Why the April 5th Hearing is Important

The quotes from Congressmen Darrell Issa and Dennis Ross that have been quoted in the press have all come from  a press release of  the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.    Most articles ignored the following quote "This hearing will establish an important baseline for Congress' upcoming work on the Postal Service's structure, fiscal health and self-governance," from Congressman Darrell Issa that better than anything so far lays out the issues that the committee will look at in regards to the Postal Service.  These are:

• Postal Service's structure - this most likely focuses on the management structure as well as questions regarding the network of processing plants and retail outlets, the use of contractors, work sharing, civil service employment law and how it applies to the Postal Service, and labor relations issues including the current collective bargaining process
• Postal Service's fiscal health - the focus here is clearly the prospects of the Postal Service being financially self-sufficient.   This will likely include the question, "Can the Postal Service be self-sufficient and pay the retiree benefit liability obligations currently required by law?"
• Postal Service Self Governance - the focus here is the Postal Service's business model.   Here the committee will likely focus on the Board of Governors and senior management looking to see if the current structure gives the proper incentives to ensure financial self-sufficiency.   The focus on the business model will need to include returning to a government department model as well as corporatization and privatization models employed outside of the United States. 

The hearing on April 5th will be a full committee hearing.  As a full committee meeting, the review of the APWU contract will get broader coverage on the 24 hour news channels, other print and broadcast media, on talk-radio and the blogosphere.   This could raise the Postal Service up a notch or two on the national policy debate.   How that affects the ability of Congress to find a solution that solves the Postal Service's problems is anyone's guess.

In Praise of Quad Graphics

The challenge for companies selling print is that they need a non-print strategy to sell their companies capabilities.   This includes the use of blogs, Facebook LinkedIn, and Twitter. 

One old line print company is doing a  nice job in what appears to be their first step into the use of social media to promote their business.  I have recently added Quad Graphics to my Twitter feed (#QuadGraphics is their hashtag) and am glad I did.   It is an excelent source of links to news articles and forums that Quad Graphics is running on twitter.  I urge those who follow the mailing industry on Twitter to add this twitterer to their list that they follow and they will learn much

Why Didn't APWU Compensation Go Down?

Government Executive and Federal Times both reported today that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will be holding a hearing on April 5 on Postal Service pay.   It is clear from quotes attributed to Congressmen Darrell Issa and Dennis Ross that the Postal Service's witness is going to have a very unpleasant time. 

The Postal Service should expect a grilling from members of both parties in Congress.   Congress is the representative of the shareholder and the two largest creditors facing the prospect that their bills for over $5.5 billion will not be paid next fall and similar bills in future years may not be paid.  If the Postal Service takes actions that do not reduce the non-payment risk of those payments due next fall and ones due in future years than Congress is within its right to raise questions as to whether the current Board of Governors needs to be replaced and could even put the new Postmaster General and his management team at risk of replacement.  
The grilling that the Postal Service faces will likely ask one question repeatedly.  Why was the Postal Service willing to sign any contract that did not freeze or reduce the compensation of current APWU members if APWU members enjoy a significant wage premium?  

This will be the central question because testimony was presented by Michael Wachter in 2003 to the President's Commission that stated Postal Service employees enjoyed a 34.2% wage premium has been quoted by Representative Dennis Ross as the basis for his concern that the Postal Service was not tough enough in negotiating the APWU contract.  Dissapointment with the agreement was also expressed by Congressman Darrel Issa who stated "The union contract renewals are the best chance to find new savings. Unfortunately, this looks like a missed opportunity. The Postal Service must show Congress and the American people that it can pay its own way, because the numbers do not seem to add up."


These comments reflect real concern because it is not clear if the Postal Service will have the money to pay the wage increases to current employees in 2012 through the end of the contract.   However, it is not clear that going to arbitration would have produced a more favorable settlement for the Postal Service, even if it presented new testimony of Dr. Michael Wachter that continued to show a wage premium of a similar magnitude.  Having looked at the challenges of unionized firms facing the need to reduce compensation expenses in order to remain competitive found few firms that were able to do this outside of bankruptcy regardless of whether negotiations were conducted under the Railway Labor Act or the National Labor Relations Act.   Even firms without unions find it difficult to impose significant pay cuts on current employees, although it was not uncommon during the last recession for non-union firms to both increase the share of health care premiums paid by employees and eliminate the match to 401-K plans.   Many of these companies have restored these benefits as the recession ended. 
 
