06/22/2017 – On June 21, the APWU and National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU) sent a joint letter to Postmaster General Megan Brennan chastising her administration’s “wholesale and massive job cuts.” APWU President Mark Dimondstein and NPMHU President Paul Hogrogian explained, “The cutting of an already skeletal workforce will not only cause massive disruption to the workforce but will cause further degradation of postal services for the American people throughout the country.” The postal unions have drawn a line in the sand and are standing united against Postmaster Brennan’s continuous “cost-saving” shortcuts – shortcuts that have greatly affected not only the bargaining-unit workforce but also mail processing, mail delivery, customer service and the reputation of the United States Postal Service.
Although the APWU and NPMHU have separate collective bargaining agreements, this letter informs Postmaster Brennan that we stand together against her administration’s wholesale job cuts and tactics that ignore and break management’s obligations in our collective bargaining agreements:
“Without change, these management actions essentially throw any good faith efforts and constructive relationships to the wind. At a time when the parties have been working together to craft, promote, and pass constructive postal reform legislation, we wonder why the Postal Service would choose to declare war on its unions and its employees. Rest assured that, absent correction, the APWU and the NPMHU will together resist these misguided actions and violations of your agreements with, and commitments to, our members.”
The letter concludes with an offer to meet and explore alternatives to the proposed massive cuts that will preserve service and jobs. Click here to view the full letter.
On June 21, 2017, NPMHU President Paul Hogrogian and APWU President Mark Dimondstein delivered a clear message to Postmaster General Brennan. (pdf)
Text copy of the correspondence is as follows:
Megan Brennan
Postmaster General – Chief Executive Officer
United States Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW
Washington, DC 20260
Dear Postmaster General Brennan:
American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO
June 21, 2017
As presidents of our respective unions representing over 250,000 hard-working postal employees, we are deeply disturbed by the wholesale and massive job cuts under way by your administration. The cutting of an already skeletal workforce will not only cause massive disruption to the workforce but will cause further degradation of postal services for the American people throughout the country.
We also note that your public commitment to abide by the respective Collective Bargaining Agreements as you address workforce complements is being violated because the ongoing job reversions and job abolishments are contrary to contractual obligations. The excessing impact statements – currently amounting to over 1500 events affecting over 15,000 employees and counting – are blatant violations of our CBAs in relation to advance notice, mandated information to the unions, meeting requirements, move dates, and residual vacancies.
Using the information that the Postal Service has provided to the unions, there also is no way to determine if the required Article 12 provisions involving part-time flexible hours or PSE and MHA/Casual employment were considered or if the staffing is based upon all available work hours.
Our contracts further require that at the Area/Regional meeting a list of residual vacancies be provided to the union for each excessing event. At the current time, there are insufficient residual vacancies to accommodate the impact of thousands of bargaining unit employees. In fact, it would take a significant amount of time to gather that number of residual vacancies.
Without the residual vacancies, there is no excessing. That begs the question of why there is a demand to excess thousands of employees if there are no ‘landing spots’ for the excessed employees to be placed into.
Based upon all of the above factors and concerns expressed above, the NPMHU and the APWU request that management consider and explore all other alternative options prior to the massive excessing plan currently proposed.
Without change, these management actions essentially throw any good faith efforts and constructive relationships to the wind. At a time when the parties have been working together to craft, promote, and pass constructive postal reform legislation, we wonder why the Postal Service would choose to declare war on its unions and its employees. Rest assured that, absent correction, the APWU and the NPMHU will together resist these misguided actions and violations of your agreements with, and commitments to, our members.
We are both available early afternoon on Tuesday June 27th or late morning or early afternoon on Wednesday June 28th to further discuss these matters in person.
We await your response.
(Signed) Presidents Paul Hogrogian and Mark Dimondstein
2.3 years to go…………..840 hours sick……400 annual……….iron clad FMLA……What Me Worry?……….I will make it to the finish line in style. (plus I get a real pension from NYPD) IOD Muffin Meghan can take a walk off a short pier. worst job I ever had going all the way back to caddy when I was 12, worst mismanagers I have ever seen, worst do nothing unions I have ever seen. dumbest workers I have ever worked with…………the place is sleazy and cheesy to its core. when I retire I will rip the mailbox out of the ground……….never want any further contact with this low rent govt agency. thank God the OPM will handle all retirement once I leave this dump! President Trump sells the dump to FDX and/or UPS or turn it into an ESOP and let these dopes sink or swim. (they will drop like a rock) now would you like to hear what I really think about this place, uncensored! Postal Workers=Sheeple Strong!
Here we go again. Smoke and mirrors and nothing will change. I think it’s funny that people start panicking over all this stuff. This game has been played for years and years and yet we get the same results. We will still be talking about this stuff 25 years from now. Take a breath and relax people. Just go to work and do your job. If you don’t like it then find another line if work.
Its time to cut the bloated Management ranks. For every Management
“job” there are 2 or 3 toolbags doing it. Nepotism, favoritism and plain
stupidity produces a Management team that couldn’t manage their
way out of a paper bag with openings at both ends. How are
those new delivery standards working? How long are lines at the offices?
How many pieces of mail actually get lost or thrown away. How many
toolbags change color codes to reach delivery standards? How many
new hires quit after being subjected to 19th century labor standards?
Oh yes people it is all falling apart around us. Muffin Meghen and her
cohorts are doing their best to ruin the service. Good luck to you
new people. 30 years of this to look forward to.
Funny. Nothing is going to change
We as members must stand up. Until that happens we deal with the consequences.
two words, BUY OUT!
Lets be frank
When u get to the finish line, the postal service is really no great life to shout about.
Bankruptcies to meager living
Just above the line in income for any outside benefits.
