postal service is literally on the verge of collapse. Customer service is being curtailed, the price of stamps are going up, much needed employees are being excessed, and the wages of gainfully employed workers are being stolen with impunity. Yet, it has been widely reported that former Postmaster General John E. Potter walked out the door earlier this month with the greater part of $6 million in bonuses and perks in his retirement package. In 2008 Potter reportedly hauled in $857,459, while he president of the United States had to settle for less than half that.

There's something terribly wrong with that picture. It's yet another example of how those in corporate power are benefitting from a growing culture of entitlement that enrich the corporate class at the expense of poor and middle-class Americans. It's also another step by the United States towards a banana republic mentality, where the powerful are entitled to get away with murder, and to hell with the masses.

The forty-year experiment of trying to run the postal service like a private business has been a total failure. The U.S. Postal Service should stand as a poster child that attests to the fact that when you try to provide a public service using the methods of private enterprise, the greed attendant to the profit motive will invariably overwhelm the incentive to provide the service.

But the intent of the current series of articles is not to further denigrate the postal service - it's doing a far better job of that than I could ever hope to. We want to be productive, so we're going to discuss the steps that must be taken to turn the agency around. But at this point that would take a book, so we're going to layout an outline of sorts, then address each issue in a separate article.

The first issue that needs to be addressed is executive bonuses. That's the primary source of the agency's problems. Executive bureaucrats in government agencies are already being paid to do their jobs, so they should simply address their responsibilities and be appreciative of the fact that they have a job in the first place, because most of them are being overpaid in their base salaries, and they're not even earning that. I invite anyone who disagree with my contention to simply ask themselves one question - what did PMG Potter do for the postal service to warrant walking out the door with 5.5 million dollars?

Thus, it should be strictly prohibited by law for public executives to be paid, or accept, anything beyond their base salary. Creating a mindset where public bureaucrats expect to be compensated beyond their base salary can become a slippery slope that leads to the wholesale corruption of government agencies like we find in many other countries, and like we now see in the postal service. So the practice should be forbidden - period.

A related issue is employee morale. Any executive worth his or her salt should recognize that` any organization's most valuable asset is its employees. Most postal executives make the mistake of thinking that they are the postal service. But they're very wrong. The postal service is made up of its nearly 600,000 employees. Thus, if you antagonize them, you no longer have an organization, all you have is a group of unhappy people whose primary mission in life is to undermine the personal success of their handful of bosses, and as a result, they give the agency no more of themselves than is necessary to maintain their jobs.

It has become glaringly obvious that the postal service can't survive under those conditions. In order for the postal service to survive the agency needs every employee to contribute all of their individual experience, knowledge, and expertise to make the postal service more efficient. The agency needs employees who are willing to say, "I know this is not my responsibility, but I see something here that can cost the postal service money, so I'm going to take a minute of my personal time to correct it." That kind of thinking used to be routine, but most employees are no longer of that mindset. The postal service treats its employees so badly that it's lost that kind of incentive among most of its workers. While they may correct a situation that will inconvenience the public, when it comes to something that may benefit their superiors, they hope for the worst.

The postal service used to give incentive awards for suggestions that would improve the efficiency of the operation, and the post office is currently benefitting greatly from some of the improvements that the employees suggested.  But that program broke down because the agency started taking the suggestions, turning them down so they wouldn't have to reward the employee, then later incorporating the suggestion and ignoring the employees' protests. 

Routine creativity is also suffering as a result of the self-serving attitude of postal managers - and when I say managers, I mean executive managers, because we're hearing from an increasing number of irrate station managers who are also frustrated with system. In the past, some of the best, and most innovative employees would compete for positions in postal management. These were the people who were more interested in personal accomplishment and the challenge of resolving problems than they were the signs on their door. But in the current environment the people who vie for jobs in management are those who don't want to work and are willing cheat, steal, and harass their fellow employees, because having a lack of character is now a part of the job discription.

So in effect, the postal service is now being run by the very worst employees, harassing and dictating to the very best. The tail is literally wagging the dog - and what makes the situation even worse is that many of the people in management know it. A lot of the people who are now in management didn't get any respect as employees because their fellow employees saw them as lazy and inefficient. In fact, many of them wouldn't have survived as craft employees. So now, consistent with their lack of character and immaturity, they ignore the postal service's primary mission and give priority to their personal game of pay-back.

