| arbitration_award.pdf |
SUMMARY OF HIGHLIGHTS OF
2010-2015 NATIONAL AGREEMENT
The following is a summary of highlights of the new National Agreement between the United States Postal Service and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association resulting from the July 3, 2012 Interest Arbitration Award. The Award and the separate opinion and dissent of Interest Arbitration Board Member Joey C. Johnson are available in their entirety on the NRLCA’s website.
Term
• The term of the new Agreement is November 21, 2010 through May 20, 2015
Salaries and COLA
• General Wage Increases Totaling 3.5%:
November 17, 2012: 1.0% increase (COLA deferred to 2013)
November 16, 2013: 1.5% increase plus COLA
November 15, 2014: 1.0% increase plus COLA
• New wage schedule for new regular carriers hired after November 20, 2010
• New hourly rate for RCAs hired on or after August 11, 2012. These RCAs will receive a 7.0% general wage increase over the term of the Agreement, but no COLA.
• The Step progression for those career rural carriers hired on or after November 21, 2010 will be 52 weeks for each Step between Steps 1-12 of the new Rural Carrier Evaluated Schedule
• COLA for RCAs/RCRs on the rolls prior to August 11, 2012 will be rolled into hourly rates during the first full pay period of August 2015
Health Benefits
• Adjusted USPS Health Benefits Contribution
2012: 81%
2013: 79%
2014: 78%
2015: 77%
2016: 76%
(Employees hired on or after the effective date of this agreement will start at 77% upon conversion to regular)
• MOU to consider separate Postal Service health benefits plan in future, contingent on Congressional action or agreement of other Postal unions
Mail Counts
-2013: 18-day count (February 9 – March 2)
-2014: 12-day count (February 22 – March 7)
-2015: 18-day count (February 7 – February 28)
-2016: 12-day count (March 12 – March 25) (unless parties agree otherwise)
• All routes will be counted unless the regular carrier and management agree in writing not to count
• National mail counts will be effective at the beginning of the fourth full pay period following the count
Equipment Maintenance Allowance
-2013: increase EMA base rate by 0.5¢ (46.5¢ per mile)
-2014: increase EMA base rate by 0.5¢ (47¢ per mile)
High Option Election
• A regular carrier must have a minimum of ten years of service from his/her retirement computation date to be eligible to elect the high option
Standards
• DPS Letter standard for LLV routes: 43 pieces per minute
• Prepaid Parcels Accepted: 90 seconds per event and 9 seconds per parcel
• Dismount Distance (Walking Speed) standard: 0.00429 minutes per foot (2.647 miles per hour)
• Industrial engineering study of time standards, to be completed and implemented by May 20, 2015
• Moratorium on Article 34 time standard changes, except for new work functions
Route Conversions
• Auxiliary routes will be converted to regular routes within 30 days of increasing to 42 weekly standard hours. If increase is a result of a mail count, then the conversion will be effective with the mail count.
• Regular rural routes may be converted to auxiliary status if they decrease to less than 35 weekly standard hours
Route Consolidations
• Encumbered regular routes may be consolidated and the excessing and/or reassignment provisions of Article 12 will be applied when the route evaluation decreases to less than 37 weekly standard hours
Thank You,
Joey C. Johnson
Director of Labor Relations, NRLCA
1630 Duke Street
Alexandria, VA 22314-3467
(703) 684-5545
(703) 684-3880 Fax
SEPARATE OPINION AND DISSENT
OF BOARD MEMBER JOEY C. JOHNSON
For the most part, the NRLCA faired well under the Board’s Award. With two important exceptions Discussed below, I have concurred with that Award. It is true, of course, that we would have preferred to have received a better economic package and given back less in health care. We most definitely are not pleased with the new lower wage rates for newly hired RCAs and their subsequent advancement to regular carrier. To be sure, the Postal Service argued forcefully for much greater concessions from our craft. Likewise, of course, we strenuously argued for improved wages and benefits. However, given the present economic condition of the Postal Service, and, most particularly, the May 2011 APWU agreement, the economic package in the Award was to be expected. Realistically, we were not likely to do better than the APWU. That agreement provided precedent that would have been very difficult to ignore, as Chairman Clarke has emphasized. The encouraging thing is that, with two exceptions, we did not do worse than the APWU.
