anyone with a washington post logon interested in cutting and pasting the article on the comments section so the rest of us lazy schmoes can read it? Thanks.
Familiar Postal Routes May Detour Rural Mail Carriers Face Changes in a Potential Overhaul of USPS
By Robert Gutsche Jr. Special to The Washington Post Friday, December 31, 2004; Page A27
SPRING GROVE, Minn. -- Before anyone else, Steve Selness knows who here gets letters from collection agencies, who gets what bills and birthday cards.
Selness by no means peers through people's mail; he tries to pay attention merely to the address when sorting it each morning.
Rural carrier Steve Selness has a 102-mile route in southeastern Minnesota.
"Sometimes there are certain things that are good for me to know about my customers, and then there are the things that aren't okay for me to know," said Selness, 44, one of two full-time rural mail carriers here who drives nearly six hours a day to bring mail to about 400 mailboxes in southeastern Minnesota.
In rural America, where people can live miles apart and still consider themselves the closest of neighbors, people tend know a lot about one another. But you know even more about neighbors if you are a rural mail carrier.
"I guess that's just what you get for living in a small town of 1,800," he said.
Things in rural America -- including how people get their mail -- may work a bit differently than elsewhere in the country, but even the nation's back roads cannot escape the economic and cultural impact of changes that may come from a possible overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service that is being considered in Congress.
Washington lawmakers are still stalled over how much flexibility to give the Postal Service in setting its own prices and whether the service should have more control over its pension savings and other retirement benefits. But with the Postal Service thinking about another postage increase, Congress probably will address the proposed legislation early in the new session.
For a decade, the USPS has been closing post offices to consolidate the sorting of mail at regional hubs and adding technology to the way workers handle mail to save the agency money.
Those changes alone have already had lasting effects on rural mail service. In tiny Woodman, Wis., for instance, the federal government closed its post office almost five years ago and initially moved operations into a small tavern where people would sort and pick up their mail.
But mail has not been sorted there in at least three years. Now when people send mail, it gets postmarked three towns away.
These closings mean jobs to small communities, but there is little to suggest an overhaul of USPS operations would signal a large drop in the need for rural mail carriers.
Postal jobs overall are expected to decline through 2012 as post offices continue to turn to technology to sort mail, but the number of rural carriers rose from 46,000 in the mid-1990s to about 63,000 today, about one-fifth of the country's total carriers, USPS officials said.
Still, rural carriers, who just now are starting to use computers, scanners to track mail and cell phones while on their routes, are preparing for more change.
They expect one day to receive everything pre-sorted -- everybody's mail sealed inside individual plastic bags.
"I'm really worried about what that will do to our hours and what that will mean for accurately sorting mail," said Selness as he reads each address on envelopes he pulls from a large sack and quickly turns from side to side, sliding the mail into racks of cubbyholes. "People get can get real mad about that sort of stuff, about their mail."
How the mail gets to the post office and into mailboxes might be a collection of minor details to most folks, but to many rural mail carriers, their duties are in keeping with history and a tradition of rural living.
"If we weren't out here doing this," said Bob Garvin, 77, who has delivered rural mail near Elroy, Wis., for nearly 60 years, "people would have locked boxes downtown. We are keeping a tradition going."
Garvin drives a 100-mile route past cemeteries, abandoned farmhouses and cornfields. He said he plans to retire next year.
It is easy to drive country roads, he said, but it is tiring stretching across his car from the driver's seat and out the window to reach the mailboxes at each of his 200 stops.
In Spring Grove, Selness, whose father was a clerk in the same post office in the 1970s, started delivering mail 25 years ago and has no plans to stop soon. Selness has one of the best-paying jobs that come with full benefits; he earns about $50,000 a year.
Each morning, Selness spends two hours sorting and packing mail into his pickup truck. He sets a pile of mail next to him. Packages go behind his seat or between his legs.
For hours, he speeds along gravel and dirt roads that are usually only as wide as one car. But 15 miles out from the nearest town, in cow country, driving around can be an adventure.
Although city carriers are known for battling dogs, rain and sleet to deliver letters, Selness and other rural carriers pride themselves in fighting all that, plus snowdrifts and cow crossings.
