Postal workers are angry over the planned payment of productivity incentives to senior managers.
Postal message boards filled this week with negative comments about what the USPS calls “additional pay incentives” to its senior management staff. The comments have ranged from accusations of managers running the USPS in to the ground to get the extra money “on the backs of craft employees” (letter carriers) to calls for postal workers to complain to their Congressmen about it.
Meanwhile, Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-NC), has introduced a resolution to prohibit the U.S. Postal Service from paying the “productivity bonuses.”
The resolution, H.Res. 144, which Jones introduced on May 17, came to light as the USPS began defending its Economic Value Added -Pay for Performance program.
The program, which was launched in 1996 by then Postmaster General Marvin T. Runyon. It rewards senior managers meeting productivity goals with extra income. It is before the House Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) who has yet schedule a hearing on it.
This year, as DIRECT Newsline reported on June 13, senior managers meeting USPS productivity goals could receive as much as 25% of their salary at the end of this year, a year in which the USPS is projecting $1 billion deficit.
An online poll taken by Federal Times, found that 90.4% of the 1,233 respondents were against the payouts while only 9.6% were in favor.
Jones’ non-binding resolution expressing the “sense of Congress” urges the postal service not to pay “bonuses” to senior managers “in any year in which the USPS anticipates that it will operate at a deficit or in which a general increase in postal rates has been requested, gone into effect, or is likely to become effective.”
In a letter seeking the support of fellow members of Congress, Jones said that until the USPS “is able to get its costs under control [it] should not be paying management bonuses” and that they “should not be awarded in years when the postal service is raising prices.”
Postal officials, responding through spokesman Gregg Frye, defended the program saying that the extra pay is not a bonus but “a portion of management pays that are at risk. Payments are not capricious or based on anyone’s evaluation, but are based entirely on performance.”
Postal managers, who achieve their goals, “earn their income” he said noting that last year, the USPS, which has more than 800,000 employees may payments averaging $2,600 to 84,000 supervisory employees.
Of that number, he said, 39,000 were frontline supervisors 26,000 were postmasters; 11,000 were plant managers, station managers, and district staff. Another 7,000 were headquarters employees and less than 1,000 other executives.
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