The first and most important exception concerns the awarding to the Postal Service of changes to the Pre-Paid Parcels Collected standard and to the DPS Letters standard with respect to LLV routes. Before
detailing my objections, however, I do want to acknowledge that we did make significant advances overall with respect to the Evaluated System and its time standards. We now have on record the undisputed view that the Evaluated System is an incentive system – that rural carriers have an incentive to work harder and smarter in order to go home early and thus earn paid time off. The Postal Service
ultimately conceded that this is so, and Arbitrator Clarke declared such based on an abundance of record evidence (and despite National Arbitrator Bloch’s unsolicited opinion to the contrary in the DPS Flats ase).
Most importantly, the Postal Service and the NRLCA have agreed that now is the time to have all of the time standards in the Evaluated System studied by professional industrial engineers and have those standards set scientifically in accordance with sound industrial engineering principles. None of the existing standards have been established in this manner. Indeed, about half of them were put into place almost 50 to 60 years ago, and we do not know the basis for any of them. Both parties recognize that there are some standards that provide too much time and some that provide too little time (the route
length allowance, or driving speed, for example). This increasingly results in more and more “winners” and “losers” among rural routes. Some of the country’s best industrial engineers were retained by the NRLCA and testified on our behalf. Unanimously, they testified that in order to fix the system and
prevent continual attempts by the Postal Service to “cherry pick” the “loose” standards and thus tighten the incentive, that all of the standards should be engineered, to insure that all of them are individually accurate. Postal Service expert industrial engineer witnesses agreed. That is what will be done under this
Award. As a precondition to the engineering of the standards, and as evidence of the parties’ commitment to the success of this process, during this interim period, no standards changes may be proposed (except for new work functions). Additionally, Article 34 will be renegotiated to reflect the new industrial engineering process for setting and adjusting standards so that both parties may call for standards reviews in the future. This puts us on a level playing field with the USPS.
My strong support for an engineered system of standards notwithstanding, I cannot agree with an Award that further distorts our current system and therefore I must respectfully dissent.
To put it bluntly, the Board majority has engaged in precisely the kind of “cherry-picking” of standards that all of the industrial engineering experts in this case advised us to avoid. In doing so, the Board majority has ignored several meritorious proposals made by the NRLCA. It is true – we did forcefully argue that the Board make no interim changes to the existing system of standards. We argued that any such changes should occur scientifically based on sound industrial engineering principles in the review and restudy of all standards. However, given that the Board is prepared to wade into the dangerous waters of making individual standards changes, it certainly should have given full consideration to all of the parties’ proposals and the evidence supporting those proposals. For example, our proposal to change the route length allowance (mileage standard) from the equivalent of 30 miles per hour to 16 miles per hour was supported by incontrovertible evidence. Route conditions have changed significantly since the 1960’s. Rural routes have far more boxes per mile then they did decades ago. Traffic and congestion has worsened, too. Our experts conducted an appropriate, scientific study that completely supported our proposal to modify the current route length allowance. Indeed, the Postal Service made no effort to rebut our evidence.
To avoid awarding some or all of our proposals on standards based on financial considerations (“The cost involved in the Mileage standard adjustment sought (over one billion dollars) is so great that this Board of Arbitration could not grant it without doing serious harm to the USPS and eventually to Rural Letter Carriers,” page 16) is to ignore all of the expert testimony on this point. The setting of standards, even in an interim fashion, must be blind to their consequences. All of the industrial engineering experts said so. And that is why holding off on making any standards changes and letting the industrial engineers review the current system of standards and make adjustments based on scientific study was recommended by the experts. To ignore these recommendations and to tinker with existing standards absent any scientific study of all of the standards is to further distort the evaluated system. And the experts said just that.
