7/20/17 NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – Some Lakeview residents say they’re fed up with the U.S. Postal Service. They’re turning to surveillance cameras to prove their packages aren’t being delivered on time.
Kerry Stockwell recently installed surveillance cameras to help deter crime in her Lakeview neighborhood. Now, they’re serving another purpose; helping her to prove the postal service isn’t attempting to deliver packages when they say they are.
“I woke up Sunday morning and I had an email saying they attempted to deliver a package at 10:20 the night before. That’s kinda late but I happened to be awake and I happened to be in my front room and I would’ve known if the mailman had come,” Stockwell explained.
She says she checked her surveillance cameras and the footage shows no one approached her door to leave a notice or the package.
“There was no notice and they never showed up so it was really just a lie,” Stockwell said.
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It wasn’t a carrier…
They didn’t leave a notice – the customer got an email.
This was obviously the brilliant work of management.
The fault here is with the carrier for falsely scanning attempts and then being careless and too lazy to even leave a notice. Then if he or she wasn’t dealt with properly by management meaning discipline on an increasing scale from “official discussion” to a letter of warning, 7 day working suspension, 14 day and then removal provided the charges are related, then the problem would continue. For example for the benefit of non-postal folks reading these, the progressive discipline can’t be used if a carrier doesn’t deliver a parcel as guaranteed as is the case here but later has an at fault vehicle accident. The accident would start its own process and management can’t use both as one case.
However, being Sunday, this was again either a CCA or RCA. It is showing customers exactly what career carriers were warning management about to no effect: City Carrier Assistants (CCA’s) are hired at much lower pay, no sick leave, little if any union representation and subject to the whims of managers and supervisors who run them ragged, sometimes get their jollies abusing them because they’re not “protected” like career employees, and expect superhuman efforts regardless of whether their demands are reasonable or even possible. One Kansas City office achieved abusive notoriety after a carrier died of heat related illness, and it was proven that the local supervision was totally indifferent to the inherent risks of working in blistering heat and overheated LLV’s which have been known to reach 135 degrees in their back ends.
They said heat did not matter, the precious computer said how much time would be allowed based on faulty and dishonest input from supervisors who routinely miscounted mail volumes, refused to give proper time allowances for carrying circulars or other factors, including weather or traffic. I know for a fact that parcels have been routinely miscounted deliberately even though most are bar coded. The scanners report a certain amount of packages for a route and management deliberately puts in lower numbers to “agree” with the computer projections.
Experienced carriers just laughed at it because it was only an estimate and little could be done to enforce its decrees, but CCA’s are bullied and terrified by it. This contributes to some of the bad behavior due to pressure from management, but because prospective employees are not vetted properly now, just about anybody can get “in”, and that means a lot more workers with real attitudes.
The Service was begging for this to happen. Employees were brow beat and abused, and knowing the chance of a career was far off and not worth the wait for the pay they got, they either copped attitudes and simply did and do not give a shit about service or accuracy, and like so many young workers think the world owes them something and that it’s a “toxic” work place if they’re expected to work, or they simply quit. I saw more than one of these types decide they had better things to do and bring back mail for whole streets and hide the trays to leave to the regular carrier the next day, thinking nobody would notice. That has never fooled anybody.
And we see what is going on out on the street – throwing packages, false scanning and not leaving notices, abusing customers – this is what the USPS created, and frankly unless the NALC grows some cajones and successfully forces management to discontinue this disaster, and I don’t see that coming any time soon, service will continue to decline.