The House committee has two options in looking at the compensation question.  The easy way is to bash Postal Service management and grab headlines by focusing only on the wage premium issue.  A more constructive alternative would look at what would be required to bring compensation closer in line to market values.   To do that they need to look at the following questions:

1. Update the Wachter study and include analyses that look at alternative alternative approaches to this question.  
2. Update the Wachter study using the compensation of APWU members under various scenarios under which increasing proportions of APWU members are employed under the new compensation schedules, employee classifications and work rules.
3. Examine the impact of the contract provisions that increase flexibility that allow the Postal Service to eliminate the cost of contracted services for work that an APWU member could do for 2 to 4 hours within a longer shift.  
4. Similarly, what is the difference in cost between using an APWU member and the non-union employee that the Postal Service is planning to displace?
5. Examine the options the Postal Service has to convince existing APWU members to retire.   A large share if not the majority of APWU members are at the highest pay step for the type of work that they do.   Replacing these employees that are earning the highest availalble salary with those who are new would significantly cut costs.   
   
   In particular, the committee needs to ask two questions here.  First, what proportion of APWU members, other postal unions, and management employees are eligible to retire now?  Second, what is the increase in the retirement rate if a VERA is introduced and for retirement incentives ranging between 5,000 and a half year's salary?  The answer to these questions would help illustrate the type of incentive necessary to increase the attrition rate to a level high enough to significantly cut compensation.
6. Examine the arbitration process in order to determine the probability whether the Postal Service would have been generated a better result than what the Postal Service agreed to using either current law or changes suggested by Senator Susan Collins.  This examination should also determine whether alternative approaches allowed by the National Labor Relations Act or Railway Act could have produced a result that would have had frozen or reduced the compensation of APWU employees without the threat of barnkrutcy or liquidataion.

If the committee concludes after asking these questions that the APWU contract and similar negotiated contracts with other unions as well as contracts that arbitration would produce would still be unaffordable, then it must determine if the more drastic option only available to firms in bankruptcy should be pursued.   That would allow the Postal Service to break existing labor agreements and impose lower cost compensation schedules.  In doing so, the committee has to ask how much this option would disrupt the mail delivery system and the probability that the Postal Service will have a business that can generate the cash over the next thirty years to cover its payments on retirement liabilities.

The Importance of Regulation

Currently there is a major push by Congressman Darrell Issa to examine how government regulation affects economic activity.   There is no question that government regulation affects the cost of running a business.   However, those who believe that elimination of regulation is a good idea need look no further than the unregulated Japanese nuclear power industry, and poor regulation of oil drilling in the gulf, and the financial meltdown that caused the great recession.   In all three cases, the relaxation of regulation reflected the problem of dealing with rare but expensive risks.  

The importance of dealing with risk is recognized by many economists, most notably Richard Posner, a conservative economist and judge who recently wrote:

If the probability of loss is high, strenuous efforts will be made to avert it or mitigate its consequences. But if the probability is believed to be very low, the proper course to take will be difficult, both as a matter of sound policy and as a political matter (to which I return in the last paragraph of this comment), to determine and implement. The relevant cost is the catastrophic loss if it occurs discounted (multiplied) by the probability of its occurring. If that probability is believed to be very low, the expected cost may be reckoned to be low even if, should the loss occur, it would be catastrophic. And if the expected cost is low but the cost of prevention is high, then doing nothing to prevent the risk from materializing may be the optimal course of (in)action

The key here the "perception of risk."  The perception of risk is key as there are many factors that cause us to downplay or overplay the risk of an event.   For example, if preventing aheart attack requires a major change of diet that one does not want to make, no amount of prodding from a doctor or previous heart attacks, may cause the person to change.  Richard Posner goes on to explain the issue of risk perception for politicians