All of these dysfunctions are a direct result of the greed attendant to attaching a profit motive to public service. In the next few weeks we intend to connect the dots, one issue at a time, because we're looking for a change that we can believe in.



Where are you, Mr. President?

Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

U.S. Postal Service Replace Own Boxes with One From FedEx?

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

U.S. Postal Service Replace Own Boxes With One From FedEx?

In my December 1, 2010 column (The United States Postal Service Takes Another Small Step Toward its Demise) I pointed out how on the day after Thanksgiving the postal service took the unprecedented action of closing the doors on its customers at both Barrington and Bicentennial stations two hours before its scheduled closing time without prior notification. The employees were outraged by the irresponsibility of that action and spoke out. One employee was quoted as saying,

"We were discussing the situation among ourselves, and nobody could believe that things have gone downhill so far, so fast. I've been working for the postal service for twenty-eight years, so I've seen them do some crazy things, but I didn't think it would ever get to the point where they would just close the door in the customers' faces. Doing something like that used to be unthinkable. We used to give priority to customer service during riots, floods, and Earthquakes! Now they're thumbing their nose at the public just to pad their bonuses."

Another employee stated,

"No one in a position of responsibility could possibly be so unprofessional and clueless through ignorance alone. I think they're purposely trying to sabotage the postal service to make it easier for them to privatize us. The craft employees are the only thing that's holding the post office together, and management seems to be doing everything they can on a daily basis to make that harder to do. It's like trying to do your job with a bunch of bad kids running all over the place and getting into everything. Eric, a person would have to actually come in and see it to understand what I'm saying. I know this is an overused phrase, but in this case it is, REALLY, unbelievable. Management doesn't care anything about customer service. All they want to do is save money. Then when they get customer complaints, they want to write craft employees up, even though they know that they caused the problem. This district's management has become a liability to the post office - and I want you to write that."

Well, believe it or not, since I reported the employee comments above, the employees from Wagner Station (on Century Blvd. and Van Ness in West Los Angeles) contacted me saying that they were not only in complete agreement with the above comments, but they had further evidence of their validity. They indicated that at their station management has removed all of the postal collection boxes from in front of the post office, leaving only one box for customer convenience - and that one is from FedEx.

Even though I had five independent confirmations of the report, the action they reported was so incredibility stupid that I drove thirty-three miles from Covina to Los Angeles to see it for my self and take the picture that's at the top of my website. The decision to remove all postal collections boxes then leave only a FedEx box in front of the post office is the equivalent of Sears trying to save their business by advertise for Bullocks.

How can the postal service even hope to remain viable with decision makers like this at the top of the food chain? While these people can't afford to provide simple customer services, they can afford to allow former Postmaster Potter to walked out the door with $5.5 million.  There's something terribly wrong with that picture. Congress needs to mount an honest and thorough investigation of postal operations from top to bottom, and if  congress doesn't take the initiative on their own, the American people needs to force the issue.  The United States Constitution speaks of creating a postal service to serve the people, not to make incompetent bureaucrats rich.  Why should a bureaucrat get a bonus in the first place?  Most of them aren't even earning their base salary, and a thorough investigation would show that many of them belong in jail.

The employees indicated that the decision was ostensively made because people were sticking objects into the lip of the boxes and pulling out mail. But what that actually indicates is that they're trying to save money again at the expense of customer service. If they would simply spend the few dollars that it would take to collect the boxes in a timely manner vandals wouldn't be able to reach the mail. Or an alternative would be to install long-lip boxes like the ones they use for customers to access the boxes from their cars. But this unbelievable decision clearly points out once again that the people who are currently running the postal service are neither thinkers, nor are they the least bit interested in customer service. They simply saw this as an opportunity to save a dollar - even though their actions advertise FedEx as a more efficient and reliable way to move the mail.

But management's poor judgement is having an even more profound impact on the postal service's decline in the area of employee morale. In order for the postal service to survive it's going to be necessary for each and every employee to go beyond giving 100%; they're going to have to give 110%. But current management has no chance of making that happen, because the employees not only have no respect or confidence in them, but they absolutely detest them - and that goes from station managers down to the most junior people in the chain of command. I see evidence of that every time they have a telecom. Whenever they have a telecom I'm told what was discussed within five minutes of their getting off the phone. One manager told me that the thought of her CSO getting credit for her efforts makes her nauseous. The employees feel no loyalty to these people whatsoever, and that's a sure sign of bad management.

