Postmaster General Continues Efficiency Improvements
Layers Eliminated, Executive Ranks Reduced
WASHINGTON — Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe today announced a newly redesigned Postal Service, one that is better positioned for growth, reflects further alignment within the organization to achieve core business strategies and, when fully implemented, will help realize approximately $750 million of annual cost savings.
“I am confident that we have developed a strong plan that takes a key step toward a leaner and less bureaucratic structure. One that is fair to our employees and one that will meet the future needs of our customers and the mailing industry,” Donahoe said.
About 7,500 positions will be eliminated across the organization through the redesign that also includes the closing of seven district offices and offers limited financial incentives to those who meet specific qualifications.
The seven district offices that are closing are Columbus, South East Michigan, Northern Illinois, South East New England, South Georgia, Big Sky and Albuquerque. District offices house only administrative functions and do not affect customer service, mail delivery, Post Office operations or ZIP codes. The functions of these seven districts will be assumed by district offices within close proximity.
A Voluntary Early Retirement and financial incentive programs will be offered to eligible employees. Employees must be 50 years old, with at least 20 years of service; or any age with at least 25 years of service to qualify for the incentive. Employees who accept the VER offer or already meet existing retirement qualifications will receive $20,000 paid over two fiscal years to separate from the Postal Service.
“It’s critical that we adjust our workforce to match America’s changing communications trends as mail volumes continue to decline,” Donahoe said. “At every step and with every change, our focus remains on our customers and continuing to provide outstanding customer service.”
Today’s announcement focused on the administrative and executive corps. Additional staff reductions will occur as the Postal Service makes necessary changes to its network and retail operations. The full scope and financial impact of these personnel actions should be realized in one calendar year – March 2012.
While cost savings will be realized, the main objective of the restructuring is to enhance and strengthen customer service and relationships. The realignment flattens the organization, enabling flexibility to more quickly adapt to changing market forces and continuing mail volume decline.
The Postal Service is streamlining operations and improving efficiencies across the organization in order to protect its ability to provide affordable, universal mail service. By modifying networks, consolidating functions and restructuring administrative and processing operations, the Postal Service is adapting to meet the evolving needs, demands and activities of its customers.
“Mail remains valuable. It is at the heart of a $900 billion industry that continues to drive commerce and the American economy,” Donahoe said. “We will continue to work with Congress and our employees to achieve the long-term, structural and legislative changes we know we need to remain a viable organization.”
I agree with almost all post i have read on this site, we are all postal employees, no matter what are title/position. United we stand, divided we fall. Unions are suppose to be supportive and fight for the employees rights,and on the other hand u have management who in turn is suppose to make sure numbers on being met, scheduling, and responsible for clerk/carrier/maintenance pay. Not too hard, physically anyhow. But yet both sides take advantage of any given situation where a grievance could come into play. Union lets it slide until incident is over so then they can collect. (Not all, don’t get me wrong, but too many in my office our self-serving). Then u have management that knows its wrong and tells u to do it anyway and then file ur grievance. KNOWING that they r in the WRONG and will have to take up unnecessary time and pay one to all employees who were wronged by their egotisical decsion. Has , is , are ….there any people who can give us employees a actual $amount on how much these people are costing us needlessly. If u think about it, both sides are chopping their own feet. Mainly management. Because if they could actually manage their simple 2 hour a day job, we wouldnt have the need for all the grievances from our union!!!!! JUST SOME MORE WASTED MOOLAH FROM THE POST OFFICE. Across the nation, it is everywhere, again UNITED WE STAND…….DIVIDED we WILL FAIL!!!!!!!!!!
The Southwest District is in a newly renovated building. Millions of dollars were spent making it a totally ‘green’ building. Less than 2 years later the offices will be empty. Zero thought went into this. Instead of saving money the Post Office wasted millions. Making Detroit the district office was purely a political move. Just another attempt to try and keep business in Detroit.
you could save a lot of money by elminating the labor specialist in providence, ri because they will not settle any step 2 grievances of monetary value and check with area. the simple fix is to let area come down and hear the grievances. the postal service always blames the labor force when the problem is poor management from the top to tne supervisors.
