FOR A HAZARDOUS JOB, TRY THE POST OFFICE
Lazare, Dan
For a hazardous job, try the post office 'Management killed our brother' Dan Lazare The outskirts of Jersey City give way to one of the grimiest industrial landscapes in the country—miles of...
...Postal workers do have collective bargaining, but, like other Federal employes, they don't have the right to strike...
...Management talks about its interests in improving safety but has not taken the necessary steps to demonstrate its commitment...
...Just how dangerous the Bulk can be became clear in December 1979, when Michael McDermott, a twenty-five-year-old mail handler, lost his life loading mail sacks into the back of a truck...
...Confirmation of that verdict comes rather unexpectedly from the postal management...
...Safety has not been made equal to other business considerations...
...And New York Bulk is one of the most dangerous of the twenty-one...
...The Postal Service's own safety statistics show that those kinds of conditions are far from isolated...
...For the moment, though, New York must take second place to the very worst plant, the Washington Bulk Mail Center in Largo, Maryland, where an astounding 23.1 per cent of the work force suffered serious injuries in 1979...
...For a hazardous job, try the post office 'Management killed our brother' Dan Lazare The outskirts of Jersey City give way to one of the grimiest industrial landscapes in the country—miles of dirty marshland littered with junkyards, machine shops, warehouses, and a huge, featureless, windowless, steel-blue monolith known as the New York Bulk and Foreign Mail Center...
...But not in the Postal Service, where safety defects go uncorrected for years...
...It usually has to be imposed from without...
...Last year, 5.5 per cent of the nation's postal work force suffered on-the-job accidents serious enough to warrant missing a day or more of work—a high rate for an operation that describes itself as mainly "light industrial...
...How do such conditions persist...
...Dan Lazare is a reporter for the Record in Hackensack, New Jersey...
...The new Postal Service was to be lean, efficient, depoliticized, and as close to a private business as the Federal Government could get...
...The Du Pont team toured a dozen large postal facilities (but not New York Bulk) and found a number of safety violations, including defective equipment which had been red-tagged "do not operate" but was in operation nonetheless...
...The Postal Service's dilatory strategy, which is being carried out through a series of appeals to the National Labor Relations Board, is engineered by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the law firm of William French Smith, President Reagan's Attorney General...
...The final missing external control has to do with the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act, the legislation that changed the name of the U.S...
...Good intentions have been thwarted by the demands of productivity...
...Meanwhile, at the Postal Service's invitation, OSHA has begun a massive program of "wall-to-wall" inspections of all bulk mail centers...
...Dinkins declared the machines out of order and told his crew to stay off them...
...A few days later, postal authorities invited the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to inspect the accident site, even though the post office, like all Federal agencies, lies outside the OSHAs jurisdiction...
...Says Lloyd Johnson, chief of staff for Representative Clay's Subcommittee on Postal Personnel and Modernization, "There's no other way to explain it...
...For postal workers, the shortcomings of the Reorganization Act are now clear...
...Often, he said, the only response to a safety complaint is that "the foreman comes up to you and says, 'You're a troublemaker...
...The report's language about productivity and safety essentially accused the Postal Service of that venerable old sin of industrial employers^—sacrificing the health and safety of its workforce in its push for higher profits...
...One member of the OSHA inspection team described New York Bulk as "a disaster area," poorly maintained and abounding in safety violations...
...One of the controls is strong unions...
...Workers, union officials, and Congressional investigators say the Postal Service "just doesn't care...
...OSHA's investigation turned up no fewer than twelve "serious" safety violations on the conveyor belt in question, including three missing safety devices considered especially important since any one of them might have prevented McDermott's death...
...And in Jersey City, where about 150 postal employes were fired in 1978 for participating in a wildcat strike, workers are painfully aware of their lack of economic leverage...
...We'll find a way to get rid of you.' " The American Postal Workers and three other unions are now negotiating with the Postal Service—or rather attempting to negotiate, since postal management has delayed the start of bargaining for months, despite a July 20 contract deadline...
...Last year management commissioned a special industrial safety team from E.I...
...The conveyor belt defects remained uncorrected until after McDermott's death...
...Still, the Postal Service's authoritarian ways are dying hard...
...The problem is institutional indifference on the part of the Postal Service...
...Safety in the post office, Clay told an audience that included McDermott's widow and about 150 of his fellow workers, is "a national disgrace...
...The Bulk, as its workers call it, covers three-quarters of a square mile and is easily the largest postal facility in the nation...
...The Bulk, opened in 1974, aims to do it more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently—and to a certain extent it does—but at the cost of one of the worst safety records of any industrial installation in America...