And many African-American employees are particularly resentful. Their anger goes much deeper than simply irrate employees resenting their boss. Their resentment is cultural in nature. In fact, resentment isn't the proper word for the feelings they're voicing - in their case the word "hatred" is more appropriate. I've been saving their email to a file, and I'm going to be publishing their remarks in the very near future.

It was a clerk that gave me the idea of referring to the postal service as a "latter-day plantation." She told me that many of her coworkers refer to the postal service as "The Plantation." She said:

"It reminds me of what it must have been like during slavery. The slave master is sittin' up in the big house, and tellin' these turncoat overseers to just get the work done, and they don't care how they do it. Then they start grinin', and bowin', and sayin' 'Yes sir, Massa. Yes sir.' It makes me sick to think how hard we fought during the sixties to give some of these turncoats a chance to hold these positions. Now they're walking around tryin' to look down they're nose at us - especially Anderson and the one they call Tyrone the Tyrant. I ain't never met him, but I can't even sleep at night thinking about some of the things I've heard about him. It just makes me sick."

On the other hand, here's what FedEx has to say:

FedEx Innovation:

"It’s clear that at FedEx, innovation is in our DNA. All employees are tasked with innovation as part of their day-to-day job. But there’s one group focused solely on developing future game-changing ideas: . . . FedEx Innovation is a cross-discipline team aimed at identifying emerging customer needs and technologies to change what’s possible through innovative solutions and businesses. The team systematically researches and demonstrates bold new concepts in key opportunity spaces and develops the best concepts with accelerated prototyping, incubation, and commercialization. Long-range goals to increase revenue and drive strategic advantage are supported through fostering a leading-edge innovation culture, methods, and thinking throughout FedEx and its international network of alliances and customers."

So yes, the postal service has serious problems on its hands - and money is the least of them. Their biggest problem is that they've lost all respect from their employees because they've tried to replace intelligent and innovative thinking with harassment, cooking the books, and defrauding their workers.  Now they have a Tea Party brewing within their ranks. And since they no longer have anyone left with either the intelligence, foresight, or common sense to address the issue, it's about to explode in their face. You can mark my word on that.

In my next article, a possible solution to the problem.


Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

A Message to the Black Community

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

A Message to the Black Community

The hip hop community takes great pride in "keeping it real." But are they really keeping it real, or are they simply struttin' around saying, "look at me," while the corporate elite have them unknowingly doing an updated version of Steppin' Fechit - right down to the ape-like body language?

Now, it's not my intention to broad-brush an entire community of artists, because old-schoolers make that mistake every generation. Their ears just aren't attune to a new and different approach to music - Swing musicians did it to Dizzy and Bird when they developed be bop, and many musicians and critics did it to Miles and Coltrane (especially Trane) when they began to push the boundaries. But in the case of hip hop, it's a little different.

Dizzy, Bird, Miles, and Trane were all well schooled musicians with total control over content. These musicians were the best in the world. They knew more about music than a brain surgeon knew about medicine. In addition, they were totally focused on the art, not self-aggrandizement. But many young hip hoppers, on the other hand, are young, undereducated brothers off the street who are paid large sums of money to portray the Black community in their own image. So while Miles and Trane represented the genius within the Black community, many of these young brothers - certainly not all, but far too many - are rewarded by corporate manipulators to magnify Black dysfunction - and the more dysfunctional, the better.

This is not just my opinion. My position can be substantiated by facts. The fact is, most of these young people don't even have the skill to create their own music - they have to "sample" the music of their predecessors who understood the importance of taking the time to learn music theory, or at the very least, learning to play scales and chord progressions on a musical instrument. And spoken word artists like Oscar Brown Jr. and Gil Scott-Heron were actually poets who took the time to learn the rules of English grammar so they could uplift and educate the community with their eloquence. So to listen to one of these brothers not only constituted a class in history, poetry and English grammar, but they also had the ability to inspire the next generation to educate themselves.

But many of these young brothers who pass for stars today specialize in dumbing down the Black community. Their lyrics are amateurish, their rhymes are clumsy and predictable, their grammar is atrocious, and their message is dysfunctional - they denigrate black women, promote crime and drug abuse, and drag the Black community through the mud. In short, they promote the position that ignorance is bliss. As a direct result, instead of inspiring their fans to a higher level of intellectual achievement, it leaves them unable to speak simple business English, which is essential to getting through a job interview.

