Mail processing reduced its overall craft complement by more than 7,000 in 2022, by about 8,000 in 2023, and by more than 4,000 in 2024, mostly among pre-career employees. Image: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe Postal Service fell short of its goals for reducing work hours at its processing facilities over 2022-2024, an inspector general audit has found, citing reasons including unexpected rises and falls in package volume and overall decreased productivity at those facilities—in some cases related to realignments in that time under the Delivering for America program.
The USPS had planned a reduction of 28 million hours in that period among its more than 100,000 employees working at more than 300 facilities, but achieved only a 17.3-million-hour reduction, “which resulted in at least $174.8 million in additional cost” compared with what was budgeted.
During 2022, all 13 processing divisions exceeded their total workhours plan, in part due to an unexpected increase in volume under a government sponsored program to ship COVID-19 test kits to homes. All divisions were under plan for 2023 but in 2024, nine exceeded their plan.
Productivity, as measured by the number of workhours it takes to process the given mail volume, declined by 2 and 3 percent, respectively, in 2022 and 2023 and increased slightly by about 1 percent during 2024. However, “some mail processing facilities still saw declines in productivity during that year.”
Said the report, “Plant managers indicated operational changes can cause declines in productivity. For instance, where operations are transferred from one facility to another, the plant that gains the operation will be less productive until plant managers can work through the job bidding process to right size the complement to match the new workload.
“Conversely, at facilities losing operations, productivity will decline until personnel assigned to deactivated operations are reassigned to ongoing operations. Additionally, employee performance and training issues contributed to declines in productivity. Plant managers stated that supervisors and employees were not always engaged and needed additional on the job training to conduct mail processing operations according to established procedures,” it said.
Other findings included that mail processing reduced its overall craft complement by more than 7,000 in 2022, by about 8,000 in 2023, and by more than 4,000 in 2024, mostly among pre-career employees; the need for peak season temporary employees declined from 17,000 to 5,000 over 2022-2024; and overtime hours decreased from 11.8 percent of total mail processing workhours in mail processing facilities to 6.7 percent over the period.
Postal management generally agreed with recommendations to evaluate: practices contributing to the achievement of the mail processing workhour plan; staffing and scheduling at mail processing facilities with declining productivity; and training needs of employees at those facilities.
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