by: Mark Jamison; A retired Postmaster having served the town and community of Webster, N.C.

I worked for the Postal Service for thirty years, the last fourteen as Postmaster of Webster a small town in the mountains of North Carolina. Over the years, I became an increasingly outspoken critic of the Postal Service. While I was still employed, I began participating in cases before the Postal Regulatory Commission. I also began contributing to the website Save the Post Office, a site started and edited by Steve Hutkins, a professor at NYU who became concerned about changes to his local post office. STPO has done some of the most detailed and in depth reporting on postal issues and I would encourage anyone interested in the fate of the Postal Service to take a ramble through the site.

Last week the folks here at Angry Bear were kind enough to host an STPO post I did titled “What are People and the Post Office for?” The “crisis” surrounding the Postal Service is in some ways much more complex than what has been reported in the broader media. In some ways, though it is very simply an attempt to eliminate a well paid unionized work force while privatizing an essential national communications network.

One of the aspects of this issue largely ignored is the dysfunctional institutional management culture that has infected the Postal Service. Since postal reorganization in 1971, the management of the Postal Service has abandoned any pretense of fulfilling its public role while pursuing dreams of corporatization. One consequence of this behavior has been a terribly hostile workplace. The phrase “Going Postal” has entered the lexicon after multiple incidents of workplace violence. Stephen Musacco has a tremendous book “Going Postal: Shifting from Workplace Tragedies and Toxic Work Environments to a Safe and Healthy Organization” detailing the history of the failing postal management culture. I have also written about this at Save The Post Office.

via Angry Bear » US Postal Management’s Dysfunctional and Failing Culture