And this is not happening by accident. Since the corporate elite in this country can no longer physically enslave the people, they've decided to enslave our minds. In the sixties and seventies the Black community began to move forward, then in the eighties Ronald Reagan flooded the inner cities with drugs in order to support his illegal war in Nicaragua. That effectively took out an entire generation of Black people. As a result, in the following generation we were left with young people who were raised by dysfunctional parents - which means that they were severed from everything in their heritage that took place prior to their parents. These young people are not even Black anymore, at least culturally speaking, they just have dark skin. Am I lying? Count the dark skinned sisters in their videos.

The corporatists continued their assault on our identity by mounting a brutal attack on the nation's educational system and depriving young people to an exposure to history. They then took over all of our access to information by repealing the Fairness Doctrine and taking over the media, leaving our young people completely vulnerable to corporate programming. Consequently, the very same thing is happening to them - and to you - that FOX News is doing to the Teabaggers; it's just a little more subtle. So is there any wonder why young people are prone to promote a form of "music" that's anti-Black, and denigrates the very womb of their own culture? I think not.

And this situation has not only impacted the hip hop community. We now find ourselves in a community where Black people in general are just as racist towards other Blacks as any racist Hillbilly. Think about how you're treated on your job by many of your Black managers and superiors. Many Black people who work for the U.S. postal service, for example, are treated so badly by they're Black superiors that they're literally praying that these Black overseers be replaced by White people.

So if we want to save the Black community, we have a Herculean effort before us. The first thing we must do is stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by all the little goodies that appeal to our hedonism. We've also got to limit the time we spend partying and shakin' our booties and start paying more attention to our kids and what's going on around us. Excessive partying is for kids. When you're an adult it time to take care of business.

Being a parent is about much more than just sitting our kids in a room in front of the television set and feeding and watering them like plants. One of the reasons that we often wonder why we don't understand our own kids is because they're being raised by BET, MTV, and ESPN. Even as I write this sentence they're probably somewhere being programed by a radio or television whispering in their ear, teaching them twisted corporate values instead of your own.

And consider this. If they're being taught by the media that the only thing women are good for is sex, what kind of husbands are they going to become? If they never see the pimps on television riding around with kids in the backseat, what kind of fathers are they likely to become? And if they're being taught that drugs, big cars, and bling are the only things that make life worthwhile, yet, they're too illiterate to get a job, what do you think they're going to turn to? That's right - crime.

Now that, my people, is keeping it real.



MILES

We knew him as Miles,
the Black Prince of style,
his nature fit jazz to a tee.

Laid back and cool,
a low threshold for fools,
he set the tone
of what a jazzman
should be.

Short on words,
and unperturbed, about
what the people thought;
frozen in time, drenched
in the sublime,
of the passion
his sweet horn
had wrought.

Solemn to the bone,
distant and torn,
even Trane could
scarcely get in;
I can still hear the tone
of this genius who mourned,
that precious note
that he couldn't
quite bend.

Wattree

Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

The United States Postal Service Takes Another Small Step Toward its Demise

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

The United States Postal Service Takes Another Small Step Toward its Demise

I received a flood of emails and phone calls over the weekend, and every one of them came from postal employees in the Los Angeles district angrily reporting that the U.S. Postal Service has committed yet another assault on customer service.

The employees at Barrington Station in West Los Angeles reported that on Friday, November 26, 2010, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, instead of extending its hours to accommodate the customers who were unable to transact their business with the postal service the day before, the station abruptly closed its doors two hours early, leaving customers angrily knocking on the door trying to get in. It was also reported that the same thing took place at Bicentennial Station, also in West Los Angeles.

The employees allege that the two post offices in question that locked their customers out during normal business hours is yet one more example of the culture within the Los Angeles district that places saving money - for which management is rewarded with bonuses - above customer service.

The Los Angeles Sentinel attempted to contact Steve Marney, Manager of Labor Relations for the postal service's Los Angeles district, but he was unavailable for comment.