Penalized at Social Security time if due any at all.
Chips on the shoulders management with no real person link.
Lets be frank, it’s just a pressed scam job. People u know for decades turn on u. Negativity abound. Intelligence of morons
I will bet you 1% that IOD Meghan laughs in the company unions face………its all just smoke and mirror and shadows on the wall.I saw all this crap going on the last 25 years………..what did I do? added UPS and FDX to my stock portfolio. worked out way better than dopes like Biller, burASS, Guffy, Diamondstein telling me a 1% yearly raise is the cat’s meow. only one who ever had balls was Vincent Sombrotto, President of the NLAC who took them out on strike on a sunny day in New York City in 1970. rest are just posers. all through the years the unions never said one word about the 110,000 postal mismanagers and the criminal bonus money they steal…….whats up with that? maybe we should report all this to the postal OIG-ROFLMFAO!
7,000 useless people at HQ,remove them or send them out as clerks and mailhandlers
Wayne your parents didn’t allow you to leave home this stupid. So wherever it happen rest assured its not permanent. I promise take your meds and stay out of the sun it will pass.
Where you get paid must be doing some bad things to you. It shows you’re anti-union and needs to be trained, or shown how it feels to be screwed. You don’t understand. Many of the people in management is the main reason for the Unions being in dire need.
Now playing cards are borderline if its true. So sure you work at a nonunion job and maybe in mgmt. Another telltale is Republican sounding as you are and in need of upward mobility.
I believe this country needs a union to represent individuals so companies cannot take advantage of the workers. But these two unions spent millions of dollars of the company money on union time representing individuals that don’t deserve to have a job. The employees they represent are lazy and don’t come to work. The union stewards sit in the union office playing cards on company time. My hope is one day the Postal Service would wake up and arbitrate to stop paying union stewards to represent it’s members. Let the union fund the investigative time and writing of grievances. Arbitrate minimum work standards and get rid of the dead wood. Disband the term clerks and mail handlers titles and combine them to postal employees. My guess is the company could save over a billion dollars.
i totally agree. well said Wayne
Go into any Post Office and look at the long lines at the windows. How much business does that drive away? Management doesn’t care! If they want to eliminate jobs, cut the number of stupidvisors and management back office jobs. That will never happen. Management just loves to discipline their low life employees. And if the back office employment was cut coffee and donut sales would drop.
My question is did she gargle often?
That also explain the brown handkerchief she carries.
My first thoughts when reading this article was the usual: Brennan is a Donohoe lackey, and like the worst PMG in the USPS’ history, that being Donohoe, she is running amok slashing positions and reducing production in the name of cost cutting but in reality is trying to figure out ways to “justify” padding her pockets and those of high ranking “officials” in the service with the estimated “savings” and creating numbers that have been proven to be very inaccurate, probably deliberately to allow room for “performance bonuses” and “year end bonuses” i.e., wholesale embezzlement from the postal budget.
We might recall Brennan worked with Donohoe from her first office as a city carrier for NINE grueling months and claiming she couldn’t do it any more. So, however she managed to do it, and I don’t want to think about it, she quickly got into management and followed her hero right into the PMG slot. She was the architect of closing plants and has no intentions of ever having properly staffed offices any where, preferring instead to put heat on Areas and District to deal with the shortages.
Contracts are agreed to and signed, then immediately ignored. To management on that level agreements are worthless. They have no intention ever of complying and let the grievance process back up and continue on their merry way until they’re absolutely forced to do what they’re supposedly legally bound to do in the first place. They steal employee’s overtime pay (Richmond, Virginia is in a real jam because of management’s ordering local supervision to deliberately screw their craft employees out of their overtime, and then using those managers as scape goats and firing them).
This cannot be tolerated. There must be an independent legally binding agency that focuses on contract violations, misappropriations, deliberately terrible service and abusive behavior toward lower level supervision and craft employees alike. It cannot be part of the USPS, and thus be rendered useless, like the OIG, who ultimately answer to management. They must be ready to crack the proverbial whip, and stop the horrendous mismanagement.
When contracts and MOU’s are repeatedly violated, measures should be taken that hold management accountable, and those misdeeds can and should result in demotions, removals, and if applicable, criminal charges.
The Service as a whole would save a lot of money stopping this scam. As a service and not a for profit business, bonuses should be illegal.
Plus, the NALC, my union, should be in solidarity with the other unions when they release this kind of information. We are all affected, and as the last link between management’s idiocy and the customer, we get the anger, questions and complaints. The ones forcing their crooked agendas on their offices never see or have to answer to a real customer, and on that rare occasion when media or someone in Congress demands explanations, they have no problem lying out their collective asses then, either. My friends have a long time to go before they can retire like I was able to do, and my concern hasn’t diminished because of the impact bad management has on them. Plus, we retirees can get screwed too, and if postal reform goes the way Trump wants it, it may be impossible for anybody to retire before they’re 62 because that asshole and the GOP want to eliminate the annuity supplemental that pays the approximate amount a retiree will receive from Social Security at 62. What a train wreck.
Don’t forget, the unions and management, are selling us out on Health Insurance by putting all postal employees, except upper management, in a “postal only” plan. Its a windfall for unions to make millions, while we get less coverage for more money. Retirees get screwed by having to pay twice. That’s why I left the NALC.
I forgot to say, I agree with every word you wrote. Spot on!
Cut cut cut but never management, and HQ vacancies are always filled almost immediately, or another do-nothing “position” is created. So glad I am out!
Almost all of the managers in “consolidated” areas were reassigned to headquarters and many new do nothing positions were created for them there.How may VP’s are there now? Where do the cost savings come from abolishing bids? Postal management logic.