Mailroom Mayhem

By MARGARET CARLSON

Pity the poor postalworker, however hard that may be for the millions who have stood in line for half an hour staring at the wanted flyers, only to have a gum-snapping clerk reject their package because it fails to comply with official wrapping regulations ("No string; paper tape only. Next!"). Attracted to their positions by good pay, generous benefits, job security and a predictable, not to say slow, pace, today's postalworkers are being dragged | against their will into the 21st century by the anthem of the Age of Fax: get a move on.

Signs are they haven't done so. Despite a $585 million high-tech makeover for the Postal Service over the past two years, the odds have not improved that a letter will get from Boston to Miami in less time than the sender could drive it there. Performance on first-class mail delivery was at a five-year low in 1988, and complaints about late mail rose 35% last summer. For the workers, automation, heavier mail loads (especially during the Christmas rush) and outside competition have turned a once cushy job into a form of boot camp in eight-hour shifts.

California Congressman Jim Bates, who asked for a congressional hearing in San Diego last week, says the service fosters "unnecessary intimidation by supervisors . . . encouraged by upper management." Workers complain of being shadowed by foremen toting stopwatches, warned "not to take little baby steps" while moving around, and denied permission to leave the floor to go to the bathroom. "Fear and hostility permeate the post office," charges San Diego letter carrier Gary Pryor. Postmaster General Anthony Frank acknowledges, "This is a top-down organization. I wish it weren't."

With the hostility has come violence. Hundreds of punches are being delivered along with the mail: the past three years brought 355 attacks by workers on supervisors and 183 by bosses on workers. Last August, John Taylor, a letter carrier in Escondido, Calif., went on a rampage with a rifle, killing two colleagues, his wife and himself. Four other California postal employees committed suicide this year. In May, an irate Boston mail handler in a stolen airplane strafed the city streets with an AK-47. During a 13-hour siege in New Orleans last December, a mail handler shot his supervisor in the face, killing him, and wounded three other people. In Massachusetts in June 1988, a clerk killed a co-worker in the parking lot and later committed suicide. A postalworker in Edmund, Okla., went on the third deadliest killing spree in U.S. history in 1986, murdering 14 co-workers before killing himself.

Postal officials say it is just a coincidence that postal employees have been involved in such mayhem, but the general public might nonetheless wonder if the mail isn't driving the mailman crazy. Psychologist Mark Haffey, who counseled workers after the Taylor killings in California, warned that "two employees identified strongly with the violence by John Taylor. They indicated that they had experienced similar impulses but had not acted on them."

Not yet. "Enough has happened that it warrants a look," says Congressman Bates. The San Diego hearing documented an unduly harsh, arbitrary management style. Witnesses told of the police being summoned to a San Diego suburb to settle one of the nearly daily disputes over the load in each carrier's bag. A study showed that 45% of the 837 carrier routes in San Diego require more than an eight-hour shift to complete. Taking time off for surgery or unapproved nose blowing is a punishable act. "There's a rule for everything," testified a San Diego shop steward. "If a supervisor wants to get you, he'll get you."

Once a backwater of the Federal Government, the Post Office Department was reorganized in 1970 as a semiprivate, quasi-military company called the U.S. Postal Service. With 825,000 employees, it has more troops than the U.S. Army. But pressure is growing from the public as the price of stamps goes up while service goes down, and hotshot new businesses like Federal Express demonstrate that a letter can absolutely, positively get there overnight. The Postal Service has had to automate to move more than 160 billion pieces of mail a year with ever greater efficiency. New machines have reduced handling costs from $15 per thousand letters to $3 per thousand. Despite automation, human hands still touch most letters 14 times. Automation means they just have to do it faster. "The stress is tremendous," says American Postal Workers Union President Moe Biller.

The nightmare of the new automation is the optical character reader, which shoots out 30,000 pieces of mail an hour and shows no mercy. A postal clerk has about a second to read an address and punch in the first three digits of the ZIP code, which is then translated into a bar-code symbol for sorting mail by carrier route. With no way to slow down the machine, the clerk is like Lucille Ball in her comic routine at a candy factory. One moment, Lucy is standing at the conveyor belt blithely wrapping individual candies; the next she is stuffing unwrapped chocolates under her hat, down her dress and into her bulging mouth. Fudge caramels spill onto the floor. Lucy is fired.

Substitute Social Security checks and Christmas cards for fudge caramels, imagine 150,000 annual grievance proceedings and 69,000 disciplinary actions instead of firing, and a picture of the modernized Postal Service emerges. Officials downplay the problems but admit that the new pace is hard on older clerks accustomed to stuffing mail into pigeonholes. Yet the old-fashioned postalworker represented by two powerful unions is going to have to adjust. "We've got to capture the savings dollar-for-dollar that these machines represent, or we can kiss the Postal Service as we know it goodbye," says Robert Setrakian, chairman of the Postal Board of Governors.

Whether or not man and machine adapt, the public should be ready to blow a farewell kiss to the 25 cents stamp. Costs are rising 112 times as fast as inflation, and the Postal Service is expected to lose $1.6 billion this fiscal year. The 30 cents stamp may be here by 1991.

While postal officials are not likely to show up on The Oprah Winfrey Show anytime soon as examples of modern touchy-feely management, they are experimenting with new programs, including "Employee Involvement" and "Quality of Worklife Processes," to give workers more autonomy on the shop floor. In San Diego about 20 supervisors are taking Dale Carnegie courses; two are being individually treated by psychologists to reduce their "irritability factor."

Until Dale Carnegie takes hold as the new model for postal supervisors, one postmaster has a low-tech idea for improving service in Worthington, Ohio. For every letter misdelivered, the postman refunds the cost of the stamp to the customer out of his own pocket. Since September, 44 quarters have been paid out and complaints have dropped from ten a week to one.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola.

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With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Michael Riley and Nancy Traver/Washington