Nov 25, 2014 – It’s a story the U.S. Postal Service did not want us to tell you: Sexual assaults committed not just by customers and strangers, but by postal employees against other postal employees.
A thick layer of snow had just dropped onto the road as we climbed a mountain near Albany, New York, to meet Diane Caruso-Ruston.
“We’re pretty tough up here,” she laughed as she let us in the door. Caruso-Ruston explained she had to be tough to work more than a decade inside a large postal processing plant where they sort mail 24 hours a day. “The culture of the Post Office is, it’s an old boys club.”
Good at getting along with the guys working alongside her, Caruso-Ruston said she thought she was going to get a promotion when she walked into one of her managers’ offices. “Next thing I know he pushes me up against the wall. And he pushes down my left side of my pants, you know those stretchy pants? He licked my leg. I got startled. And then he took his thing out and told me to kiss it.”
via NBC 4
Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS) or Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder (PGAD).
Solutio: PSE, CCA employees.
Lots of them, young, cheap & disposable.
USPS punishes employees who report harassment and assault. Not forthright, but on the “down low.” Complain and you’ll start getting the worst jobs, your supervisor will micro manage you, nothing you do will be correct. Management will, in effect, create a hostile work environment for you. Try to push you into a mistake. Oh and don’t go home if you’re sexually assaulted. You WILL get disciplined! It’s probably in the ELM. Sexual assault does NOT alleviate an employee from their responsibility to maintain their assigned schedule and make every effort to be regular in attendance! “Zero tolerance” is a joke. It only means a supervisor will look into every complaint. Then they will fabricate a report that insulates the USPS. Much like REDRESS and threat assessment teams, zero tolerance is there to protect the agency, not the employees!
Its sad but true. All the processes in place and there are many, to give the illusion of employee protection is only a confession booth established to get your information first hand for scrambling to protect the perpetrators. It is, after all their business they intend to protect it, they are not there to protect the victims. Only to minimize the assaults/harassments in early development, what to cover up, who to hide before outside interference is initiated. everyone knows that.
Listen do you want to know a secret
Do you promise not to tell woh woh woh closer.
Mr Inspector, you are right on.. If you complain to management, like the rules say to do, you get more of the same abuse/harassment. If you file an EEO Complaint, management gets a free postal attorney to represent them. As a victim you have to pay for an attorney which most of us can not afford. Most co-workers will not defend us because they in turn will suffer abuse and harassment. God forbid if you get injured. Roughly 130,000 injured workers were walked off the job due to the Post Office’s Discriminatory National Reassessment Program . There is a class action suit going on right now because of it. Too bad Trisha didn’t ask Postmaster General Donahoe about that also.
Just shows again the need for the inspection service to be independent of management and have the ability to investigate them for sexual harassment and fraud and remove them from the Postal Service when necessary.
I agree totally. There very much needs to be a totally independent body designed to conduct real investigations, not jokes, where the good old boys “investigate” a serious incident and determine there is nothing wrong. It’s like the internal investigations of police departments when their rogue cops do stupid shit. Unless there’s a lot of witnesses and evidence, they never find anything wrong either.
The GAO is a joke with no real authority. A truly effective committee or board must be immune to bribes, and even make it a crime for postal officials to try to buy their way out of trouble.
Sex predators are all over the place, and far far too many get away with it because in the case of managers, and I refer to all businesses, not just the Postal Service, they hold careers over peoples’ heads, threaten to lie about allegations and smear victims every which way.
I also think when people who are more attractive than others get special considerations then the rest of the workers are victims of sex predation and discrimination. But I don’t live in a hole, and I seriously doubt any independent agency will ever be formed to help out anybody.
The Post Office has many Zero Tolerance policies pertaining to sexual and other forms of harassment, and you can bet that nearly all of these policies are repeatedly violated by postal management. The process of promotion has been broken for decades, and unqualified individuals are now managing other people, many times in a predator like manner. These types of individual would work well in a 19th century prison type scenario, but their use of power over others in today’s world is repugnant and illegal. Like the video shows, postal management has multiple levels of authority, all of which will be used to protect any fellow managers if and when charged with any type of crime or abuse of power. The victim is always considered a criminal, and threatened repeatedly, with positive outcomes a rarity.
Well stated. The layers of management protect the very top, and the poor suckers at the bottom, floor level supervisors, are fall guys and girls for a lot of bad things. Why anybody would want to get into that corrupted world is beyond me, but many do, and I’ve never seen anybody enter management world without contacts, relatives, or sucking up and snitching against fellow craft employees. I can deal with knowing the right people to blow, or even nepotism, if the benefactor turns out to be a decent person, that is. But there is not much a worse douche bag in my estimation than a snitch who loves to report people, spread false rumors and generally cause a lot of harm. I’ve had management that excelled in this childish behavior, and others, too.
People being people, you’re going to get all kinds, and we just have to deal with it as best as possible. If somebody does harass a co-worker in any form it’s a good idea to document the incident and let that victim know you are a witness and not back out. A unified craft will put the predator in a jam if we stick together.
Am sure Bill Cosby would never have dreamed this kind infamy, but this can of worms will never go away Bill !