It would not be surprising, however, if as seems to be the case Japan failed to take cost-justified measures to minimize the damage from a 9.0 or greater earthquake. Politicians have limited time horizons. If the annual probability of some catastrophe is 1 percent, and a politician’s horizon is 5 years, he will be reluctant to support significant expenditures to reduce the likelihood or magnitude of the catastrophe, because to do so would involve supporting either higher taxes or a reallocation of government expenditures from services that provide immediate benefits to constituents. In principle, it is true, politicians would take a long view if their constituents did out of concern for their children and grandchildren. But considering how the elderly cling to their social benefits, paid for by the young including their own young, I doubt the strength of that factor, although I do not know enough about Japanese politics to venture a guess on whether politicians’ truncated policy horizons was indeed a factor in Japan’s surprising lack of preparations for responding promptly and effectively to the kind of disaster that has occurred.



The industries in the United States that face the greatest level of regulations, those in mining, construction, chemical, oil and gas, transportation of hazardous materials, and nuclear power, as well as the provision of health care, medical supplies, drugs and equipment. All are examples of industries that face the risk of rare but spectacular catastrophes.  

As the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee looks at government regulation, they need to look at the Japanese example of an unregulated market in an industry that has rare but catastrophic risks.  As Judge Richard Posner notes the U.S. and not Japan has an independent Nuclear Regulatory Industry.   Before condemming all regulations, it is worth looking at what happens when effective regulation does not exist. 

.  It is not enough to look at the cost to the firms involved of regulation but it is imporatant to determine if the regulations would argue impose costs that are less than the expenses associated with losses the regulations are designed to prevent.

Socialists Oppose USPS - APWU Contract

An Op-ed by Hector Cordon on the World Socialist website calls for rejection of the APWU-USPS contract.

This contract, along with the claim that postal workers must sacrifice due to the financial crisis of the postal service, must be overwhelmingly rejected. A rejection of the contract then requires that steps be taken to prevent a so-called “neutral” arbitrator from imposing this sell-out agreement against the will of the rank and file. No confidence can be placed in the APWU to carry out a fight to defend its membership. It is necessary to build rank-and-file committees completely independent of the APWU to undertake a defense of jobs, wages and working conditions on the basis of an independent political struggle for a socialist program.

Is Arbitration Better for the Postal Service?

Many of the readers of the blog have raised the questions as to whether the Postal Service would have been better served going to arbitration. In a comment to another post a reader provided a history of  previous contracts that were sent to arbitration,   The picture is not pretty.

• 1978 -1981 James Healy rules in favor of unions on COLAs (no cap) and partially in favor of management on no lay-off clause, which is changed prospectively to cover only employees with a minimum of six years of service. Total increases of 31%
• 1984-1987 Clark Kerr rules in favor of unions with penalty overtime over 10hrs, continuation of COLA. Total increases of 13%
• 1990 – 1994 Richard Mittenthal rules in favor of Transitional Employees and Arbitrator Valtin decided the issue of health benefits which resulted in a 4% increase in employees’ share of healthcare cost. Total increases of 12%
• 1994 – 1998 Jack Clarke imposed a four-year agreement with COLA Roll-in. Total increases of 6.25%
• 2000 – 2003 Stephen Goldberg rules in favor of a 3 yr agreement. Total increases of 6.49%

These results are taken from a fact sheet, "A History of Postal Worker Salaries,"  that the APWU developed review the results of all contract settlements including those that were settled through negotiations and those that were settled in arbitration. 
 
The only paper on this topic "Labor Market Outcomes of Postal Reorganization" by D. Richard Froelke, the former manager of collective bargaining for the U.S. Postal Service was published in the book Mail @ the Millennium, edited by Edward Hudgins and published by the Cato Institute.  This paper provides more detail on labor negotiations through the year 2000.   Most importantly, this paper indicates that the problems in wage and benefit levels reflect the continuation of contract provisions and an understanding of pay compatibility that existed in the 1970's that has been nearly imposible to remove in either a negotiated or arbitrated settlement.   The list of arbitrated settlements above, which are described in more detail in the Mr. Froelke's article illustrates that eliminating wage premiums and restrictive work rules in arbitration did not occur even after the Postal Service began presenting significant evidence to an arbitrator regarding the need to control compensation costs.
 