I recently went to the US Postal Service History website. The interesting thing I learned was that from 1789 to 2010, a 221 year span, the Postal Service ran financially in the red for 143 out of those 221 years, and ran in the black for only 78 of those 221 years. The Postal Service has never been a profitable institution. The number of post offices peaked in 1901 with 76,945. When Rural Free Delivery became permanent in 1902 the number of post offices started to steadily decline. The site posted as of 2010 there were 27,077 post offices. Closing post offices has never been a successful option to saving/making money for the US Postal Service. It never will be. Cutting back within the clerk/carrier crafts won’t either. Management says that there are too may clerks/mail handlers in their particular office that aren’t needed. I say that when you come into work at 07:30 and see the supervisor and postmaster/oic sorting parcels instead of a clerk, someone is trying to make it look like there are too many. Carriers, at one time not too long ago, were not allowed to pull their own flats. It was taking work away from the clerks. Now carriers are required to pull their own flats. When on delivery, customers have come up to my truck and said that they were just back from the post office and stood in line for over an hour before being waited on. Management would say that was because a clerk was on lunch break. I say that when that clerk comes back to their window from lunch and there are still three empty windows and the line is still out the door , we are short clerks. This isn’t customer service. It seems that the only people who really care about the customers are the workers who are in direct contact with them; clerks and carriers. Carriers are being excessed out while there are still TEs working in their office. Why? They are at the bottom of the postal food chain. Change is inevitable, for sure. We all know that. It’s going to happen whether we want it to or not. Nothing stays the same forever. With the exception, I think, of the postal service every being a profitable organization. Mr. Donahoe talks a good game. You have to be able to do that when you are trying to get the powers that be to see things your way, and to make the changes/achieve your goals. He talks as though the postal service were on the edge of a great abyss, ready to fall in to a great nothingness. One morning at a stand-up we were told to tell our customers to use the mail delivery service instead of paying bills online. I have received postal online service promotions at my home, as well as delivered them. This seems hypocritical. If postal services online weren’t available our delivery and pickup services might increase. Keeping up with the changing times I suppose. Sadly, I’m finding it hard to believe anything I’m hearing or being told about what’s happening within the Postal Service organization. I am certainly helpless to do anything about it. The Postal Service has lost credibility with customers as well, and will never be looked at as it once was, a steady, trustworthy, reliable, friendly, consciencious, customer-oriented service. Mr. Donahoe continually states that customer service is at the four-front. I do not see nor agree with that statement. It is a numbers game. Anybody can adjust the numbers to show the results they want. It doesn’t mean that those numbers are 100% correct. But that fact doesn’t matter. I had a dream last year. California was hit by a huge tsumani. Looking out from a cliff I could see the top turns of a giant rollercoaster. Then I was hanging onto the outside of a rollercoaster car and it went down under the water. I was looking all around and I saw a LLV, with a carrier in it, driving along the bottom delivering mail. Was the dream my sleepy overactive mind, or a premonition? I think the latter.
Hey Postal Sup guess what………… supervisors are just craft employees that don’t and haven’t done anything for the postal service. All the lazy employees become supervisors and EAS employees. Our district ( which I work at but not in , we have window service at the district ) received no cuts whatsoever but at the same do nothing to contribute to the service. Most EAS have never touched a piece of mail and some don’t even know how to mail a piece of mail.
After leaving the Postal Service for a new career, I was amazed at how a real company ran. There were incentives and rewards for doing a good job, a feeling of teamwork and family, and the managers often had a say in who was hired as part of their team. I’ve seen letter carriers parked reading or whatever to avoid going back to the office and helping on another route. I’ve seen management make some of the dumbest calls on where to apply resources. Between the us and them attitude between craft and management, the unions not allowing much in the way of rewards/punitive actions (everything seniority based) and the government deciding what can be charged for products and services and what ones can be offered, it is no wonder the USPS is operating at a loss. I’ve never seen any other place where both workers and management are trying to do a job with both hands tied behind their backs and on one leg. There are many talented and hardworking craft and management employees but there needs to be a way to reward these workers and weed out the dead weight in both management and craft.
We had a woman clerk who worked on the SPBS. She would walk away from the machine and disappear. Fellow clerks not happy and considered her the worse employee in the building.
Management put some pressure on her to stay at the SPBS, she did. Time passes and she becomes a 204-B. Now she can walk the floor and get paid for it. She did this for about a year.
She applys for maintance supervisor and gets the job. WHAT! She had no maintance background! God, I was pissed and chewed-out management.
smoke and mirrors.
nothing more!