Selness has dug himself -- and other carriers -- out of deep snow and mud several times along his 102-mile route. (The nation's longest route is about 175 miles in Lamont, Okla.) "I once was in mud so deep, it was up my leg, and we couldn't get the jack under the truck," he said. "But I tell you, I'd rather be driving in this stuff and on ice than walking it like they do in the cities."
Selness's partner, Ford Brevig, 56, covers 94 miles of rugged roads, not counting the three extra miles he has had to drive this year to bypass a broken bridge.
For 15 years, Brevig worked as a part-time carrier, earning about $20,000 a year, while he juggled jobs as a farm service agent and raising cattle. Even though he became a full-time carrier in August and his salary was doubled, he still runs a small karaoke business on the side.
Carriers can stay on rural routes for years, and it is not unusual to find some who stay for decades. Over time, they all gather stories about country murders, hermits, car crashes and messy housekeepers and share them, sometimes with a bit of hyperbole.
But occasionally the stories are true and more personal, such as the time Brevig found a woman lying in her yard here as he delivered mail. "I was just driving by, and I saw her there; you could barely see her," he said. "I just stopped to check it out."
She had a broken hip, he suspected, and he called for help, got her a blanket and continued on his route after paramedics arrived.
Now, sometimes she leaves treats for him in her mailbox: chocolate or something else sweet. "There's just nothing that can pay me like the post office does," Brevig said, "but, I guess, more than that, I just like being able to serve."
In other cases, it is the carrier's quirky character that ends up becoming stories.
In Elroy, all carriers -- and many residents -- know about Bernard Shaker, now retired from the postal service.
A dozen years ago, he uprooted more than 200 mailboxes on his route and used his own money to plant freshly painted posts and new mailboxes, all set level with his passenger-side window.
So the story goes, Shaker told people that in all his years he never minded driving in snow or on ice -- he just did not like that each mailbox was a different height.
Standard mail currently represents 45% of mail volume but only 25% of postal revenue. True postal reform must correct this problem. This may be politically impossible, so the any legislation that will continue to subsidize standard mail will be a patch and not a solution.
What an idiot! Has this author got some sort of Rip Van Winnkle sickness? "Just NOW beginning to use computers and cell phones?"?????... HELLO??? With a few of the numbers tweaked this article could have been written with total relavence in about EIGHTY NINE OR NINETY!!! Talk about 'behind the curve' or 'time warps'....WHOA!!!!!
As a clerk, over the years I have seen rural carriers do twice the work of city carriers, with no whine or slacking. They are cheerful, consentious and do their work with vigor. They recently were screwed by the post office in their routes and pay. These are people that the post office should praise, not mess with.
Unhelpful article. Notes changes are coming, but when? The system of bagging hasn't even been successfully employed anywhere, to my knowledge, so is this a 10, 20 year goal? DPS is not even uniformally used yet.
Well everyone knows a carrier on light duty is called a clerk, so using the above posters "observation" I guess rurals REALLY make clerks look like they do virtually nothing! Be real, their are slackers in every craft but by far most are great workers.
Give me a route with only 200 stops, 100 miles, and a satellite radio and I'll stretch across that seat 'till they carry me to one of those cemeteries on the route.
Isn't it interesting that we are anonymous... Rural carriers were not screwed by the PO on their last contract; they were screwed by their Union! USPS makes an offer and the NRLCA does and each party accepts, counters or rejects the other's offer, and they go back and forth until they reach an agreement both parties can live with. In retrospect, I'm sure the NRLCA reps are kicking themselves in the hinder, but we have to live with it until a new contract is NEGOTIATED.
