Pitney Bowes pays lawmakers to push privatizing Post Office
http://peoplesworld.org/pitney-bowes-pays-lawmakers-to-push-privatizing-post-office/Pitney Bowes seems to be promoting a reckless and astoundingly flawed plan to privatize every part of the Postal Service except mail delivery. This reckless plan was brought up years ago by the Libertarian Cato Institute but was quickly dismissed. Yet the idea has been reintroduced recently. Why would this plan be suddenly creating interest in DC at this time? It's simple: follow the money.
Under this plan, financed by Pitney Bowes, the entire Postal Service would become a series of private companies that would process and transport the mail to your US Postal Service Letter Carrier who would deliver it. The rational of this misguided plan is that they can eliminate hundreds of thousands of good union middle-class jobs and replace them with low wage and benefit challenged employees. Then disguise it by still having your trusted Letter Carrier bring it to your door.
This Postal Service is easily the most trusted Government Agency in America. So Pitney Bowes and its extremist colleagues in DC figure they can't privatize the entire Postal Service, as Mitt Romney wanted to do, instead they will keep the public face of our nations most trusted agency and have employees paid at the Walmart level process the mail. Corporate America daily underestimates the intelligence of the American people but this seems to be extreme even by their standards.
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Fuck 'em.
I apologize for the crudity of language in the following post. It is born of righteous rage, and I cry your pardon. I also apologize for the length; please understand that what follows is only a representative sampling of many, many more negative experiences I've suffered at the hands of postal management.
Buckle up. This is a bumpy ride.
I quit my postal job of 18 years a week and a half ago, without notice. I didn't even bother going back in the day after I talked to my union steward about how to go about it.
No, nobody got a goodbye. Eighteen years, people getting excessed out of the facility because there's not enough mail... everyone worried about whether they'll be living in town next year (and how long does it typically take to sell a family home these days, hmm?).....
.....and I looked about me a couple days before I quit and didn't recognize a single face. I counted over a dozen TEMPS. After telling all us full-timers there wasn't enough mail to keep us there, they go and hire
almost twice as many GODDAMNED FUCKING TEMPS as they did excess full timers out of their craft, that facility, or both!
AND THE NATIONAL APWU **AGREED TO ESTABLISHING PSEs*** DURING FINAL CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS! I believe a compelling case could be made against the APWU nationally for failure to adequately represent the interests of their members. Would anyone like to join a major class action? Current APWU members as of the last contract passage should be eligible. I'd really like to pull a few thousand years' worth of union dues collections out of the APWU and give that money back to the people who deserve it, because a union with a grievance backlog of several hundred cases, some said grievances being left unresolved after the affected employee left, retired, died, or transferred out of the facility is clearly not adequately representing the memberships' interests. And those grievances mostly piled up in the span of time the totally incompetent fucking idiots "running" the "critical" dispatch shift were initially placed in charge, up to this very day. I now believe that to be intentional, being as it is a time-tested method of breaking a union.
My head nearly exploded. I knew it was time to go, with a swiftness.
Fine. Go ahead. Staff everything with minimally-trained (or untrained) temps instead of ten, fifteen, twety people who collectively possessed twenty temps' worth of job experience EACH and see what happens to delivery accuracy. Pay them half my pay for the same goddamned job at the same fucking station! Move them to another station every ten minutes or so, because you, you fool, don't understand what a goddamned ripple effect is or how one works, and then wonder why tasks aren't being completed and the mail doesn't get out on time. Fuck with the schedules of the full-timers, AGAIN, after other plant managers tried this exact plan twice in prior years (it never worked), giving them four hours less time to process the mail for dispatch and forcing two shift to trip over each other without additional equipment or floor space, and see what happens to processed mail volumes. Replace the displaced workers who now come in four hours later with temps- working on the full-timers' prior shift, making full-timers take the less-than-optimal 7:30pm-4AM (!!!) shift, you miserable, sorry fucking excuses for "management". That's what happens when you put a FUCKING ACCOUNTANT IN CHARGE OF OVERALL PLANT OPERATIONS!!!
God help me, but I hope the plant I spent so many years at does close. Everything bad happening to the USPS except the health care benefit prefunding requirement is entirely and almost without any exception at all the fault of goddamned dogshit stupid motherfucking moron fuck-your-family-life-and-blame-Congress-for-it managers who don't know their asses from their elbows, and neither one from a fucking hole in the ground because it's been years, if ever, since they actually processed one single damned piece of mail.
THE PLANT MANAGER HIMSELF did not know, and had never known, that postal employees who work into the night differential time period on any Saturday shift receive Sunday premium (time +1/4) for both Saturday and Sunday if they work both days... wait for it... BECAUSE OF HOW THE USPS ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT HANDLES THE PAY PERIODS, CLOCK RINGS, AND BEGINNING OF THE PAY WEEK!
And he, the plant manager, lately of the USPS FUCKING ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT, did not know that! And that rule has been part of the APWU contract for the entire time of my employment at USPS!!!
