(November 13, 2012)  Hearings in the ongoing interest arbitration proceedings to determine the terms of the 2011 National Agreement between the NPMHU and the Postal Service continued on Friday, November 9, 2012.  The hearings are being conducted before a three-person arbitration panel – chaired by Herbert Fishgold as the neutral member, with Robert Dufek serving as the USPS-appointed member and Robert Weinberg serving as the NPMHU-appointed member.  The next hearing is scheduled for November 16, 2012, with continuing hearing dates already scheduled through January of next year.

          At the hearing on November 9, the Postal Service’s lead advocate set forth the general outlines of the USPS arguments and evidence.  The agency’s case starts with the dire financial circumstances facing the Postal Service, which are caused, in the Postal Service’s view, primarily by electronic diversion of first-class mail.  This means that the Postal Service is “insolvent,” with more than $36 billion in losses over the past six years.  Its liquidity is approaching exhaustion; it has maximized its debt load at $15 billion; and thus, according to the Postal Service, it needs a total restructuring of its labor costs for mail handlers.

          What follows from these arguments is a series of draconian proposals from the Postal Service, including – for current mail handlers – absolutely no general wage increases, no cost-of-living adjustments, and a drastic increase in employee contributions for health insurance to the current rate paid by federal employees.  Another proposal from the Postal Service seeks to substantially modify, and effectively eliminate, the current no lay-off clause.  In addition, the Postal Service is seeking the authority to hire and to utilize, without any contractual restrictions on scheduling, use, or retention, a total of 25% non-career casual employees.  Finally, for new career mail handlers hired in the future, the Postal Service proposes that their pay rates be 20% lower at the entry level and 20% lower at the maximum level.  The bottom line is that the Postal Service seeks to freeze the wages for all current mail handlers, while reducing their take-home pay by approximately 8% to pay for health insurance premiums.  For new hires, the USPS proposal would mean a permanent, non-career workforce with low pay and no benefits for one-quarter of employees performing mail handler work, and a reduction of 20% in the wages of newly hired career mail handlers.

          In contrast, the NPMHU is seeking a restoration of general wage increases and cost-of-living adjustments for current mail handlers, which would be part of an overall financial package that would allow the Postal Service to reduce its overall labor costs in future years.  NPMHU representatives made clear that the Postal Service is institutionally incapable of either presenting or agreeing to a rational or common-sense approach to labor costs, and thus it would be necessary for the arbitration panel to issue an award that met those requirements.

          As noted, hearings reconvene on November 16, with the Postal Service expected to present evidence about its current financial situation.  Watch for future updates to learn about developments as they occur.

From the National Association of Letter Carriers:

Interest Arbitration Update: The interest arbitration board that will set the terms of a new National Agreement between NALC and USPS, chaired by Shyam Das, convened by telephone in executive session on Thursday. The session was held after hearings dates scheduled for Monday, Oct. 29, and Wednesday Oct. 31, had to be rescheduled due to the impact of Hurricane Sandy. A progress report on the proceeding will be forthcoming next week.

Read more: NALC | The National Association of Letter Carriers, AFL-CIO.

The interest arbitration proceedings to determine the terms of the 2011 National Agreement between the NPMHU and the Postal Service have begun, with hearing dates already scheduled through January 2013.

The three-member arbitration panel held its first planning and process meeting on October 15, 2012. The neutral member and chair of the panel is Herbert Fishgold, a nationally known arbitrator with more than thirty years of experience. As previously announced, Fishgold – who was appointed through a striking process run by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service –is an arbitrator of nationwide reputation and professional stature, who is also a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators. He has served as a third-party neutral for more than thirty years, during which time he has mediated and arbitrated bargaining disputes in a wide range of industries at the national, state, and local levels. Arbitrator Fishgold is familiar with many of the basic facts and issues presented by the Postal Service, the mailing industry, and postal employees generally – based on, among other things, his service as an interest arbitrator in the 2006 dispute between the National Rural Letter Carriers Association and the Postal Service.

Joining Fishgold on the panel as the USPS-appointed arbitrator is Robert Dufek, a Manager of Labor Relations at the Postal Service and long-time management attorney and representative. The third member of the panel has been appointed by the NPMHU, and he is union lawyer Robert Weinberg, a senior member of the law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser, PLLC in Washington, DC. That firm, which has operated as General Counsel to the NPMHU since 1992, also is the home of Bruce Lerner and Matt Clash-Drexler, the lawyers representing Mail Handlers both in last year’s national negotiations and in the current arbitration proceedings.

Hearings are slated to begin on November 9, with as many as twelve dates scheduled in November, December, and January. As the testimony and evidence are presented, more details will be distributed.

The Mail Handlers Union last month filed a national level grievance concerning the use of “lead clerks” to supervise mail processing units when a regular supervisor is absent. The “lead clerk” position was agreed to in the last APWU contract, with the aim of reducing the use of acting supervisors, usually referred to as “204B’s”. According to the USPS and the APWU, “lead clerks” would “guide” all employees in a unit, including mail handlers.

The problem, as far as the Mail Handlers are concerned, is that the USPS never negotiated with them on the issue. In practical terms, the provision would effectively preclude mail handlers from being used as acting supervisors in units that have lead clerks. The argument could get even more interesting if the arbitrator deciding the mail handlers’ next contract includes a “lead mail handler” provision in his award…

(If you can’t access the Scribd version of the grievance below, click here to view or download from Google Docs.)

