Word: carrier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...Enough has happened that it warrants a look," says Congressman Bates. The San Diego hearing documented an unduly harsh, arbitrary management style. Witnesses told of the police being summoned to a San Diego suburb to settle one of the nearly daily disputes over the load in each carrier's bag. A study showed that 45% of the 837 carrier routes in San Diego require more than an eight-hour shift to complete. Taking time off for surgery or unapproved nose blowing is a punishable act. "There's a rule for everything," testified a San Diego shop steward. "If a supervisor...
...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 she is stuffing unwrapped chocolates under her hat, down her dress...
Trying to deliver 160 billion pieces of mail may be driving the carrier crazy. Bush's fence-mending mission to China unleashes a storm of criticism. -- AIDS protesters target the Roman Catholic Church...