Bid Posting November 9-18, 2023Branch News November 25, 2023
Fellow Members- I hope that you had a good Thanksgiving and that you are ready for the upcoming holiday season and all of the fun that it entails at home and for the peak here at work. With the holidays comes stress and anxiety though, so please always be mindful of your fellow employees. Nobody knows what anyone else has going on, so always be kind. Job bids for the SIPS and other areas were posted and awarded. Only one of the 39 jobs went residual and that will be assigned to an unassigned regular; we will then only have seven (7) UAR’s left. Next year we will be on automated bids and the first selection of jobs is slated to be posted on January 2nd. As of now, my calculations have there being twenty-two (22) jobs in that posting. Volunteer sign-ups are in the MDO office for Christmas and New Year weekends. The new turnstiles are in; no more piggy-backing in. Let’s hope everyone’s badge is working. Many other facilities around our Local have these, and management loves to track who is coming in and out of them…just fair warning. The “Initial Findings of the Mail Processing Facility Review” were released on 11/21/23 (see to the right of this posting). The propaganda states a few things of interest. The first item is that there would be no career layoffs as a result of their initiative. The second item, though, is that there is an estimated decrease of 19 craft and 4 management positions. The paper does not specify to what crafts or in what ratios those decreases would be applied; I’ll say more about that when I have more to say. They then offer up some projected savings numbers, which I can’t buy into since you are now going to be transporting all of that mail to Harrisburg to have it run and then transported back here. I get that we had too many half full trips running out of the building, but consolidate them to save your money instead of sacrificing the service standards to the customer!! Finally in the “Local Customer Considerations” section it states that a local postmark will still be available, which is great that they will stamp it here basically a day before it gets to Harrisburg to be processed but I’d rather my mail get stamped, sorted, and delivered right out of here in less hours than the travel time alone. Finally, in the biggest lie on the sheet, it states, “Delivery times of mail to residences and businesses should not change because of the MPFR”. I guess since they put the operative word “should” in there, that opens the door to what is a foregone and inevitable outcome that they WILL change. You can’t expect that a letter that currently leaves Bethlehem addressed to Bethlehem on Monday and gets cancelled, processed and returned to Bethlehem from the Lehigh Valley by at latest Wednesday morning for delivery will still get to its destination in the same window. That same Bethlehem-bound letter from Bethlehem now has to come to the Lehigh Valley, get on a truck to Harrisburg, wait to be unloaded, get processed, wait to get back on a truck to the Lehigh Valley, get unloaded here and cross-docked to a truck bound for Bethlehem, get unloaded at Bethlehem, and then finally get in the carrier’s truck for delivery. You’d be better off walking it to the destination. Upper management bean counters are just trying to fudge up nonsense numbers and make unsubstantiated claims and promises to support their desire to push through the unproven, misguided, and not-thought-out plans of PMG DeJoy’s “Taking the Service out of U.S. Postal Service Plan”. The next procedural step of this charade is the Public Input Meeting. The big BS public input meeting is this Thursday, 11/30, at 3PM at the Movie Tavern Trexlertown…6150 Hamilton Blvd…Allentown, PA 18106. As I said in the last rant, these are usually nothing more than a dog and pony show that management just views as an inconvenient formality towards attaining their goal. We will see how this one goes but, according to President Gibson, the one for the Trenton facility was a complete sham and “an unfunny joke”. Please feel free to attend and voice your thoughts, but do not call out to do so (that would be dumb…management will be there). They schedule these as far away from the Plant as possible and at an inconvenient time for the specific reason of lowering the attendance. I will be attending and I will report out to all of those attending the Union Meeting on 12/5. Outgoing parcels are back! (For the time being). In case you haven’t noticed, we are once again running outgoing parcels on the APPS machine. This was initially only going to be for a day, then a week, but now it looks like it may be for at least peak season. This is just evidence that these other facilities cannot handle the volume that they are being tasked with and that the upper management just throws crap at walls to see what sticks. They also clearly haven’t done the extensive research or planning needed to try making all of these moves. Maybe those facilities can handle some of the work when the volume is low and during the historically slow periods, but when business ramps up, it’s just not working. No matter what the future may hold for our Plant, we need to continue to show up for work and to diligently do our jobs in spite of upper management and as service to our customers…and just out of simple pride in personal performance. Speaking of showing up for work, management is issuing discipline for attendance related violations at an all-time high. As I have stated for ten years, attendance is black-and-white and leaves no gray area and not a lot of wiggle room; you are either here or you are not. You have been warned repeatedly about impending crackdowns and now here they come. The pandemic has subsided and the USPS is looking to cut what they deem deadweight. The easiest way to keep your job is to be at your job. If you receive discipline letters, be sure to bring them to a Union rep within 10 days of receipt. Be sure to heed your Union rep’s advice too when they start leveling with you about the gravity of your particular situation. Attendance discipline may be easy for management to prove, but it’s even easier for you to prevent. The road ahead appears to be rocky, hold on for the ride and… Stay United, Stay Strong- Sean Lehigh Valley-Scranton 2022 Picnic
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Branch President Sean Craig Your Union RepresentativesLocal Memorandum of UnderstandingUpdated 2023
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