In late July, the National Association of Postal Supervisors filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service, challenging its administration of the pay system that covers approximately 50,000 managers and supervisors. It is the first time in nearly 45 years that NAPS, on behalf of the postal managers and supervisors it represents, has sued the Postal Service over pay.

NAPS went to court because the Postal Service has violated the law’s requirement that it pay managers and supervisors a salary comparable to the pay of their private sector counterparts and that it pay them more than the workers they supervise. These managers and supervisors help to assure the prompt and efficient delivery of mail and the reliability of postal operations. Without a “supervisory differential” in pay, the incentive of craft workers to become supervisors is sorely undermined, and without compensation comparable to the private sector, the Postal Service cannot recruit well-qualified supervisors from outside the Service.

NAPS was prompted to file the lawsuit after the Postal Service in May 2019 issued the final terms of its 2016-2019 pay package for all personnel under the Executive and Administrative Schedule (EAS), which covers the nearly 50,000 managers, supervisors and other middle-management employees who are not members of collective bargaining units. The terms of the Postal Service’s pay package were largely the same as it had first proposed in 2017, before more than a year of “consultation” with NAPS’s leaders and before a review by a three-member fact-finding panel convened in 2018 at NAPS’s request by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. The fact-finding panel extensively reviewed the fairness of the Postal Service’s pay system for its managers and supervisors and unanimously found that the so-called “pay-for-performance” system the Postal Service had devised and applied to all postal managers and supervisors is “seriously flawed.”

read full article