I have to respond to the clerk. My office has 35 rural routes and about 20 city routes. City carriers have a 3 page Standard Operating Procedure posted in our office that regulates everything they do. They are not allowed to talk to co-workers, must case a standard amount of mail and a little computer spits out how long it should take them to do their job on that particular day. Most city carriers work till at least 5pm everyday. Rural carriers have no such sop. They have full freedom to run their route the way they feel is most productive. They talk and carry on all morning without fear of being chastised by management. They make the same amount of $$ as city carriers except they only work about 5 hours a day. Most are on the way home at 1pm everyday...well except for saturday. Ya see, they are off on saturdays. Regular rurals are home with their families on saturday while their subs carry their routes. Why the NALC doesn't adopt this system I'll never understand. EVERY rural carrier I know scoffed at the notion of joining the NALC when the opportunity arose. They see how city carriers are treated and want no part of it! There are countless #'s of city union studs that are out of touch with reality. Postal management has the city carriers by the short hairs because of the ingnorance of the NALC.
"My people are destroyed because they lack knowledge"-The Prophet Isaiah
As a city carrier of 7 years...that sounds like a great idea...as long as it gets managment off of my back and i don't have to use my own vehicle. I'm all for it. I know guys who skip lunches...and do all sorts of things to make it back in "good" time because they are intimidated by managment. Then management uses these carriers times against other carriers stating that so and so was back at such and such time why are you an hour later than them? Not all routes are equal..as many, especially the ones with the seniority claim they are...and also some forgo lunches and breaks because of the atmosphere of fear and intimidation created my supervisors who serve money not people. I say we try a new plan...i'd rather work till 5pm everyday with the same pay...if management never talks to me again...and my job is secure...because in this current environment there is so much insecurity. Plus with a new system maybe the postal service won't need 5 supervisors to stare at 26 workers for 3 hours.
200 Stops?? Give me a break. Our 3 hr a day Aux route has 400 boxes. ABout what I had in 1989 when I was a 42H route. Now 700 deliveries, 36 miles and more mail than will fit in the truck most days. That's after multiple cuts/territory shifts. While the rural evaluation system may be working in parts of the country, on populated, DPS, heavy traffic routes, there is just about no way to make evaluation... THere are no longer scores of people signing up to "take my job". I hope the carriers that still have good routes appreciate them.
19 comments:
77 years old and still delivering! No Early Out for him.
anyone with a washington post logon interested in cutting and pasting the article on the comments section so the rest of us lazy schmoes can read it? Thanks.
Familiar Postal Routes May Detour
Rural Mail Carriers Face Changes in a Potential Overhaul of USPS
By Robert Gutsche Jr.
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, December 31, 2004; Page A27
SPRING GROVE, Minn. -- Before anyone else, Steve Selness knows who here gets letters from collection agencies, who gets what bills and birthday cards.
Selness by no means peers through people's mail; he tries to pay attention merely to the address when sorting it each morning.
Rural carrier Steve Selness has a 102-mile route in southeastern Minnesota.
"Sometimes there are certain things that are good for me to know about my customers, and then there are the things that aren't okay for me to know," said Selness, 44, one of two full-time rural mail carriers here who drives nearly six hours a day to bring mail to about 400 mailboxes in southeastern Minnesota.
In rural America, where people can live miles apart and still consider themselves the closest of neighbors, people tend know a lot about one another. But you know even more about neighbors if you are a rural mail carrier.
"I guess that's just what you get for living in a small town of 1,800," he said.
Things in rural America -- including how people get their mail -- may work a bit differently than elsewhere in the country, but even the nation's back roads cannot escape the economic and cultural impact of changes that may come from a possible overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service that is being considered in Congress.
Washington lawmakers are still stalled over how much flexibility to give the Postal Service in setting its own prices and whether the service should have more control over its pension savings and other retirement benefits. But with the Postal Service thinking about another postage increase, Congress probably will address the proposed legislation early in the new session.
For a decade, the USPS has been closing post offices to consolidate the sorting of mail at regional hubs and adding technology to the way workers handle mail to save the agency money.
Those changes alone have already had lasting effects on rural mail service. In tiny Woodman, Wis., for instance, the federal government closed its post office almost five years ago and initially moved operations into a small tavern where people would sort and pick up their mail.
But mail has not been sorted there in at least three years. Now when people send mail, it gets postmarked three towns away.
These closings mean jobs to small communities, but there is little to suggest an overhaul of USPS operations would signal a large drop in the need for rural mail carriers.
