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Rural Carrier State Convention highlights

Skags///Freeloaders///Shame on you for helping rural carriers online/// you are the problem/// if you don’t go to meetings, you don’t deserve the information///

Can anyone guess what all the words and phrases above have in common?  They were words and statements made by some of our National officers at state conventions across the country.

Aside from the fact that these people work for us, I am astounded that they stand up and disparage a large amount of their dues paying members in front of an audience. I continue to be blown away by these people that continue to live in the past.  They say that online rural carriers helping each other is the reason carriers don’t join the union.  So, we are the problem in their eyes.

I wonder if they will ever change their stance. In this age, there is no way they can stop the gathering and discussions of rural carriers online. It is the nature of the beast. When and if they ever realize this, they will see their membership skyrocket.

Times have changed and they either need to change with the times, or continue to bury their heads in the sand and lose members. It’s not hard to figure out.. You go where the members/potential members are and you engage them and show them why they should join.

This is a different time we live in than the days of when everyone knew the value of a union and joined without question. Today you have to show them why they should spend their hard earned money..

As I said earlier, it is the nature of the beast. Most of us that are members already know the value of the union, but the new generation has not grown up with unions being widely accepted by the people. You have to adapt to your potential members and this is the main thing the NRLCA fails to do. Rural carriers are online and if you want to reach them, you have to go where they are. Plain and simple..

So now on to the little tidbits of info that have trickled out from State Conventions across the country. A huge thanks to those of you that once again shared information with us poor undeserving rural carriers 😉

Engineer Study News

  1. Engineers did not give us the report in layman’s terminology so it is not easy to understand.
  2. President Dwyer said the report they submitted was in “industrial engineer ” speak and she asked for the “book of dummies ” of the report
  3. There is also the issue of mapping out 50,000+ routes
  4. There are a lot of things to negotiate with the PO.
  5. The PO603 will probably have to be rewritten
  6. There will no longer be L routes with the new system
  7. There will be time given for stop signs, and lights, walk distance and drive distance up long drive ways
  8. They will also be using info that must now be provided by the mailers as to how many flats are in presort bundles in place of counting them. It appears anything run into flat tubs will now be counted as a flat, and used in place of actual counts.
  9.  They believe the standard for a parcel that goes into the mailbox will not be too much less than the 30 seconds we get now
  10. Depending on walk distance and driveway time there could be parcels that net over 5 minutes.
  11.  The engineers told the USPS that drive distance is paid at a lower rate than walk distance under the new system, if they want to pay us to walk, it will cost them.
  12.  Our 12 minutes a mile comes out to 30 miles an hour all day, our actual time is so much slower.
  13.  Also their 170 + standards for what we do and driving was not formatted in a mail count type set up so no way to take March numbers and plug into new standards.
  14.  The engineers are in the process of plugging the new standards, of which there are around 180, into the routes that have been mapped. That way national will have an idea of how the study will affect us. Once they receive that information, it will be put out on the website, hopefully by the middle of July. But those 1700 are the only ones that have been mapped. The other 50,000+ will have to be done. And both sides will have to decide on how to map the routes in the simplest way and how to implement the standards.

Non Engineer Study News

  1. The USPS will be using the pings from the scanner to track, excessive speed and acceleration as well as left turns and backing. It supposedly will not be used to punish carriers (Yea right)
  2.   92% of routes counted in this last count – 17,000 came back overburdened
  3.  When volume dropped the postal service sold their excess equipment. Now that it is back up and we need the equipment there is none to be had, so
    2 & 1 casing maybe coming; this is only going to work in offices with enough regular and auxiliary routes in that zip. Ex: Regular carrier comes in 30 minutes early, starts casing, pulls down and leaves. Aux carrier then reports takes off the flip labels and does cases her route and pulls down. She then puts the regular carriers labels back up.
  4.  With mail count they discovered:* First class mail was up *Flats were up *Parcels were substantially up
  5.  But 90% of union members are in offices with less than 30 routes. And the smaller the office the higher percentage of membership overall.

Route Stats

Down 940 H routes
Down 1915 J routes
Up 3,125 K routes
Down 268 Aux Routes
Up 269 Regular routes
Up 1,278 L routes
1,277 non L went L

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