Finally, it is worth noting that many who argued prior to passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act that steps were needed to constrain wages made recommendations that are not much different than contract provisions in the APWU contract.   For example, Michael Schuyler, Senior Economist at the Institute for Research in the Economics of Taxation made the following recommendations in the paper, "How to Bring Postal Compensation into Line With The Private Sector," a paper published in 2003.

• Increase postal compensation at the rate of inflation until the postal pay premium is reduced or eliminated.
• Increase postal pay more slowly than increases in an index of private sector labor costs to gradually reduce the postal pay premium. 
• Restrain postal wages when the postal worker quit rate is very low or the number of qualified people seeking postal jobs is very high.
• Vary postal wages by geographic region.
• Increase the use of part-time and temporary employees who would receive market or above-market compensation but less of a pay premium than full-time career employees.

With the exception of varying pay by geographic region, the APWU contract goes further than the suggestions made by Mr. Schuyler as it imposes, for non-career and new full time employees, a pay schedule and a definition of a full-time job that most likely closely matches market compensation and work rules for the work that APWU members perform.  The cost of getting the market based compensation and workrules for new employees  is a limit on wage increases for current employees to increases that follow his suggestions.   If the Postal Service can increase the pace of retirement of current APWU members, then I am willing to bet he and others that have written about a pay premium would agree that the trade-off represents a reasonable deal for both sides.

Compensation Comparison Chart

Thanks to my readers I was able to create a chart comparing Postal Service compensation to compensation at FedEx Express and United Parcel Service.  As all readers know FedEx Express is non-union UPS is organized by the Teamsters and the Postal Service is organized by one of four craft unions.  The Postal Service compensation figures are from 2009 and were provided by the Postal Service to reporters prior to beginning of negotiations with APWU and NRLC.

The comparison's are a bit disingenuous for the APWU includes a number of maintenance crafts that are higher paid then the most employees that sort mail.  Therefore a fairer comparison would compare the average compensation of employees that sort mail or work at a retail counter with the wages paid UPS and FedEx inside workers.   

The comparisons illustrates why the compensation levels negotiated with the APWU for new employees and non-career positions have much lower wages.   It is clear that the new wage structure should bring APWU members that sort mail or work a retail counter to an average compensation level that will fall between what FedEx and UPS now pay.   If one assumes that UPS and FedEx employees see increases in compensation in the next few years, either due to contract provisions or increases reflecting improving business at both firms, then it is possible that by the end of the contract, APWU average compensation will likely be closer to what FedEx will pay its employees than what UPS will.

In many ways, Mailhandler union members face a worse comparison that APWU members.   Few of their employees are in maintenance and other positions that generate higher salaries.   Therefore, their average salary is likely further above market rates than APWU members.   Therefore, the contract that they will negotiate next fall will likely have all of the changes in work rules and pay schedules that the APWU just agreed to.  They may find it more difficult to negotiate any protections for current employees that the APWU did.

For members of the NALC and NRLC unions the comparison is a bit more complicated.   Their current compensation falls between UPS and FedEx compensation levels.   However, Postal Service is seeing its volumes decline while UPS and FedEx volumes are growing.  Also determining what is a fair wage for the delivery portion of the service depends on an estimate of the value of the delivery service alone and the division of revenue for all activities other than delivery and delivery.   Only after that is conducted would it be clear whether the compensation paid to Postal Service carriers is at, above, or below market rates. 

The difficulty of doing a comparison with compensation of the NRLC members most likely explained why the NRLC was not willing to continue to negotiate.  They most likely face a lower risk of an adverse ruling in arbitration than APWU members as the economic case of the Postal Service is much more complicated in that negotiation.

Comments and suggested additions to this table are requested.   They will be added to the table and posted when received.