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We Still Don't Know What We Are!

We Still Don’t Know What We Are!
By Dioenis D. Perez
New York Area Vice President

Welcome to Fiscal Year 2022. Here we are, yet we don’t know what we are. I (not NAPS Headquarters) claim that the Postal Service (we are not a company) still doesn’t have an identity it can project to all its employees—craft and management. Meanwhile, what the general public wants is service.

The definition of service is “the action of helping or doing work for someone.” Here we are today, since the inception of the USPS, with a rich history of providing service at any cost to the American public. There are many fingers that can be used to point as to why we have a $188 billion debt that is more than 250% of its annual revenue. Domestic politics play a huge role.

Craft and management employees who work on the front lines, be it in mail processing or customer service, are being pulled in so many different directions with so many different mandates and new orders, they have no idea what to do first anymore. Their daily objective is to survive to see another day in this crazy Postal Service new world order.

One example is Function 4, which seems to have been a pet peeve across the country for the past several months. Marching orders are to improve the Customer Service Variance (CSV), primarily meaning we need to reach the objective goal of 92% for each unit. Generally speaking, most offices were well below this threshold; many offices have improved since, but still are shy of this goal.

The problem with Function 4 is we are not earning enough hours in our workload in LDC 45. The variances indicate there are not enough transactions to justify the USPS being open all these hours. Local management didn’t hire all the regulars we currently have, nor did they have a say in setting the window hours for daily business.

I understand that we have to identify “standby time,” provided there is zero work in the office for clerks to perform. However, this still is not enough to reach the goal of 92%. The key is fewer employees.

Now we are faced with an abundance of time-consuming Zoom meetings telling us to improve our Function 4 performance nearly every single day. In addition to this, we have area persons telling us to use fewer hours in Function 4. I have no issue with that, but then another area person who is watching the RCE scores wants to know why we have failed an RCE shop due to a WTIL issue.

Is it services throughout the day or just service part of the day? An EAS employee monitoring their window has to guess correctly because they don’t know if they should save hours to improve CSV or spend hours so they pass the RCE shop and provide service.

The fix that addresses both concerns is as follows:

• Give us more credit per transaction because not every clerk works at the same speed and not every customer knows what they need in less than a minute.
• Close our windows earlier to reduce LDC 45 hours and variances
• Disregard the RCE WTIL being five minutes or less; make it 20 minutes

With integrity, dignity and respect always!