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The New District Model Isn't Working for Me

The New District Model Isn’t Working for Me
By Dee Perez
New York Area Vice President

Is it me? Perhaps it is—you be the judge. The need in the field is to fill EAS vacancies, as well as hiring more CCAs and PSEs. In this pandemic, we could use more occupational health nurse associates to get employees back to work, even if the Postal Service hired them only for a short time.

What puzzles me the most is trying to understand the logic of a district manager being housed in a building that also houses HR, Labor, Training and other departments, yet they no longer report to the district manager. The USPS trained these district managers to manage all these positions, plus a mail plant. Now, they have been relegated to a staff they can count on two hands, while others are in charge of other aspects of the operations these district managers once managed—and manage it from afar.

Postmasters and supervisors, Customer Service, now have more administrative tasks being dumped on them than ever before. However, the most disturbing part is I’ve been told from friends in other states and throughout my own state on Zoom meetings that the new mantra is “Just give it to the Postmasters and SCSs to do; make them do it all!”

If true, I find it offensive and unprofessional for leaders to have this attitude toward EAS employees in the field; we do all the heavy lifting, every darn day. Now, districts have no choice because they don’t have support staff to do their work. MPOOs have to reach out in the field for ambassadors or subject matter experts to monitor compliance in order to achieve service goals. Isn’t this hypocritical for the field to do this work when the USPS eliminated an entire structure, Operation Program Support, just 10 months ago?

Looking through one lens allows you to see this, in a way. That’s good because a peer is training and mentoring you to meet your PFP money goals. Or you can look at it through the lens where the mentor now is backed up doing their work and now needs to pay additional time to their SCS to perform the tasks to which they can’t get. It all depends on the lens through which you are looking.

In the meantime, the time has come for the USPS to recognize those in the field who deal with all the stress and heavy lifting in this unprecedented time we work in today. For two, very long years, we’ve been carrying the burden of this responsibility for the agency. Another type of compensation besides the flawed, secretive PFP system would be welcomed and well-deserved for every EAS employee.

Food for thought: The USPS should inform Amazon we no longer will deliver their products on Sundays. Tell them to deliver their own products on Sundays. Imagine the savings!

With dignity, integrity and respect always.