The man in charge! God Himself! HE DID NOT KNOW!!! The stewards had to explain this to him! LIKE HE WAS FIVE YEARS OLD!!
To be a supervisor (management) in the USPS, no actual postal job experience is required. All you do is take the ESA exam once you are eligible, pass it, interview successfully (knowledge of the job requirements is not part of this interview to my knowledge), and you're in management, typically starting, oh, TEN OR ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS PER YEAR BETTER PAID THAN YOU WERE. You get this for, essentially, sitting on your flat, dead ass, because the contracts all prohibit postal managers from doing postal work (aside: this is why supervisors in the retail offices are always seen doing nothing and offering no help; they are specifically barred as a term of the National Agreements with the three postal unions from ever actually touching live mail unless there is an issue with that mail that falls under their own little bailiwick).Prior job performance isn't even part of the measuring stick for becoming postal management. Remember that whenever you have a complaint about postal supervisors, wherever they are. If it's a retail office supervisor, the chances are, I would say, better than even that that supervisor never once worked as a window clerk, and again, they are specifically barred from opening another register and working it (yes, even if the line is out the door), canceling any mail at all, etc., & etc. Fully half of all USPS ESA-level employees could die horribly overnight (and many of us secretly wish they'd do just that) and it would, until they started replacing with HALF PAY FUCKING TEMPS, have had no measurable effect at all. No, not even on the daily work of the experienced employees. We know our jobs much, much better than postal managers. That's why we get visibly angry approaching the level of doing violence WHENEVER a postal manager tries to tell us "that's not how the job is done." No, you stupid overpaid fuckwit, I know how to do the job and you are FUCKING WRONG, and I won't do my job wrong no matter how many times you insist that you're ordering me to do it wrong so I goddamned good and well better FOLLOW management's orders, dammitfuckyougotohell.
I got removed from the building one night the last time they jerked around out start times, for refusing to follow orders. That time, they sent almost everyone on afternoons, a little more than ten people at that time, all of whom has at least my time in in the USPS) onto the night shift- they essentially reversed the polarity of our body clocks for us, and with three days' notice because they screwed up the start date on the posted bids, the precious little fucking darlings, because the managers were too FUCKING STUPID AND INCOMPETENT to do THEIR jobs right, thankyouverymuch.
Anyway, there was an arbitration award posted prominently at the employee entrance to the workroom floor. It related to management's practice of requiring employees to run mail processing equipment containing several thousand part rotating or moving at high speeds by themselves, instead of having another employee on the same machine, you know, like the entire processing stream, schedule, and safe operations were written around. I refused to run mail along on one of those machines because it is not a safe method of operation, and got ejected from the building when I used that very arbitration award (that "management is incorrect in its assertion that the practice is acceptable", yes a direct quote). Their response to what I thought was an affirmative defense?
"That is an ongoing issue." Another manager's actual words to me when she arrive with a third supervisor (lotta chiefs, huh? Yeah.) purely for the intimidation factor. This is like saying that laws against murder are an "ongoing issue" because murders still occur, so of course we can do nothing at all. Look, ya dim bulb witch (NOT the word in my mind at the time, say sorry), I'm not as fucking stupid as you are, and you're less than half as clever as you believe yourself to be. BINDING ARBITRATION IS BINDING AS A POINT OF BOTH CONTRACT AND LAW, YOUR SUPERIORS SIGNED THAT DOCUMENT, and you do not have the "Authorit-a" to set those things aside because you don't like the result! Talk about going out of your way to be a witch! For NO GOOD FUCKING REASON!!
GOD!!!
I was still escorted out. I thought the floor supervisor, the incompetent, half-literate, dumb-as-the-box-the-rocks-came-in, arrogant, overtly hostile, and eminently convinced of his own greatness and infallibility Donald Watson, MFD (Miserable Fucking Douche) was actually going to physically assault me when I stopped at the very arbitration award posted right on the goddamned wall to collect some information I intended to use to contact the arbitrator who had signed the thing. No, he screamed at me the whole time as though getting the name of the person whose authority he had just essentially nullified for good equated to me doing something wrong.
When I did contact the union's arbitrator the next day, the actual man who signed the actual arbitration award, he went up in flames... at me. How dare I try to use in my own defense the document he himself signed. How dare I try to actually apply the only possible end result, the actual set-in-stone here-it-is-spelled-out Decree from On High, from that arbitration any moron with a couple neurons to rub together could come to. Oh, no. He wasn't pissed off at Donald Miserable Fucking Douchebag Watson for flouting his authority as an arbitrator... he was pissed off at me for invoking the authority he had exercised, by way of that document, to end what he himself termed in so many words that "management is incorrect in its assertion..."
The fucking idiot Watson fell back on denial and denied the plain fucking words written in black and white on the motherfucking page when my steward presented the actual written award, taken from its place on the damned wall, to him during my disciplinary meeting. He actually said, and stuck to, his assertion that the words on the page didn't say what they said, despite no wiggle room at all, even to a first grade reader, for misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the meaning of those words. At the time, I thought he was only pretending to not understand plain goddamned third-grade English. I came to believe by the end of that meeting that he actually is not literate enough to comprehend what "incorrect in its assertion that the practice is acceptable" means.
