It's been close to a month since my last post and much has happened, most mundane, ordinary stuff, but a few important items.
Christmas at the Post Office has changed dramatically since I started in 1988. At that time an employee's life during December was consumed by the demands of work. Seven day weeks, 12 hour days were the norm. It didn't end with Christmas. January brought sale catalogs and a boost in advertising that ran through May when volume would tail off until the back-to-school sales began, then the process started again with the first Christmas sale mailings in September.
With automation of the mail stream much of that work is now performed by machines and what took 10 employees 10 hours to do, now 1 employee can complete in two and a half. The only part of the mail stream not impacted by machines at the delivery office level is parcels.
They still must be sorted individually by hand, but this year with the weakening economy, even that is suffering reduced volume. I don't have any hard numbers to substantiate it, but past experience and just the "feel" of the mail flow tells me times have changed.
Even as little as a couple years ago in our office I worked straight through, 7 days a week, from Thanksgiving to Christmas. This year the change is so dramatic, my manager was entertaining approval of leave during that time, something never before considered during December.
Overtime was needed only in the case of personnel shortages, i.e. sick leave, out of the office for other duties, etc. There were only a few instances of OT required due to mail volume, and that only in the case of processing parcels.
To those who think of the Postal Service in terms of a stodgy old government bureaucracy, over populated with excess employees, outdated practices and costly inefficiencies, you are out of touch with today's business.
While there are certainly areas needing improvement, as in every business on the planet, cost cutting and service improvement is the name of today's game. Employment is down some 100,000 from it's peak according to 2007 figures and 2008 has seen even deeper cuts with 50 million fewer work hours used compared to 2007.
There are several early retirement offerings currently in process and depending on the results other measures are being considered to cut costs and employee levels. From what I'm hearing, everything is on the table.
Mail volume is down overall with a total of 202.7 billion pieces delivered in 2008, or an average of 675 pieces of mail for every man, woman and child in America. Still that's a decline of 9.5 billion pieces, or 4.5 percent, compared to the previous fiscal year. That is substantial and these numbers are for the FY ending September 30, before the worst of the economic decline began to settle on business and individuals.
In the midst of this the service is deploying a new Flat Sorting System that will automate even more of the mail stream, further reducing the need for clerk craft employees (that's my area) and heavily impacting delivery employees who will receive a substantial amount of their mail ready to go to the street.
While I'm trying to secure a transfer to South Carolina in the midst of this changing business environment, I really have no idea what all this could mean for my future. Even with a 20 year work history, transferring into a new plant could put me in a precarious position if that plant is required to reduce it's "complement" (that's "employee levels" to the rest of you).
Finding out where I would stand as a transferee has been pretty tough to ascertain. Still, the fact that I need to be in South Carolina has not changed simply because the economy or my employers business model is changing.
So you can see there are some challenges ahead for those of us at the Postal Service just like the rest of the nation. We are not exempt. Even while we move the mail (40% of the world volume), bringing people together via their written communications and packages we are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs.
Unlike other delivery services we don't add surcharges for fuel or economic hard times. It cost the same to send a letter across town or across the nation. From the US Virgin Islands to Guam, from Chicago to a soldier serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, it still costs only 42¢ to mail a letter.
"We are all in the same boat on a stormy sea and
we owe each other a terrible loyalty." - G. K. Chesterson
