Alliance Report — August 31, 2015

As we reported last issue, the Postal Service has been reporting improvements in mail delivery times since winter and a commitment to ensure excellent service going forward. Postmaster General Megan Brennan did so at the Alliance July board meeting and chief operating officer David Williams reiterated the results and commitment at the August meeting of the Postmaster General’s Mailers Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) of which the Alliance is a member.

David Williams, USPS Chief Operating Officer

Yet the winter swoon in service continues to garner media headlines and political reactions. The ongoing coverage is largely due to a recent Management Alert – Substantial Increase in Delayed Mail issued by the USPS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) that confirmed the decline and the causes already reported by USPS—bad winter weather and mishandling of the implementation of nationwide processing and schedule changes on January 5, 2015.

David Williams, USPS Inspector General

The OIG alert reached this conclusion: “Mail was not being processed timely throughout the country. We found in the first 6 months of 2015 delayed processing increased by about 494 million mailpieces (a 48 percent increase), as compared to the same period last year (SPLY).” The alert defined “timely” as follows: “The Postal Service considers mail delayed when it is not processed in time to meet its established delivery day.”

It is worth reading the OIG’s description of how the operational changes impacted service:

“Network and Operational Changes: Significant changes to the Postal Service’s mail processing network took place over a short period of time. These included the service standard revisions, the mail processing consolidations, and the operational window expansion. While some of the operational impacts were anticipated, other impacts were not fully understood prior to these network changes. The Postal Regulatory Commission encouraged the Postal Service to study the effects of service standard revisions during the initial implementation phase to make informed decisions before moving forward with full implementation.

The service standard revisions impacted the schedules for nearly all processing and transportation activities nationwide. Specifically, the revisions allowed the Postal Service to expand its operational window, which allowed mail to be processed much earlier and resulted in over 5,000 employees transitioning from night to day shifts. This required staffing realignments and training of mail processing employees on new jobs. The Postal Service could not immediately shift mail processing clerks’ and mail handlers’ scheduled workhours to mirror the processing times of the new operational window. Moreover, the job bidding process established between the Postal Service and its unions can take several months to complete, and larger plants had to re-bid hundreds of jobs to those with start times concurrent with the new processing times.”

And the OIG had four recommendations which the USPS mostly agreed with:

“1. Continue to monitor and mitigate delayed mail processing as appropriate.

2. Assign appropriate staffing and conduct training to ensure timely processing of the mail.
3. Ensure appropriate transportation is in place to help meet the new service standards. 4. Establish criteria for determining if the network has stabilized and ensure the criteria are met prior to resuming the Phase II consolidations or conducting any other optimization efforts.”

We agree that not meeting promised service standards for mail delivery times is unacceptable, but we do not think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. While the early 2015 delivery service was a disaster, it appears to have been a temporary disaster with known and agreed upon causes that can be remedied. It should not be used to put a stop to the necessary process of right-sizing the postal network and rationalizing its costs to meet the efficiency requirements of lower but still massive mail volumes upon which our nation is heavily reliant.

Linda Malone, USPS VP network operations, recipient of OIG alert