In the end, the “correctness” of the evaluated system is not to be determined by the level of “incentive” in the system but rather by the accuracy of the standards, which must be set using sound industrial engineering principles. The Board majority’s award in this regard is result-oriented and
is designed to give the USPS interim savings at the expense of rural carriers and the integrity of the evaluated system. There is no doubt that the savings achieved by modifying the Prepaid Parcels Collected standard and DPS letter standard for LLV routes generate far more savings for the USPS, than do the costs associated with granting our standard proposal on Walking Speed (dismount distance). Sadly, this inequitable result is not based on the evidence; rather, it is based on dollars and cents only. It is unwise and premature to make changes now that favor one side or the other.
The other Postal unions risk changes to salaries and benefits in collective bargaining and interest arbitration. We face those same risks but have been saddled with additional risks related to changes in time standards. A re-study of the whole system of standards will ultimately ensure the integrity of both the individual standards and of the system as a whole. There will be no need for the level of incentive to be an issue that continues to infect the bargaining process in the future, as it has in the past. The level of incentive will become irrelevant because the incentive in a system of engineered standards will be premised on rural carriers working harder and smarter under scientifically correct standards.
If the Chairman was prepared to look at individual standards, I submit he was obligated to look at all of the proposals before him and the evidence introduced to support any changes. If that had occurred, the result as far as standards are concerned would have been far different. If, contrary to our urging, the Board majority is set upon making changes to any individual standards, there is simply no logic behind ignoring other indisputably meritorious standards changes solely because they may be costly to the Postal Service.
* * * * *
Finally, there will be a new pay chart for newly-hired rural craft employees. This reality is similar to the result in the APWU voluntary settlement. In the APWU contract, however, no current employees were adversely affected by changes to the pay charts. In this case, Rural Carrier Associates hired after November 20, 2010, the date of the expiration of the 2006-2010 National Agreement, are treated like newly-hired employees when they become regular carriers. They will be subject to the lower pay scale in table two. Accordingly, these RCAs will suffer a pay cut – something no APWU-represented employee was subject to at the time of that voluntary settlement. Given that rural relief employees work a greater are of the hours than any other group of non-career employees in the other crafts and have no benefits in most cases, I cannot in good conscience agree with this portion of the Award. To penalize this group of current employees is patently unfair.
Accordingly, I dissent from paragraph 1 (relating to RCA’s hired after November 20, 2010) and paragraphs 3.A and 3.B (relating to DPS Letters and Prepaid Parcels Accepted).
The first and most important exception concerns the awarding to the Postal Service of changes to the Pre-Paid Parcels Collected standard and to the DPS Letters standard with respect to LLV routes. Before
detailing my objections, however, I do want to acknowledge that we did make significant advances overall with respect to the Evaluated System and its time standards. We now have on record the undisputed view that the Evaluated System is an incentive system – that rural carriers have an incentive to work harder and smarter in order to go home early and thus earn paid time off. The Postal Service
ultimately conceded that this is so, and Arbitrator Clarke declared such based on an abundance of record evidence (and despite National Arbitrator Bloch’s unsolicited opinion to the contrary in the DPS Flats ase).
Most importantly, the Postal Service and the NRLCA have agreed that now is the time to have all of the time standards in the Evaluated System studied by professional industrial engineers and have those standards set scientifically in accordance with sound industrial engineering principles. None of the existing standards have been established in this manner. Indeed, about half of them were put into place almost 50 to 60 years ago, and we do not know the basis for any of them. Both parties recognize that there are some standards that provide too much time and some that provide too little time (the route
length allowance, or driving speed, for example). This increasingly results in more and more “winners” and “losers” among rural routes. Some of the country’s best industrial engineers were retained by the NRLCA and testified on our behalf. Unanimously, they testified that in order to fix the system and
prevent continual attempts by the Postal Service to “cherry pick” the “loose” standards and thus tighten the incentive, that all of the standards should be engineered, to insure that all of them are individually accurate. Postal Service expert industrial engineer witnesses agreed. That is what will be done under this
Award. As a precondition to the engineering of the standards, and as evidence of the parties’ commitment to the success of this process, during this interim period, no standards changes may be proposed (except for new work functions). Additionally, Article 34 will be renegotiated to reflect the new industrial engineering process for setting and adjusting standards so that both parties may call for standards reviews in the future. This puts us on a level playing field with the USPS.
My strong support for an engineered system of standards notwithstanding, I cannot agree with an Award that further distorts our current system and therefore I must respectfully dissent.
