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

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

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

As pointed out in part II of this series, the forty-year experiment of trying to provide mail service by using the principles of private enterprise has led to the postal service becoming so corrupt and inefficient that it's no longer able to perform its primary mission, delivering the mail. Much like what took place on Wall street, the profit motive attendant to the principles of private enterprise has overwhelmed the agency's mandate to provide a public service. The agency's old mandate has now been replaced by the primary mission of enriching it's top executives. That, in turn, has led to a culture of employee abuse, poor customer service, and the looming demise of the agency itself. Thus, in our previous article we advocated the abolishment of the "pay-for-performance" program for the agency's top executives. As we see it, that's an essential part of any hope to save the postal service.

The pay-for-performance program was initially put into place based on the widely held assumption that outrageously higher pay would draw a higher caliber of executives, but there is absolutely no evidence that there is any correlation between greed and competence. In fact, our recent experience with the postal service, and on Wall Street, seems to suggest that just the opposite is true. Thus, a more accurate rule of thumb should be, any person who places more emphasis on wealth than character is not smart enough to be trusted.

If the executives that we entrusted to run the postal service were actually worth the money that they were being paid, surely they should have recognized that the agency's nearly 600,000 employees and the goodwill of its customers are the agency's most valuable asset. Yet, the very first thing these executives did to offset the agency's losses was to undermine them both. Even as these executives enriched themselves with unprecedented perks and salaries, they began to excess, downgrade, and literally steal from their employees, and did everything they could to make it harder for their customers to mail a letter - including removing collection boxes. And if that wasn't enough, they then began to penalize employees for waiting for an elderly or disabled customer to bring a letter to the door.

The postal board of governors should consider putting people in place who are less interested in enriching themselves than they are in the personal challenge of problem solving. With that approach maybe they'd get someone who would recognize that it's human nature to to work harder for a person who one respects, than one who makes it impossible to avoid punishment. Longstanding behavioral research shows that even rats work harder for reward than the do punishment.

In addition, a truly innovative executive would recognized the motivating power of being a part of a winning endeavor. An executive with that kind of insight would undoubtedly have come up with the idea of dividing the various work-floors into groups, and having each group elect their own leader. Then the various groups could compete to meet the unit's goals in productivity, attendance, safety, efficiency, customer service, etc. The groups' ongoing scores could be posted on a bulletin board, then at the end of each quarter the winning groups could be recognized, rewarded, and given certificates of appreciation to go into their personnel files, which could later be used for upward mobility.

Another advantage of such a system would be, since each group would have its own leader, if there's a problem within the group, the supervisor could discuss it with the group's leader to address. That would minimize confrontations between employees and management, save on grievances, free up supervisors for other tasks, and help to identify the natural leaders within the organization. Most important, however, is it would give the employees a sense of self-direction, raise employee morale, and the peer pressure attendant to internal competition would be vastly more effective in enhancing productivity than employee harassment. In short, the employees would begin to work with the postal service, instead of against it.

An insightful executive would also have recognized that one of the biggest drains on postal revenue is simply getting the routes put up for delivery. Due to the misguided impact of excessive downsizing there are literally thousands of unassigned routes across this country on any given day, and in many cases these routes are being put up by employees who aren't familiar with them. This leads directly to miscased and misdelivered mail, and a delay in getting the mail processed. So it should be obvious to any executive focused on his job that every case in the postal system should conform to a uniformed pattern.

Currently the routes are setup to conform to the way they're delivered on the street. This results in a hodgepodge of numbers and streets going in every direction. So to an employee who's unfamiliar with the route it looks like a Chinese crossword puzzle, and they require a several-day learning curve to get a handle on it. That's a tremendous drain on postal revenue.

All routes should be uniformed in the way that they're setup in the station, then pulled down according to the way that they're walked on the street. That way, a new carrier only has to figure out the route once, when he's pulling it down, instead of every time he picks up a letter.

The routes should be setup in the natural way that the human brain organizes information. Larger streets should be at the top of the case, and smaller streets at the bottom. And everything on the case should go from low to high, with even numbers first, then odd. Then in order to pull the route down the way that the mail is delivered, the swings should be numbered and color coded - blue if the addresses go from low to high, and red if they go from high to low. If the cases were setup that way, anyone would be able to walk up to any route and put it up with no problem - it would be easier on the DPS machines as well, because machines don't like confusion.

There are literally thousands of things the postal service could do to make its operation more efficient, but unfortunately, as my kids used to say, many of these high-paid executives are "stuck on stupid." They never saw a problem that cutting their employees' throats wouldn't fix.

Eric L. Wattree

wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)

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

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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.

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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.

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