Word: postally
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Once a backwater of the Federal Government, the Post Office Department was reorganized in 1970 as a 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...
...nightmare of the new automation is the optical character reader, which shoots out 30,000 pieces of mail an hour and shows no mercy. A postal clerk has about a second to read an address and punch in the first three digits of the ZIP code, which is then translated into a bar-code symbol for sorting mail by carrier route. With no way to slow down the machine, the clerk is like Lucille Ball in her comic routine at a candy factory. One moment, Lucy is standing at the conveyor belt blithely wrapping individual candies; the next...
Substitute Social Security checks and Christmas cards for fudge caramels, imagine 150,000 annual grievance proceedings and 69,000 disciplinary actions instead of firing, and a picture of the modernized Postal Service emerges. Officials downplay the problems but admit that the new pace is hard on older clerks accustomed to stuffing mail into pigeonholes. Yet the old-fashioned postalworker represented by two powerful unions is going to have to adjust. "We've got to capture the savings dollar-for-dollar that these machines represent, or we can kiss the Postal Service as we know it goodbye," says Robert Setrakian, chairman...
Whether or not man and machine adapt, the public should be ready to blow a farewell kiss to the 25 cents stamp. Costs are rising 112 times as fast as inflation, and the Postal Service is expected to lose $1.6 billion this fiscal year. The 30 cents stamp may be here...
...While postal officials are not likely to show up on The Oprah Winfrey Show anytime soon as examples of modern touchy-feely management, they are experimenting with new programs, including "Employee Involvement" and "Quality of Worklife Processes," to give workers more autonomy on the shop floor. In San Diego about 20 supervisors are taking Dale Carnegie courses; two are being individually treated by psychologists to reduce their "irritability factor...