To put it bluntly, the Board majority has engaged in precisely the kind of “cherry-picking” of standards that all of the industrial engineering experts in this case advised us to avoid. In doing so, the Board majority has ignored several meritorious proposals made by the NRLCA. It is true – we did forcefully argue that the Board make no interim changes to the existing system of standards. We argued that any such changes should occur scientifically based on sound industrial engineering principles in the review and restudy of all standards. However, given that the Board is prepared to wade into the dangerous waters of making individual standards changes, it certainly should have given full consideration to all of the parties’ proposals and the evidence supporting those proposals. For example, our proposal to change the route length allowance (mileage standard) from the equivalent of 30 miles per hour to 16 miles per hour was supported by incontrovertible evidence. Route conditions have changed significantly since the 1960’s. Rural routes have far more boxes per mile then they did decades ago. Traffic and congestion has worsened, too. Our experts conducted an appropriate, scientific study that completely supported our proposal to modify the current route length allowance. Indeed, the Postal Service made no effort to rebut our evidence.
To avoid awarding some or all of our proposals on standards based on financial considerations (“The cost involved in the Mileage standard adjustment sought (over one billion dollars) is so great that this Board of Arbitration could not grant it without doing serious harm to the USPS and eventually to Rural Letter Carriers,” page 16) is to ignore all of the expert testimony on this point. The setting of standards, even in an interim fashion, must be blind to their consequences. All of the industrial engineering experts said so. And that is why holding off on making any standards changes and letting the industrial engineers review the current system of standards and make adjustments based on scientific study was recommended by the experts. To ignore these recommendations and to tinker with existing standards absent any scientific study of all of the standards is to further distort the evaluated system. And the experts said just that.
In the end, the “correctness” of the evaluated system is not to be determined by the level of “incentive” in the system but rather by the accuracy of the standards, which must be set using sound industrial engineering principles. The Board majority’s award in this regard is result-oriented and
is designed to give the USPS interim savings at the expense of rural carriers and the integrity of the evaluated system. There is no doubt that the savings achieved by modifying the Prepaid Parcels Collected standard and DPS letter standard for LLV routes generate far more savings for the USPS, than do the costs associated with granting our standard proposal on Walking Speed (dismount distance). Sadly, this inequitable result is not based on the evidence; rather, it is based on dollars and cents only. It is unwise and premature to make changes now that favor one side or the other.
The other Postal unions risk changes to salaries and benefits in collective bargaining and interest arbitration. We face those same risks but have been saddled with additional risks related to changes in time standards. A re-study of the whole system of standards will ultimately ensure the integrity of both the individual standards and of the system as a whole. There will be no need for the level of incentive to be an issue that continues to infect the bargaining process in the future, as it has in the past. The level of incentive will become irrelevant because the incentive in a system of engineered standards will be premised on rural carriers working harder and smarter under scientifically correct standards.
If the Chairman was prepared to look at individual standards, I submit he was obligated to look at all of the proposals before him and the evidence introduced to support any changes. If that had occurred, the result as far as standards are concerned would have been far different. If, contrary to our urging, the Board majority is set upon making changes to any individual standards, there is simply no logic behind ignoring other indisputably meritorious standards changes solely because they may be costly to the Postal Service.
* * * * *
Finally, there will be a new pay chart for newly-hired rural craft employees. This reality is similar to the result in the APWU voluntary settlement. In the APWU contract, however, no current employees were adversely affected by changes to the pay charts. In this case, Rural Carrier Associates hired after November 20, 2010, the date of the expiration of the 2006-2010 National Agreement, are treated like newly-hired employees when they become regular carriers. They will be subject to the lower pay scale in table two. Accordingly, these RCAs will suffer a pay cut – something no APWU-represented employee was subject to at the time of that voluntary settlement. Given that rural relief employees work a greater are of the hours than any other group of non-career employees in the other crafts and have no benefits in most cases, I cannot in good conscience agree with this portion of the Award. To penalize this group of current employees is patently unfair.
Accordingly, I dissent from paragraph 1 (relating to RCA’s hired after November 20, 2010) and paragraphs 3.A and 3.B (relating to DPS Letters and Prepaid Parcels Accepted).