Fucking. Idiot. I don't know whether to feel sorry for him if he really is half illiterate, or burn with the white-hot fury of a thousand exploding stars that he was so overtly and knowingly hostile, arrogant, and pretend-stupid. Then again, literally everyone who dealt with him on the workroom floor was left with the clear and undeniable impression that this man may well be the dimmest bulb in any possible box, so it may be wisest to assume he really was being knowingly malicious. That fits his personality, except that he uses his own "ignorance" of contractual terms he disagrees with as a weapon to deny employee rights and magnify employee responsibilities.
And now you know why postal service employees occasionally, well, "go postal". The people above you can deny reality specifically in order to punish you for occasionally actual but far more often merely perceived wrongdoing only so many times before certain personality types just snap. Their actions when they do go and shoot up their office are not at all correct, and not a trace of the result is acceptable, but I do completely understand them, too.
That's actually scary.
And that's how utterly stupid, counterproductive, ass-backward policies and procedures that only make the problem worse get put into place in the postal service. The USPS was never a "business", but a SERVICE (something even our union stewards, who "are working very well with management" according to the plant manager, The Honorable and Venerated Monsieur Mister Pope His Highness Dan Chanski, disagree with), and government services can and do run at a loss, sometimes for a very long time. In many cases in our building, the supervisor of the section was part of an entirely different postal craft, and never once actually did or were anywhere near the job they will be supervising!! No effort has ever been or will ever be made to fit the experience of the supervisor with the required task of the supervisor, because there are thee postal crafts, and although employees can and sometimes do voluntarily leave one craft for another, when they do THEY LOSE EVERY SCRAP OF THEIR SENIORITY, even if they're working in the same facking building!
The very few times regular clerks were promoted to 204-B status (an old title that lay between clerks and management), those 204-Bs did not last, not because they were bad managers, but (I suspect) because their prior job experience made them more knowledgeable about that job than the supervisors and managers above them!! ALL such were demoted right back into the clerk craft in less than a year. They "got along too well with subordinates" or they "had attitude frictions with higher management personnel". No, what really happened was they made the career managers look as fucking clueless and stupid as they were just by DOING THEIR FACKING JOBS RIGHT FOR ONCE, YOU FUCKING MORONS!!!!!
The plant manager, Dan Chanski, ended up being the worst. The bulk of his time in the USPS was in the accounting department. Okay, rule #1: DO NOT PUT AN ACCOUNTANT IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING BUT ACCOUNTING OR YOUR BUSINESS/PLANT/SITE WILL FAIL AND YOU WILL LOSE YOUR SHIRT IN THE PROCESS.
There, that felt good. And for those "concerned" that I mentioned the empty suit by name, I don't give a fuck. I don't work there any longer, there's absolutely nothing he or anyone in the USPS can do to harm me or my future chances of employment, so fuck 'em. See the look on their face, say "fuck 'em", see the look on their face.
So I left, without notice, without saying goodbye, without a backward glance. I even did it from the comfort of my own couch at home, and I didn't have to talk to snyone in my former plant.
Chanski told us he wanted to move us to the later, extremely crappy shift with punitive-seeming hours "because I'd like more flexibility in the afternoons". That quote, by the way, came from the little service talk he gave we afternoon full-timers. PART OF THE SPEECH WAS TO TELL US PSEs WOULD BE THERE IN THE AFTERNOONS "TO HELP COVER THE GAP". Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brain. It's a brand of stupid so sublime I want to kill myself because there's just nothing interesting left to see in life.
And you have to admit, the levels of stupid I've described here take great effort and natural talent to achieve, and concerted direction to put into actual practice. I have never seen in any business, before working for the USPS or after I started, employ such a spectacular concentration of arrogant, self-assured fucking stupidity in one place. The good news is, if I see that at a prospective employer in the future, I'll know to turn and walk as fast as I can, and never mind being polite or convenient about it.
I'm happier now, unemployed by choice as I am, than I ever was in the past eighteen years. That's. Fucking. Sad. Not once, at any time, did I ever get a day shift or a weekend off I didn't use vacation time for, because even with that many years in, I was still, on the day I quit, next to last in seniority rank in my section. Not once, in eighteen stinking years. That's what happens when position #1 on the seniority list has a starting year of nineteen sixty fucking five. If I'd known that this was how it was all going to end, and with myself bitterly miserable on top of it, I might never have taken the damned job with USPS in the first place.
Good bye and good goddamned riddance. A pox upon that house. I may apply at UPS or FedEx and pay every last bill I can online just out of sheer malicious spite!
(Yeah. On balance, not a "good" place to work, and a piss-poor choice of employment for me personally. Good pay and benefits, to be sure, but the negatives, with which I am intimately familiar, simply do not balance the scale.)