Postal jobs overall are expected to decline through 2012 as post offices continue to turn to technology to sort mail, but the number of rural carriers rose from 46,000 in the mid-1990s to about 63,000 today, about one-fifth of the country's total carriers, USPS officials said.
Still, rural carriers, who just now are starting to use computers, scanners to track mail and cell phones while on their routes, are preparing for more change.
They expect one day to receive everything pre-sorted -- everybody's mail sealed inside individual plastic bags.
"I'm really worried about what that will do to our hours and what that will mean for accurately sorting mail," said Selness as he reads each address on envelopes he pulls from a large sack and quickly turns from side to side, sliding the mail into racks of cubbyholes. "People get can get real mad about that sort of stuff, about their mail."
How the mail gets to the post office and into mailboxes might be a collection of minor details to most folks, but to many rural mail carriers, their duties are in keeping with history and a tradition of rural living.
"If we weren't out here doing this," said Bob Garvin, 77, who has delivered rural mail near Elroy, Wis., for nearly 60 years, "people would have locked boxes downtown. We are keeping a tradition going."
Garvin drives a 100-mile route past cemeteries, abandoned farmhouses and cornfields. He said he plans to retire next year.
It is easy to drive country roads, he said, but it is tiring stretching across his car from the driver's seat and out the window to reach the mailboxes at each of his 200 stops.
In Spring Grove, Selness, whose father was a clerk in the same post office in the 1970s, started delivering mail 25 years ago and has no plans to stop soon. Selness has one of the best-paying jobs that come with full benefits; he earns about $50,000 a year.
Each morning, Selness spends two hours sorting and packing mail into his pickup truck. He sets a pile of mail next to him. Packages go behind his seat or between his legs.
For hours, he speeds along gravel and dirt roads that are usually only as wide as one car. But 15 miles out from the nearest town, in cow country, driving around can be an adventure.
Although city carriers are known for battling dogs, rain and sleet to deliver letters, Selness and other rural carriers pride themselves in fighting all that, plus snowdrifts and cow crossings.
Selness has dug himself -- and other carriers -- out of deep snow and mud several times along his 102-mile route. (The nation's longest route is about 175 miles in Lamont, Okla.) "I once was in mud so deep, it was up my leg, and we couldn't get the jack under the truck," he said. "But I tell you, I'd rather be driving in this stuff and on ice than walking it like they do in the cities."
Selness's partner, Ford Brevig, 56, covers 94 miles of rugged roads, not counting the three extra miles he has had to drive this year to bypass a broken bridge.
For 15 years, Brevig worked as a part-time carrier, earning about $20,000 a year, while he juggled jobs as a farm service agent and raising cattle. Even though he became a full-time carrier in August and his salary was doubled, he still runs a small karaoke business on the side.
Carriers can stay on rural routes for years, and it is not unusual to find some who stay for decades. Over time, they all gather stories about country murders, hermits, car crashes and messy housekeepers and share them, sometimes with a bit of hyperbole.
But occasionally the stories are true and more personal, such as the time Brevig found a woman lying in her yard here as he delivered mail. "I was just driving by, and I saw her there; you could barely see her," he said. "I just stopped to check it out."
She had a broken hip, he suspected, and he called for help, got her a blanket and continued on his route after paramedics arrived.
Now, sometimes she leaves treats for him in her mailbox: chocolate or something else sweet. "There's just nothing that can pay me like the post office does," Brevig said, "but, I guess, more than that, I just like being able to serve."
In other cases, it is the carrier's quirky character that ends up becoming stories.
In Elroy, all carriers -- and many residents -- know about Bernard Shaker, now retired from the postal service.
A dozen years ago, he uprooted more than 200 mailboxes on his route and used his own money to plant freshly painted posts and new mailboxes, all set level with his passenger-side window.
So the story goes, Shaker told people that in all his years he never minded driving in snow or on ice -- he just did not like that each mailbox was a different height.
Standard mail currently represents 45% of mail volume but only 25% of postal revenue. True postal reform must correct this problem. This may be politically impossible, so the any legislation that will continue to subsidize standard mail will be a patch and not a solution.