Lead.clerk .National.level .Grievance.8.21.12

From the National Association of Letter Carriers Facebook page:

Interest arbitration for a new National Agreement between the National Association of Letter Carriers and the United States Postal Service began formally on Thursday, Sept. 6. The hearing convened at NALC Headquarters in Washington, with the union’s entire Executive Council in attendance along with a contingent from the USPS. The three-member arbitration panel, consisting of neutral arbitrator Shyam Das, NALC attorney Bruce Simon and USPS attorney Robert Dufek, heard opening statements from NALC’s lead counsel Keith Secular and his USPS counterpart, Thomas Reinert. "The NALC acknowledges that the Postal Service’s financial situation is as dire as the agency says it is," NALC President Fredric Rolando remarked afterward, "but the main source of the problem is not the pay and conditions of letter carriers, but the Congress of the United States. The arbitration panel cannot solve the financial crisis by helping the Postal Service dismantle itself; Congress must act and the arbitrators must give the parties the chance to do what’s necessary to adapt to the needs of the 21st century."

(August 16, 2012) As announced at the 2012 NPMHU National Convention last week, after the parties were done striking names from a list provided by the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, FMCS Director George Cohen has appointed Herbert Fishgold as the arbitrator for the NPMHU/USPS bargaining dispute. Mr. Fishgold is an arbitrator of nationwide reputation and professional stature, who is also a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators. Indeed, Mr. Fishgold has served as a third-party neutral for more than thirty years, during which time he has mediated and arbitrated bargaining disputes in a wide range of industries at the national, state, and local levels.

Arbitrator Fishgold is generally familiar with many of the basic facts and issues presented by the Postal Service, the mailing industry, and postal employees generally – based on, among other things, his service as an interest arbitrator in the 2006 dispute between the National Rural Letter Carriers Association and the Postal Service. And, Fishgold most recently served as the mediator in the last stage of the process to try and settle the NPMHU/USPS impasse.

The parties must now each select one additional member to serve on the three-person arbitration panel, and that process should be concluded shortly.

As the arbitration moves forward, the National Office will keep you updated, to the extent possible, during what is expected to be a lengthy arbitration process.

Read more: Arbitrator Appointed in NPMHU/USPS Bargaining Impasse – National Postal Mail Handlers Union.

From the American Postal Workers Union:

As we reported in June, the APWU has been engaged in informal conversations with management on financial incentives to encourage employees to leave the Postal Service.Although no official offers have been made, discussions are continuing, APWU President Cliff Guffey has reported.“I understand that there is great interest in this topic among some members, but it is simply not feasible or smart to conduct negotiations in public,” he said.“As additional information becomes available, we will keep members informed. This process cannot be rushed. In the meantime, please rest assured that needs of APWU members are uppermost in our mind. We will not be pressured into accepting an offer that is not in the best interests of our members.”

via Update on Incentives.

In his most recent blog posting, former APWU President Bill Burrus claims that the APWU’s National Executive Board has decided to withold agreement on retirement incentives for its members “in response to management’s refusal to implement newly negotiated contractual provisions”.

Burrus calls the decison “awkward at best”:

This decision is highly unusual in that the retirement incentive would be used as a benefit for the represented employees and to deny it as a means of punishing management is a clumsy means of contract enforcement.

The employer has a host of options to reduce costs beyond the separation of retiring employees, but the target is to reduce costs and this is only one of the tools available to employers to reduce payroll. If a particular means is not available, such as lay off or reduced hours, management often turns to consolidations or other ways of reducing expenses. So if the option of voluntary retirement is unavailable the principle objective of reducing costs will continue to be aggressively pursued. Management has the tools to reduce labor costs without accelerating attrition

Every employee leaves employment with the only question being the timing of his/her separation so the denial of a substantial incentive is a high individual price to pay for a mano to mano sense of collective activity. In the end, it is “we” who have decided that “you” will not receive a benefit. That is an odd place for a union to find itself.

via BurrusJournal.org – AN AWKWARD PLACE.

The APWU and USPS have reached agreement [PDF] on implementation of an arbitration award on retreat rights for Clerk Craft and Motor Vehicle Craft employees, Industrial Relations Director Mike Morris has announced. In an award issued June 29 [PDF], Arbitrator Shyam Das sustained the APWU’s grievance protesting the Postal Service’s refusal to allow excessed employees to retreat to Non-Traditional Full-Time (NTFT) duty assignments that were posted in August 2011 after approximately 9,000 part-time flexibles and part-time regulars were converted to full time.

The July 25 agreement stipulates that Clerk Craft and Motor Vehicle Craft employees who had exercised their retreat rights at the time of the excessing and were denied their rights on or after Aug. 27, 2011, will be given the opportunity to select, by seniority, among duty assignments for which they would have been the senior bidder. Affected employees will be made whole, based on local fact circumstances, the agreement says. Any employee who becomes excess to the needs of an installation as a result of the agreement will be reassigned in accordance with Article 12 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement [PDF].

The newly updated Joint Contract Interpretation Manual (JCIM) is now available, Industrial Relations Director Mike Morris has announced. The APWU and USPS finalized the 2012 JCIM on July 13.

The JCIM is intended to be a resource for the local administration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. It provides mutually-agreed to explanations of how to apply the contract to the issues addressed.

When disputes arise, the local parties should first go to the JCIM to determine whether the dispute is addressed and, if it is, the parties are required to resolve the dispute in accordance with this manual, Morris said.

“There is a lot of new material this year,” Morris noted, “because of the numerous changes we made to the National Agreement during negotiations in 2010 and 2011.”

Click here for a copy of the 2012 JCIM [PDF].