According to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the Dutch postal union has agreed to an new contract with TNT that chose job cuts over wage cuts. The union agreed to the contract once it realized that the job cuts were inevitable.
Immediately, 5,000 postal employees or around 22% of all postal employees will be laid off. An additional 6,000 jobs will be eliminated with retirements, not renewing temporary contracts, and not filling vacancies. When the process is over TNT will have little more than half of the employees the have today.
TNT has an advantage over the USPS as it can afford the severance, early retirement incentives, and unemployment expenses associated with the layoffs. Also TNT does not have to deal with RIF rules that make determining who is left aft a layoff a real challenge for management.
While the Postal Service may not have to drop employees by half, further reductions beyond what attrition produces appears inevitable over the lives of new postal union contracts. Developing methods to make the reductions as painless as possible for employees and management would seem to be an area that will come up in the current negotiations.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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5 comments:
Alan Robisnon wrote "further reductions beyond what attrition produces appears inevitable... Developing methods to make the reductions as painless as possible ... will come up in the current negotiations. "
The USPS has eliminated over 130,000 craft (worker) positions since 2006. In 2009, over 30,000 took early retirement.
There have been no corresponding and equivalent reductions in management and supervisory positions.
In fact, the USPS just announced that rather than eliminating vacant supervisor positions it will begin filling these positions starting December 29th.
The current ratio of employees to supervisor must be in the range of one supervisor for every 10 employees. This is ridiculous!
There must be equal reductions from the ranks of management before the craft employees endure more losses. Heck, we are the ones who actually move the mail!
Maintaining 120,000 ties and stuffed shirts won't help sort a single piece of mail.
either congress is sticking there head in a hole and refuse to look at management ratio to workers or the salaries management is making is ok to them.universal salaries instead of universal service!
As a Postal worker I can tell you we have "shirts" come in our office regularly to check our cases after we leave to be sure we didn't leave one piece of mail there (most first class mail now is DPS and is NOT cased.)
There are too many people in the USPS who do not move the mail but nitpick the carriers. Another example, they drive around to be sure that we "curb" out wheels on a level road!
We need to cut out these do nothings and put them in real jobs.
I know clerks hate to hear it, but there are too many of them. There needs to be a reduction in the number of full time clerks and we need to take a long and hard look at how we do that. But there must also be an even larger reduction in managerial and other EAS positions. We are incredibly overburdened with the weight of those who do not move the mail or contribute to the mail being moved. It's time to really remove unnecessary management positions, instead of eliminating one job while creating a new higher level job to promote the effected supervisor into. We also need to rid ourselves of such useless positions as the diversity office and innumerable useless paper pushers and number crunchers of useless numbers.
In response to the comment by Unforgiven, I'd like to know what definition of "moving the mail" is used. This is obviously a Letter Carrier that is short-sighted and brainwashed by the NALC into thinking Letter Carriers do it all. How else would they get dummies to pay such exorbitant union dues? Stand by for your round of cuts Unforgiven, and see who sticks up for you when you spend eight hours moving the mail out on the street (at night!)
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