USPS has all the waste that comes with being considered a govt organization, but somehow the efficiency and accuracy that rivals private/public competitors. On average we have 7 managers for every 1 craft employee. Yet accountability is at an all time low across the board. Despite the bloat of the managerial class there is somehow "less work to be done" and we all need to be faster, and in the rural carrier case they are searching for any and every reason to pay us less.
If there is less craft work to be done and accountability is at an all time low then why are we not downsizing the managerial employees?
Companies across the USA used data from COVID to find out just how far they could push the "essential workers" across the country both in terms of how much work and how few employees they can squeeze to do said work. Look at just how few employees you see at retail locations these days. How many stores are open 24 hours anymore and if they are, how many employees are actually there?
I think Amazon was a similar story at USPS for the rural craft.
Day after day we were casing, organizing, loading, maintaining, and delivering 70+ hour routes. Either you got faster, accepted the fact you were going to be at work 10+ hours every day, or you quit/retired (Cheaper than a buyout for sure). It was truly sink or swim, these peak seasons were a baptism by fire. I don't think it was a coincidence that instead of increasing the pay scale above a 48k or granting additional days off under an additional letter scale the only recourse was to cut the routes down. This abuse went on for years at offices and when cuts finally happened, Amazon decided it needed to start using a branded group of contractors do deliver its packages.
So now we have routes that are about 60% the size of what was being delivered, but the carriers now have an outstanding skill-set and affinity they didn't have before. Most people don't even remember what it actually was like to deliver a true 43k. From what I've seen, if you were delivering a 12-13 hour route in 8 or 9 hours you are now delivering an 8 hour route in 5-6 hours when applying that same skill level.
The same managers that saw us go over evaluation every single day and barely get by now see many of us getting done under 8 hours. They didn't live through the paychecks that never changed even though the job was more and more physically demanding. The reality is that without all the chaos of excessive work hours and packages they are the ones that now have no work to do. When things aren't on fire, you don't need 5 people standing around to put out fires. Naturally, all that extra time has them looking for a fire to put out that isn't there. Their new fight is that rural carriers are now cheating the PO because they used to squeeze more work out of us for less.
Amazon "left" and many are now content or have adjusted to the volume and the size of their routes. So now they want to lie about the size of our routes and make changes to agreements after the fact. The latest I've heard is they are going to use the fact that many of us get done early in our evaluations against us. No one can say how for sure yet, but I've heard musings of adjusting the standard of the route to match the carriers speed or force us to fill in time on other routes "for free" until we match the worked time our eval calls for. And if you were getting done early they would issue discipline against you for milking time using the routes historical time data against you. The reality is that management knows their positions and jobs are where all the current waste is and are looking for any way to take that money out of our pockets so they can keep their jobs that allow them to sit on their phone and in zoom calls all day because it beats doing real work.
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and we don't get anywhere near as much amazon as we used to and the routes are freshly cut. This is not a job where we are easily replaced especially when new highers are looking for schedule stability.
