The U.S. Postal Service must hire 9,000 employees over the next three months to staff regional part-time post offices as part of a settlement it negotiated with the American Postal Workers Union. The new postal employees will be working at offices that are open for four to six hours a day.
The deal, reached Monday, was declared a “major victory” by the union, which had filed a grievance over the Postal Service’s efforts to limit operating hours at its small regional post offices and use non-union part-time employees.
The basic deal, reached through an arbitration judge, was that the hours at the regional offices would be limited but the workers must all be APWU members and at least a third must be full-time employees.
The Postal Service will hire 3,000 full-time workers to staff the six-hour offices and another 6,000 to staff the four-hour offices. The latter group will be “Postal support employees” — essentially part-time temp employees, though they must also union members.
“This is historic,” said Bob Johnson, the president of APWU’s Greater CT Area Local and one of the negotiators. “We haven’t had APWU members in most of these offices in decades, and now to have to have full-time positions in six-hour offices — that’s phenomenal.”
Created by the federal government, the Postal Service remains under its authority, but operates as an independent business. It does not receive federal funding and must rely on the sale of postage and related products for its operation. It reported losing $5 billion in fiscal 2013.
The Postal Service has long tried to consolidate and close thousands of its small regional offices, arguing that it is badly needed to control costs because email and text messaging have reduced mail volume. Those efforts have been stymied by a combination of political, labor and grassroots opposition, which has argued that the offices are still needed by their local communities.
A 2011 Postal Service effort — dubbed “POStplan” — would have “realigned” services at the regional offices, limiting some to no more than two hours of operation a day.
On Sept. 5, a labor arbitration judge ruled that POStplan violated the Postal Service’s labor contract with APWU, but only at the offices that would be open for four to six hours a day. The Postal Service and the union signed a memorandum of understanding on Monday outlining the hiring practices at the other offices.
