An audit report by the U.S. Postal Service’s inspector general said the service’s collective bargaining agreement with the American Postal Workers Union was blocking efforts to improve customer service at the local branch offices.
The contract has made it extremely difficult to remove poorly performing employees, the audit found.
The report, released last week, notes that 20 percent of customers expressed serious dissatisfaction with the level of service in fiscal year 2013, a nine percent increase from the previous year’s level. The word most “frequently associated with customer service” was “rude,” according to the Postal Service’s own survey.
The inspector general noted that the Postal Service already had procedures in place for improving customer service but that these were “not functioning as intended.” It said a key problem was that sales associates’ positions were not based on the employee’s suitability for the task as industry best practices would suggest, but rather by whether the employee had seniority. That was something the workers’ union had insisted upon.
“Sales associates’ positions are based on a seniority bidding process established in an agreement with the American Postal Workers Union rather than on customer service skills. Once an employee becomes a sales associate, resolving serious issues related to that employee, such as persistent discourteous behavior, can be difficult and time-consuming,” the inspector general’s report said.
The report said managers agreed that they needed better customer service and that staffing the relevant positions with people who “understand and empathize” with the customers was an obvious component of that. But their hands were often tied. “Because the Postal Service is bound by this (collective bargaining) agreement, management has limited flexibility in staffing sales associate positions.”
The Postal Service has suffered economically in recent years, having reported a loss of $5.5 billion in fiscal year 2014. Declines in mail volume due to the growth in online communications has been a major factor, but the audit report points to additional reasons, analysts note.
“It is definitely hurting the bottom line anytime you have bad customer service,” said Aloysius Hogan, senior fellow at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The postal workers’ unions — others include the National Association of Letter Carriers and the National Rural Letter Carriers Association — have clashed repeatedly with the head of the Postal Service in recent years, largely blaming leadership for the service’s woes. The APWU said in a statement Sunday that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, who retired last month, “chose a path that undermined the USPS — closing post offices, slashing hours of operations, virtually eliminating overnight delivery of first-class mail, and outsourcing key functions to unqualified private companies.”
The feeling is mutual for Donahoe. In a speech last month at the National Press Club, he said, “as much as we try to have an elevated conversation about the future of the organization, we never get beyond the narrow set of interests that are determined to preserve the status quo.”
The Postal Service is a quasi-private entity. It was established the federal government, and it is still subject to federal authority but is nevertheless directed to operate as a for-profit entity. It is not subsidized by taxpayers.
UPDATE: APWU Clerk Craft Director Clint Burelson responded in an email: “When customers are dissatisfied with postal retail service it is usually because they must wait on line for a long time, which is caused by staffing. We believe management should correct this problem.”
This story originally published at 1:56 p.m. Tuesday and has been updated since then.
