From the National Association of Letter Carriers:

Dismantling the Postal Service is not the way to save it – YouTube.

The Postal Service has provided the APWU with an updated list of 1,500 post offices [PDF] where custodial work that had been subcontracted will be returned to the Maintenance Craft, Director Steve Raymer has announced. The return of subcontracted work complies with the 2010-2015 Collective Bargaining Agreement, Item 1.A, of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Maintenance Jobs.

An earlier list, provided to the union in March, was replete with errors, and included stations, branches and other facilities of larger independent installations. The custodial duties at these facilities will be returned to the Maintenance Craft as well, based on Item 1.B of the Memo, Raymer said.

The March list also included sites where custodial work hadn’t been contracted-out, although the MOU stipulates that a minimum of 1,500 post offices where custodial work was fully subcontracted would be assigned to the Maintenance Craft.

Establish Positions Now

Maintenance Craft officers are urging the Postal Service to immediately assign the work to the craft and to establish custodial duty assignments at the post offices on the list, Raymer said. “This differs from the position we took in March, when we insisted that the USPS had to correct the list. The stalling has to stop,” he added.

Maintenance Craft officers are encouraging locals to identify small offices that may not be on the list and to contact management about combining duties at the small offices with offices on the list to establish full-time duty assignments. “The jobs must be full-time if they are going to provide ‘landing spots’ for any excessed Maintenance or Clerk Craft employees,” Raymer said.

Cross-installation duty assignments can be created under the terms of the MOU. It is possible that the drive-time between installations could be considered a commute and therefore non-compensable, he said. “This is because in offices of this size, the Postal Service may establish 8-hour work days that are completed within 10 hours.”

Under current regulations, an employee can be given a break in service of an hour. In addition, a meal break of a minimum of 30 minutes must be included. “This accounts for 1.5 hours of the possible two hours between shifts, leaving 30 minutes for the employee to ‘commute’ to the next post office,” Raymer said. “This does not apply to stations, just to the cross-installation small office combinations,” he noted.

Please contact your National Business Agent if further guidance is needed.

IN the last two months, Canada Post’s digital mail service, called Epost, has gained a sizable number of new Winnipeg subscribers.

That’s because the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is now distributing its fortnightly pay stubs to all of its 12,000 employees via Canada Post’s digital platform.

The WRHA Epost service began May 3 and about 70 per cent of employees have already signed up, which is considered a strong early uptake on the service on the part of Canada Post.

Those who haven’t yet signed up will receive their pay stubs through the mail until they do.

Those Winnipeg health-care workers are part of massive group — numbering 7.5 million — who subscribe to Canada Post’s free online service.

For the WRHA, the move to digital pay stubs was about efficiency, reliability and environmental consideration.

For Canada Post, it is no less than the difference between sustainability and a significant decline in business.

Read more: Canada Post’s digital service snags major clients – Winnipeg Free Press.

The Gloucester County Times, a small newspaper in New Jersey, reported earlier this week that a local postal worker was under investigation for mail theft. Today the paper got a little more mileage out of the story by editorializing about it. It’s the kind of slightly sanctimonious thing that newspaper editors are good at- most postal workers are honest, but one bad apple spoils it for everyone, etc., etc. Replace “postal workers” with “cops”, “priests”, or “football coaches”, and you can run the same basic piece over and over again.

Until, that is, you get to the last line:

While the vast majority of postal workers are honest, any lack of confidence in the mail can only worsen the postal service’s estimated $905 billion financial hole.

$905 billion?

Did I miss something? The most recent financial results show the USPS’s year to date loss from actual operations as $627 million. Million, not billion. And even if you throw in the arbitrary PAEA charges, the paper “loss” only reaches $10 billion.

So how did the paper come up with a “hole” of $905 billion?

I’m guessing that somehow someone confused the recently announced estimate of the year to date total federal budget deficit, which just happens to be $905 billion, with the USPS budget deficit.

It’s a pretty big mistake, but you have to remember that newspapers are in a situation very similar to the one facing the postal service. Declining revenue, competition from the Internet, etc. And just as the USPS has been eliminating what it considers “non-essential” services, newspapers are also getting rid of things they don’t think are important any more.

Like fact-checking!

via Editorial: ‘Inside job’ not good for post office | NJ.com.

TUCSON – The US Postal Service made special deliveries to one north side neighborhood Wednesday after a mechanical failure caused one of their delivery trucks to go up in flames on Tuesday.

It happened in a neighborhood just south of River Road and east and west of Swan Roads at about 11 a.m.

David Birch, a US postal inspector said, "there was a mechanical engine problem. The driver pulled over and in a short time the vehicle was engulfed in flames, totally engulfed and virtually consumed totally." The driver was not injured in the incident.

via Mail delivery continues despite fire | KVOA.com | Tucson, Arizona.

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