Another Union Forces Employer to Pay Workers for Not Working

We've already seen something like this in the auto industry, and now we see it with postal workers:

The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.

It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.

Mail volume is down 12.6 percent compared with last year, and many postal supervisors simply don’t have enough work to keep all employees busy. But a thicket of union rules prevents managers from laying off excess employees; a recent agreement with the unions, in fact, temporarily prevents the Postal Service from even reassigning them to other facilities that could use them.

So they sit — some for a few hours, others for entire shifts. Postal union officials estimate some 15,000 employees have spent time on standby this year.

They spend their days holed up in rooms — conference rooms, break rooms, occasionally 12-foot-by-8-foot storage closets — that the Postal Service dubs “resource rooms.” Postal employees use more colorful names, like “holding pens” and “blue rooms.”

“It’s just a small, empty room. … It’s awful,” said one mail processing clerk who has spent four weeks on standby time this summer. “Most of us bring books, word puzzles. Sometimes we just sleep.”

Employees interviewed said they hate the practice, which relegates them to hours of boredom each day. Postal managers don’t like it, either — but they say declining mail volume makes it necessary.

“Volume has dropped, we don’t get the same mail receipts we used to get, and our overtime is already pretty much nil,” said Edward Jackson, the plant manager at the mail processing facility in Washington, D.C. “But we still have to keep them in a pay status. So we put them in the standby rooms.”

Once again union rules, negotiated when things were much better, are hamstringing employers who desperately need to cut costs. And, of course, you probably won't hear the union chiefs volunteering to renegotiate a deal for what is becoming a dying industry. Thanks to email and package services like UPS and FedEx, not to mention online bill paying, there are fewer reasons every day for people to use the postal service.