What an idiot! Has this author got some sort of Rip Van Winnkle sickness? "Just NOW beginning to use computers and cell phones?"?????... HELLO??? With a few of the numbers tweaked this article could have been written with total relavence in about EIGHTY NINE OR NINETY!!!
Talk about 'behind the curve' or 'time warps'....WHOA!!!!!
Jesus..Lord of my life you are! www.lovinggrace.org
I'm an atheist, myself.
$50,000 a year vs IT budget for the same scale of $526,000. Go ahead, try to justify screwing Rurals, Karl
As a clerk, over the years I have seen rural carriers do twice the work of city carriers, with no whine or slacking. They are cheerful, consentious and do their work with vigor. They recently were screwed by the post office in their routes and pay. These are people that the post office should praise, not mess with.
Unhelpful article. Notes changes are coming, but when? The system of bagging hasn't even been successfully employed anywhere, to my knowledge, so is this a 10, 20 year goal? DPS is not even uniformally used yet.
Well everyone knows a carrier on light duty is called a clerk, so using the above posters "observation" I guess rurals REALLY make clerks look like they do virtually nothing!
Be real, their are slackers in every craft but by far most are great workers.
Give me a route with only 200 stops, 100 miles, and a satellite radio and I'll stretch across that seat 'till they carry me to one of those cemeteries on the route.
Isn't it interesting that we are anonymous...
Rural carriers were not screwed by the PO on their last contract; they were screwed by their Union! USPS makes an offer and the NRLCA does and each party accepts, counters or rejects the other's offer, and they go back and forth until they reach an agreement both parties can live with. In retrospect, I'm sure the NRLCA reps are kicking themselves in the hinder, but we have to live with it until a new contract is NEGOTIATED.
Or if they can't agree, then an ARBITRATOR will decide it. Did you forget that part?
I have to respond to the clerk. My office has 35 rural routes and about 20 city routes. City carriers have a 3 page Standard Operating Procedure posted in our office that regulates everything they do. They are not allowed to talk to co-workers, must case a standard amount of mail and a little computer spits out how long it should take them to do their job on that particular day. Most city carriers work till at least 5pm everyday.
Rural carriers have no such sop. They have full freedom to run their route the way they feel is most productive. They talk and carry on all morning without fear of being chastised by management. They make the same amount of $$ as city carriers except they only work about 5 hours a day. Most are on the way home at 1pm everyday...well except for saturday. Ya see, they are off on saturdays. Regular rurals are home with their families on saturday while their subs carry their routes. Why the NALC doesn't adopt this system I'll never understand. EVERY rural carrier I know scoffed at the notion of joining the NALC when the opportunity arose. They see how city carriers are treated and want no part of it!
There are countless #'s of city union studs that are out of touch with reality. Postal management has the city carriers by the short hairs because of the ingnorance of the NALC.
"My people are destroyed because they lack knowledge"-The Prophet Isaiah
As a city carrier of 7 years...that sounds like a great idea...as long as it gets managment off of my back and i don't have to use my own vehicle. I'm all for it. I know guys who skip lunches...and do all sorts of things to make it back in "good" time because they are intimidated by managment. Then management uses these carriers times against other carriers stating that so and so was back at such and such time why are you an hour later than them? Not all routes are equal..as many, especially the ones with the seniority claim they are...and also some forgo lunches and breaks because of the atmosphere of fear and intimidation created my supervisors who serve money not people. I say we try a new plan...i'd rather work till 5pm everyday with the same pay...if management never talks to me again...and my job is secure...because in this current environment there is so much insecurity. Plus with a new system maybe the postal service won't need 5 supervisors to stare at 26 workers for 3 hours.
"We have met the enemy and he is us" POGO
200 Stops?? Give me a break. Our 3 hr a day Aux route has 400 boxes. ABout what I had in 1989 when I was a 42H route. Now 700 deliveries, 36 miles and more mail than will fit in the truck most days. That's after multiple cuts/territory shifts.
While the rural evaluation system may be working in parts of the country, on populated, DPS, heavy traffic routes, there is just about no way to make evaluation... THere are no longer scores of people signing up to "take my job".
I hope the carriers that still have good routes appreciate them.
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