USPS Contract Talks Collapse
After months of dickering, the United States Postal Service threw in the towel Friday and said that further contract negotiations with two of its union were futile. Collective bargaining had reached an “impasse.”
Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), acted surprised, issuing a statement saying, “I am disappointed by the Postal Service’s decision. We have been making steady progress in negotiations, right up through this afternoon. Our negotiations have been innovative, professional and productive and have been conducted at the highest level.” Obviously the USPS has an entirely different perception of where things are.
The NALC is the larger of the two unions, representing 196,000 employees who deliver mail primarily in urban areas.
The separate talks between the USPS, the NALC and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union AFL-CIO (NPMHU), which represents 46,000 workers who work in mail processing plants and post offices, have been running on the fumes of two extensions since November 20, when the contracts expired. The last deadline was midnight Friday and the unions couldn’t wheedle another extension out of the post.
It is unclear why exactly the talks broke down but the unions are opposed to pretty much all of the post’s cost-cutting initiatives, which include cutting deeply into the workforce responsible for 80% of its overhead, closing unprofitable facilities, stopping Saturday and overnight deliveries and dropping out of its current healthcare plan in search of a cheaper one.
Workers represented by NALC got more than $15.7 billion in wages and benefits last year; the NPMHU folks got $3.5 billion. The USPS expects to lose $14 billion this year and may not be able to pay its bills by summer. It estimates that it needs to cut costs by $20 billion by 2015 to return to something resembling profitability.
A group of 15 senators, nervous in an election year, got the USPS to agree to delay closing any more facilities until May holding out the crumb of some unlikely kind of legislative fix.
With their talks in collapse, the USPS and the unions now have to agree about what to do next.
Rolando said, “Now that the formal litigation process has begun, we will pursue a negotiated agreement through mediation and prepare to vigorously defend our members in Interest Arbitration, if it reaches that step.”
He said the matter would automatically be sent to mediation under the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. And if no agreement is reached in 60 days of mediation, the issues will be submitted for final and binding resolution before a so-called Interest Arbitration panel that must legally consider all the evidence presented by the parties. However, it seems they could skip mediation and go directly to arbitration, which is unrealistically allowed to ignore the post’s parlous financial condition.
Meanwhile, the existing contracts will maintain. Being deemed an essential service by Congress postal workers can’t strike.
The USPS is already in arbitration with the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. A fourth union, the American Postal Workers Union, ratified a new contract last year that will run until May 2015. It calls for pay raises during the term of the contract.
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