Word: hours
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pity the poor postalworker, however hard that may be for the millions who have stood in line for half an hour staring at the wanted flyers, only to have a gum-snapping clerk reject their package because it fails to comply with official wrapping regulations ("No string; paper tape only. Next!"). Attracted to their positions by good pay, generous benefits, job security and a predictable, not to say slow, pace, today's postalworkers are being dragged | against their will into the 21st century by the anthem of the Age of Fax: get a move...
...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 shifts...
...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 his supervisor in the face, killing him, and wounded three other people. In Massachusetts in June 1988, a clerk killed a co-worker in the parking lot and later committed suicide. A postalworker in Edmund, Okla., went on the third...
...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 wants...
...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...