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The Challenge: Postal Wages and Discounts
Burrus Update 17-2009, Oct. 30, 2009
In a continuing effort to influence our contract negotiations, the postmaster general and spokesmen for major mailers have repeatedly suggested that postal employees’ wages and benefits are excessive.
Their claims are spurious, but our disagreement on this subject will not be resolved through debate between mailing-industry white papers and articles in union publications. The best resolution would be for one side to accept the logic of the other, and apply the result to wage-setting for postal employees.
We are willing to accept the premise of our adversaries: Postal executives and the mailing industry defend the postage discounts the USPS offers to major mailers, saying they are equal to the costs the Postal Service avoids as a result of worksharing.
Accepting their analysis of the value of sorting and applying barcodes, the American Postal Workers Union has issued a challenge: We will accept their conclusion and we demand that the Postal Service compensate mail-processing employees accordingly. Set wages at a rate that would be slightly less expensive than the workshare discounts the USPS offers to major mailers.
If the true value of discounts for letters and flats that have been bar-coded and pre-sorted to five digits is 10.5 cents, postal employees will sort every letter and flat for 10.4 cents – and we will process parcels for free! We will take the raw mail, as it arrives in collection boxes, and sort it all the way to 11 digits, at a lower cost than the discount “worksharers” receive now for five-digit sortation.
Our proposal would reduce the Postal Service’s costs significantly, improve efficiency, and make better use of underutilized employees and equipment.
If management’s assertions about the discounts are true, the USPS should jump at our offer.
William Burrus
President