It's not unusual for a post office to change its business hours, but in the past the postal service would give its customers ample notice of the pending change in order to ensure that its customers were not unduly inconvenienced. But in this case, several sources complained, it was done with such thoughtless unprofessionalism that even the employees were caught off guard. Several employees indicated that they were completely shocked when management simply closed the doors on customers without any prior notice two hours before the scheduled closing time. The employees said that management then ordered the window clerks off the line to help sort mail that they should, and could have had sorted the day before. One employee commented:

"We were discussing the situation among ourselves, and nobody could believe that things have gone downhill so far, so fast. I've been working for the postal service for twenty-eight years, so I've seen them do some crazy things, but I didn't think it would ever get to the point where they would just close the door in the customers' faces. Doing something like that used to be unthinkable. We used to give priority to customer service during riots, floods, and Earthquakes! Now they're thumbing their nose at the public just to pad their bonuses.

"There were customers outside banging on the doors. I know they were upset. I sure would be. It reminded me of how I feel when I'm in a long supermarket line, then just as I get close to the counter the cashier puts out a sign saying, 'Line Closed.' But at least in a supermarket they'd open another line for the shoppers to go to. But in this case, the post office just locked the doors, leaving customers outside banging on the doors trying to get in. There was no consideration whatsoever given to the fact that many of those people probably took off from work to get to the post office on the day after a holiday.

"People used to take pride in working for the post office. I remember a time when I'd meet new acquaintances I'd find a way to work the fact that I was a postal employee into our conversation. But now, these managers are so incompetent, irresponsible, and make us look so bad, that I'm embarrassed to admit where I work even when I'm asked. A lot of the public think this stuff is our fault!"

This kind of blatant and unprofessional behavior is running rampant throughout the postal service. In fact, it has become so routine that many employees are beginning to suspect that it can't be by accident. One longtime clerk stated the following:

"No one in a position of responsibility could possibly be so unprofessional and clueless through ignorance alone. I think they're purposely trying to sabotage the postal service to make it easier for them to privatize us. The craft employees are the only thing that's holding the post office together, and management seems to be doing everything they can on a daily basis to make that harder to do. It's like trying to do your job with a bunch of bad kids running all over the place and getting into everything. Eric, a person would have to actually come in and see it to understand what I'm saying. I know this is an overused phrase, but in this case it is, REALLY, unbelievable. Management doesn't care anything about customer service. All they want to do is save money. Then when they get customer complaints, they want to write craft employees up, even though they know that they caused the problem. This district's management has become a liability to the post office - and I want you to write that."

It literally defies logic how the people in upper management can possibly think that they can promote the viability of the postal service by alienating both the workforce, and their customer base. One would think that when an organization is in the position that the postal service currently finds itself that the first thing it would do would be to make every possible effort to raise the morale of the people doing the work, and to provide better service to its customers. That's business management 101. But the postal service is doing just the opposite. Instead, of trying to raise morale, it's harassing, intimidating, and stealing from its employees; and instead of promoting better service, it's undercutting employee efforts to provide quality service by putting policies in place that gives saving money priority over customer service in order to insure larger bonuses for themselves.

What makes this problem even more serious, however, is that the corporate culture in the Los Angeles district is such that its going be next to impossible to correct the situation. The primary problem is that cronyism has been running so rampant throughout the district for so long that it's gotten to the point where the people with the very least amount of talent, good sense, and integrity are at the top of the food chain, while those who are the most capable, dedicated, and knowledgeable, are routinely weeded out and kept at the bottom of the barrel.

There are a number of reasons for that. First, the more intelligent and dedicated an employee is the more integrity he or she is likely to have, but since the district's number one priority is to save money by hook or crook, it works against these people, and it caters to those of lesser integrity and dedication, and thus, more likely to be of lesser intelligence. That leads to incompetent managers promoting their incompetent cronies. And finally, since mid and upper management is literally brimming over with incompetence, competence and intelligence are frowned upon as a threat to the status quo. Thus, the bottom line is, the system rewards ignorance and dysfunction, and penalizes intelligence and innovation, so how can the agency possibly succeed?

The failures of the postal service are often held up by corporatists as an example of why public service should be privatized. But actually, the postal service is a prime example of why public service should never be relegated to the private sector. The forty-year experiment of trying to run the postal service like a private business clearly demonstrates that whenever you attach a profit motive to public service, the corruption and greed attendant to making a profit will invariably overwhelm the primary purpose of providing that service. Thus, by insisting on using that approach you will always, virtually without exception, end up with service so negligible that it can be drowned in a bathtub.

Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.