750 million? What about the BILLIONS, yes BILLIONS that the USPS is over paying for current retirees, and why has the PMG not gone the Congress to lobby harder to change the prefunding of future retirees. Continue the management cut and get are money back and we can keep saturday deliver. Dah Loser
Did anyone else notice the new definition of this Govt. Agency. The new PM calls it “this organization”. Looks as though we won”t be rolling our eyes at future stand-up talks when it’s called “this company”. Now if the boys at the top would get rid of “corporate communications” we could log into our scanners a lot sooner.
I truly cant believe that there are so many clowns on here posting stupid crap. String up the management because they dont even touch the mail. The carriers are the life blood of the Postal Service!! All the bums are supervisors, and they are making $90,000… Just let us great 30 year workers do our jobs.. Quit being evil!! Quit making upterrible rules….
Lets make the Postal Service great like it used to be.. I could deliver my eight hour route in two hours.. Sit in a bar for six hours and then go back for some OT..
Gotta love the racist dumbf**ks!
wow, what responses. Although I thought the “announcement” would be a bigger deal also, I think its a start. They are just starting ‘slow’. .changes are made all the time. This organization is much to complicated, but with congress and the PRC and all the politicians eyeballing the USPS affairs, you’d think more concrete decisions would have been etched out sooner. You’d think USPS would want more from their high paying managers, people who knew how to work people, not discourage them. We go on the same merry-go-round every day with dysfunctional managers and nothing gets settled. What a waste of time and resources. Why don’t the district offices take note on the amount of grievances filed against a particular supervisor and the relevant charges, investigate it, and send it on up the ladder for removal purposes, discipline, demotion, etc…. just a thought, but its better than none at all.
Just a start boys and girls. Way too many nigger slugs on the payroll, cut those union slugs out. Not one could even get a job at McDonalds.
Hahaha, the majority of these people were going to retire anyway. Think, this was planned from the beginning of the announcements from the new Postmaster General. Make APWU think employees were going to be laid off, than pay EAS the big bucks for all those 50 something. What a joke, Sucka..
I will see to it that all of my friends are taken care of. Even if I have to pay them myself
Sucks, doesn’t it Management losers? LMAO
I work at Sacramento P&DC on tour 1. We have 3 MDO’s and 1 acting MDO. Then they bring up 204b’s to cover for supervisory personnel.
This is a total waste. We do not need so many MDO’s on a tour. On some days you have all 4 of them at the same time.
Don’t hate on the craft slugs. They can only get away with what management ALLOWS them to get away with. In my facility, the slug supervisors are “buddy buddy” with the slugs because of the ole “Birds of a feather” theory. Discipline has been taken from the supervisors because most can’t read or write (a general requirement for admin). This basic function also makes them incapable of understanding a contract. Thank GOD for unions,,and thank GOD for President Obama!
I wonder what kind of management structure a large national company like Wal-Mart has? I doubt they have so many managers overseeing other managers. The Postal Service’s problem is that it has a top-heavy organization. Until whole departments are eliminated, workloads combined, and tasks streamlined, the future looks bleak.
One retiree told me back in 1978 an outside management consulting firm was brought in. What they found was so shocking that no other consultants were ever brought in again to examine the Postal Service.
By the way, I wonder how many managers and supervisors at the local and district level have a management degree from an accredited four year college. Probably next to none which is why they manage by threats and bullying.
Hey Postal Supervisor get rid of the unions? I assume that you would start with NAPS. Not that I am a huge fan of the craft unions but because mgmt. callously, maliciously and with contempt violate workers rights on a daily basis. It is a necessary evil.
Many supervisors/204B’s know less and did less when they were in the craft than just about anyone else. I am a 30 plus year employee who remembers when the P.O. was a great place to work but due to nepotism and favortism many incompetents have been promoted on the coattails of other incompetents. I know, I worked with about 90% of them. The good employees want nothing to do with getting into mgmt. because in large part it is a disaster!
just love these $90,000 supervisors wanting to get rid of the unions, If craft was making $30,000 how much do they think they would be making !!! If anything needs to be gotten rid of it should be NAPS…….
Just wanted to know why you needed 74 Districts in the first place and how dare you only get rid of 7? None of you even touch a letter, flat, or parcel, the life blood of this organization! Shame on all of you!
