FY25—The Beginning of Another Challenging Fiscal Year
By Dee Perez
New York Area Vice President
I want to thank all my friends from across this great country for sharing their work-related concerns. Once again, I always will keep your identity and location confidential.
Good riddance FY24! Now it’s time to say hello to my little friend, FY25. By now, either your MPOO or district manager will have blown you away with updated FY25 expectations that will be more intense than the previous year. Naturally, when the USPS loses $4 to 6 billion, PMG Louis DeJoy takes the heat for it.
The break-even goal in the “Delivering for America” playbook is going on year four. Congress is grilling DeJoy about these huge financial losses and the unattained scores promised in the DFA playbook with the S&DCs. Some communities are in an uproar over the S&DC in their area.
In fairness to DeJoy, I believe he’s sincere in changing the USPS culture and business model. He’s explained his vision on many occasions through various media outlets and to us at the NAPS LTS, national conventions and Executive Board meetings. I believe he’s sincere in his quest, but I don’t know if it’s going to work. At least he’s doing something, which, to be fair, no other PMG before has done anything like this.
DeJoy has a vision he’s trying to implement. Again, will it work and improve the USPS? I don’t know; only time will be the judge. I hope he is successful because the old way of doing things has proven to be a failure. It’s time to move on and use technologies to make us more streamlined and efficient.
However, for the record. I don’t agree with all his changes. MPOOs and district managers have talked in their private circles about what a disaster eliminating Operations Programs Support has become. In the past RIF, my understanding is everyone found a position. Granted, some people were elevated to positions in which they had no business being; others went back to the field. It’s a mixed bag of successes and failures.
Moreover, the big hit was taking away district managers’ responsibilities, which has undermined and weakened them. Limiting them to only Retail and Delivery was a bad move. It has stifled districts from getting things done at the ground level when a problem is detected. Now, issues must move through different channels and directors for approval in a much-slower process. Despite stovetop management being implemented to foster faster communication from the top to the bottom to move things faster, just the opposite has occurred.
To compensate for the loss of Operations Programs Support, we are seeing postmasters, area managers and even supervisors monitoring and being assigned to pull data/reports, then emailing the information to the field while also conducting a Zoom meeting on occasion to help MPOOs manage their bloated areas of responsibilities. I don’t condone this practice; EAS employees who help should say “no.”
t is not in “your” job description to be a part-time Operations Programs Support specialist/MPOO helper/handyman because the MPOO is overburdened. The only way to get positions back in Operations is for both MPOOs and district managers to make their dissatisfaction known to USPS Headquarters and not place additional responsibilities on EAS employees who already have a tremendous workload.
My understanding is CRDO leadership believes frontline EAS employees are not holding their employees accountable, which is why we are losing $4 to 6 billion a year. In their view, it has nothing to do with the millions spent on refurbishing existing facilities to convert them into S&DCs or purchasing modern technology to process parcels in RP-DC-converted sites into mini S&DCs faster.
Nor does it have anything to do with the lack of mail volume itself from an aging population that no longer depends on mail correspondence and has no interest in bulk business mail. And let’s not forget the excessive travel expenses resulting from three-day seminars all over the country for Headquarters employees and supervisors to hear the message from the CRDO messiah himself and his apostles.
Remember, MM—membership matters! NAPS is approximately 1,500 members shy of 30,000. If each branch signs three new members in the next two months, we will surpass 30,000 members.
I know the New York Area branches will do their part—what about your branch?
Categories: The Postal Supervisor