...The board is dominated by big business types, with Myron A. Wright, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Exxon, as its head...
...About 100 workers walked off the job, and some hoisted a bedsheet over a plant gate with the inscription, "Management killed our brother...
...Post Office to the Postal Service, removed the postmaster general from the President's cabinet, and set the service on its way to becoming a self-supporting quasi-corporation...
...Last year, 10.4 per cent of the 17,000 workers in the bulk mail system suffered serious on-the-job injuries, a slight drop from the 1979 rate of 13.1 per cent...
...By comparison, the rate for the construction industry, according to the most recent Federal statistics available, was 6.8 per cent, while for the auto industry it was 5.5 per cent, the same rate as the Postal Service's...
...The Senate is currently considering legislation, which passed the House last year, to give the agency the right to conduct surprise inspections of postal facilities and to levy fines against the service for persistent violations of Federal safety standards...
...In August 1979, for example, Clyde Dinkins, a foreman in Jersey City, shut down his section because his repeated complaints about safety violations on extendable conveyor belts—the same kinds of defects that were to cause McDermott's death—had been ignored...
...The Du Pont report, subsequently leaked to the press, was devastating: "Safety in the United States Postal Service is not managed now," it stated...
...Michael McDermott, who died ten days before Christmas, was a victim of one such overload...
...Control is in the hands of an eleven-member board of governors nominated by the President and confirmed by the.Senate...
...The situation is considerably worse, however, for the twenty-one highly automated bulk mail centers around the country, of which New York Bulk is one...
...The new post office is relatively insulated from Congress and is no longer subject to an annual budget review and appropriation...
...it can shield the complaining workers from retribution from above, and it can see to it that such complaints are acted upon promptly...
...The incident touched off a furor in the plant...
...The comparable figure for underground bituminous coal miners, according to the U.S...
...After ten years of the new, stripped-down Postal Service, many workers long for the old U.S...
...Mandatory overtime is the rule at such times, bringing a decline in worker alertness...
...The plant is especially prone to trouble, he said, during a surge in mail volume, such as the pre-Christmas rush...
...There are indications that safety conditions have begun to improve...
...Before 1970, the post office may have been patronage-ridden and inefficient, but at least it was responsive to Congressional prodding— and, from the point of view of the people who sort and deliver the mail, more open and less monolithic...
...Inside, an intricate circulatory system of conveyor belts and pilotless trams starts at ground level, rises to the ceiling, twists and turns, and descends finally to the floor...
...Du Pont de Nemours, which has one of the lowest accident rates in the American industry, to evalute its own safety program...
...The serious accident rate for all postal workers dropped from 6.9 per cent in 1979 to 5.5 per cent last year, while for bulk mail workers, it decreasedjrom 15.3 to 10.4 per cent over the same period...
...Basil Whiting, OSHA's second in command, testified that machinery in the plant is poorly maintained and that the installation was processing more mail than it could safely handle...
...The purpose of the maze is simply to take the mail in, sort it, and then send it on its way...
...Post Office...
...Safety issues are a major portion of the unions' bargaining program...
...The absence of regular surveillance by OSHA is another factor contributing to post office work hazards...
...Last year, 18.9 per cent of its workers suffered serious injuries, compared to 21.3 per cent the year before...
...To be sure, concern for worker safety is not the first priority of most employers...
...OSHA's findings confirmed the grim verdict of Representative William L. Clay, the Missouri Democrat who conducted two days of stormy hearings in Jersey City three days after the mishap...
...When the system becomes overloaded, jam-ups occur and workers are sometimes hurt by mail sacks tumbling out of overhead conveyors...
...For his concern, the foreman, who had previously received a special commendation for productivity, was rewarded with a pay cut and demotion to the rank of clerk...
...Mine Safety and Health Administration, is 12.5 per cent...
...When it comes to safety, a strong, responsive union can protect the worker who refuses to operate a machine that seems unsafe...
...The problem of OSHA's lack of jurisdiction may soon be corrected...
...Later, another member of the OSHA inspection team said privately that if his agency had had jurisdiction, it would have had an almost perfect case for criminal prosecution, since there was little question that the death was due to intentional safety violations by management...
...When you go to work at the bulk center, you work for an employer whose main method of labor relations is repression," testified Ron King, a veteran of New York Bulk, at Clay's hearings...
...In the case of the post office, however, several vital outside controls are missing...
...While his workmates were at lunch, McDermott became entangled in a high-powered conveyor belt and was dragged into the machinery...
...OSHA officials testified at Clay's hearings that the devices had evidently been removed or rewired by management to ensure that production would never be unnecessarily halted...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
