Word: letters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...