CLARIFICATION TO SOME QUESTIONS
ON THE NEW NATIONAL AGREEMENT
SALARIES AND COLA
• RCA’s hired after August 11 2012 will receive the new pay rate of $15.56.
• RCA’s promoted to regular between July 3 2012 and August 11, 2012 will receive evaluated compensation at the new rate. RCA’s receiving the pay rate of $19.45/hr., then being promoted to regular after August 11 will take a decrease in hourly pay.
• The 2012 COLA will be deferred until the COLA payouts in Jan. 2013 and July of 2013.
HIGH OPTION ELECTIONS
• No high options will be affected until the beginning of the guarantee year. A regular will have to have 10 years of service to elect the high option after the guarantee year.
STANDARDS
• New standards will take effect after the next National Count.
• The postal service still has the option to count in Sept.
• All standards will be evaluated by engineers to get more accurate timing. Should be done within 3 years.
• Mail count scheduled for 2016 is in anticipation of all standards being corrected.
• All routes will be counted unless both management and carrier elect not to count.
Article 12 changes
• Aux. routes must reach 42 standard hours to be converted to regular. Postal service has 30 days to convert and the route does not need to go through another mail count.
• Regular routes going below 35 standard hours may be converted to aux. routes if there is vacant or if and encumbered routes. Encumbered routes have to have a vacancy in the office or within 50 miles of the affected office for any excessing carrier per article. 12.
• There is still discussion on how long a carrier on a 35 hour route will have to wait for a vacant route.
TRC Postions
• The postal service will not be able to hire any TRC’s after Aug. 10, 2012.
• All TRCs will be eliminated by Aug. 11, 2013
• Management cannot get into the practice of trying to hire as many TRC’s as possible prior to Aug. 2012. If you see this happening please contact a state level steward.
RDWL
• The RDWL will be posted 4 weeks before it becomes affective.
DAILY DYNAMIC ROUTING
• The union and the postal service will start talks in regards to figure payments for “special” circumstance routes i.e., routes that only deliver parcels and routes that have only one stop and the volume is too great to put on a regular route etc. This is only in discussion at this time.
• RCA’s hired after August 11 2012 will receive the new pay rate of $15.56.
• RCA’s promoted to regular between July 3 2012 and August 11, 2012 will receive evaluated compensation at the new rate. RCA’s receiving the pay rate of $19.45/hr., then being promoted to regular after August 11 will take a decrease in hourly pay.
• The 2012 COLA will be deferred until the COLA payouts in Jan. 2013 and July of 2013.
HIGH OPTION ELECTIONS
• No high options will be affected until the beginning of the guarantee year. A regular will have to have 10 years of service to elect the high option after the guarantee year.
STANDARDS
• New standards will take effect after the next National Count.
• The postal service still has the option to count in Sept.
• All standards will be evaluated by engineers to get more accurate timing. Should be done within 3 years.
• Mail count scheduled for 2016 is in anticipation of all standards being corrected.
• All routes will be counted unless both management and carrier elect not to count.
Article 12 changes
• Aux. routes must reach 42 standard hours to be converted to regular. Postal service has 30 days to convert and the route does not need to go through another mail count.
• Regular routes going below 35 standard hours may be converted to aux. routes if there is vacant or if and encumbered routes. Encumbered routes have to have a vacancy in the office or within 50 miles of the affected office for any excessing carrier per article. 12.
• There is still discussion on how long a carrier on a 35 hour route will have to wait for a vacant route.
TRC Postions
• The postal service will not be able to hire any TRC’s after Aug. 10, 2012.
• All TRCs will be eliminated by Aug. 11, 2013
• Management cannot get into the practice of trying to hire as many TRC’s as possible prior to Aug. 2012. If you see this happening please contact a state level steward.
RDWL
• The RDWL will be posted 4 weeks before it becomes affective.
DAILY DYNAMIC ROUTING
• The union and the postal service will start talks in regards to figure payments for “special” circumstance routes i.e., routes that only deliver parcels and routes that have only one stop and the volume is too great to put on a regular route etc. This is only in discussion at this time.