How can efficency be attained when less employees and less post offices available to the public. This is a bunch of political hog wash! There will definitely less customer services at the window unit to serve the customwrs on a daily basis than there are now. So where is rhe customer service improvement! Management have sent managerial personnel accross the country for years wasting money they could have saved by using employees in the local cities already employed there. Money wasted on hotel, per deim, buying homes selling homes, airfare, bonuses yearly, credit cards purchases, and other perks that go along with it.Now they want to say the reason they are out of money is because of paying employees at the lower level that are actually doing the work! Why isn’t Donahoo trying to get the $55 billions overpayment back from the retiree pre-fund benefit. This would help a lot rather than closing all the offices that has service for all American like the commitment for Universal service is suppose to. This need to be looked into some more rather than making rash decuisions that will eventually destroy the post office and its service. This will make the economy worse, more people will be out of work!!
7,500 ???? That doesn’t even qualify as a Drop in a bucket. And while we’re at it, why do they earn such ridiculous salaries anyway? If the only people handling the mail are clerks, mailhandlers and carriers, and every everyone else is just making rules for us to follow – then make your base elimination 117,500. While you’re at it get rid of the deat weight and the union that’s enabling them to suck the company dry.
I am presently watching them transfer a manager who is a thief to another position, far away. They never fire bad managers, they just shuffle them around. I have always been of the mind that managers MUST meet the following criteria, “The Peter Principal”.
I have yet to meet a manager that I liked.
I have to admit, there are a lot of craft slugs out there. But there aren’t as many as there used to be. They’ve been promoted to Mgt slugs/vpp golfers.
No doubt, there are a lot of useless management types but all you who are lambasting management need to look in the mirror. There are tens of thousands of you who are horrible employees whose antics would not be tolerated in any other organization. Declare open season on both management AND craft deadbeats and start generating some REAL savings. While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the unions that protect the slacker craft employees. Don’t recall any one of the above comments referencing your own craft slugs.
Some of the most hateful people in the world work in postal ‘mis-management’. I’ve never seen such a miserable group of evil souls. Just happy to know that their wrath is coming to an end! Yayyy. Hahaha!
Get rid of the worthless HR Managers. That position is so unnecessary. It’s about time those losers felt the pain that they’ve placed on craft employees over the years. I don’t feel sorry for them one bit. In fact, I’m quite happy to see the postal mis-management staff come crumbling down.
It’s just a start. How about recalling the mega million $ pension given to Potter. More could be eliminated. Why does NYC require 2 districts? Why allow sweetheart contracts with preferred mailers at a gross loss of revenue to service (reverse debt to equity). There is so much more that can be done. The best thing in everyone’s interest would be to be reimbursed our congressionally mandated over payments.
Do more with less….About time management felt our pain, what
goes around comes around. Give me an early out and I am GONE.
This boy not putting his finger in the dyke to delay it LET ME OUT!!!!!!!!
As I have stated before, the USPS gave up a REAL OPPORTUNITY to restructure it’s management force by closing or combining AT LEAST TEN DISTRICTS(and perhaps more as eluded to by THEIR OWN OIG) and make significant RESTRUCTURING of the balance of their management structure….
BUT NO, they have decided to TAKE THE LOW ROAD and make SHOWCASE REDUCTIONS in addition to playing HIDE THE BANANA with the rest of their MANAGERS.
It’s too bad…..
Business as usual, just move, shuffle and hide the incompetent unnecessary managers/supervisors around. No one is fired, as they should be, for doing such a terrible job.
The tea party people needed to take note, the demise of the postal service is at hand and little if anything has been done. I expected more from the new PMG.
This still does not address the excessive number of unwanted, unneeded managers/supervisors/204bs at the local level. Mr. PMG what is it going to take? In the real world they would have been fired for a job not well done! Come on and do the right thing, eliminate a lot more management! Save the USPS!
Can’t expect too much from upper managenet who could’t run a hot dog stand!
This a drop in the bucket but at least Washington is finally turning on their own! When hungry enough, sharks will eat each other…or throw their friends under the bus to save themselves! The PMG just needed to show Congress that he is taking active steps to address the problems we face ( politics, politics, politics!) Somehow he will manage to spend the money he is supposedly saving us in some other ridiculous way, like hiring former PMG Potter as a consultant. No wonder we are still going under! I hope we last long enough for me to retire from one of the former greatest institutions in America!
This is not exactly a bold new move. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I foolishly expected some real concrete money saving moves. A LOT MORE management needs to be eliminated.
Not enough cuts! Reduce the number of administrators at the local and district level. i.e. have ONE postmaster in charge of multiple offices.
Save a couple million more….Can the Diversity Specialists….