Vern K. Baxter’s research while affiliated with University of New Orleans and other places

The mechanization and automation of mail processing has taken place in a unionized organization where labor—management relations are governed by a collective bargaining agreement. The Postal Reorganization Act authorized the Postal Service to enter into collective bargaining agreements with nationally recognized labor unions for the purpose of establishing compensation and working conditions. This replaced the political process of addressing labor issues in Congress with a corporatist system of peak negotiations between postal managers and representatives of nationally recognized postal unions. Negotiations between postal unions and the Postal Service establish contract provisions, and local administration of the contract is overseen by regional and national officers. A four-step grievance—arbitration process leads to the appointment of independent arbitrators who resolve difficult workplace issues. Conflict between labor and management over wages, hours, discipline, the impact of technology, and overall control of the labor process is mediated by the collective bargaining process. The best scientifically planned strategies and programs of postal management meet indeterminate outcomes when confronted by the power of organized labor in collective bargaining and the grievance—arbitration process.

Labor and Politics in the U.S. Postal Service grew out of concern for the way a large public organization does its work. It reflects my effort to link experience working as a letter carrier and mail collector with subsequent years of study in the field of organizational sociology. The final product is an academic book that certainly reveals great distance from experience in the postal workplace, but I must confess that the book still presents more a view from the bottom than a view from the top of the post office. I hope this view proves beneficial. It turns out that studying the post office has become an ongoing project that has outlived several jobs, relationships, and hairlines. What originated as a historical study of the 1970 reorganization became an analysis of the causes and consequences of an ongoing process of re­ structuring and technological change in the post office. Fortunately for me, similar restructurings have recently occurred in organizations and industries across the nation and around the world. The competitive pressures, new technologies, and political and class-based conflicts dis­ cussed in this book are perhaps more relevant today than they were in the late 1970s when I began research on the post office.

The automation of mail processing involves a contradictory political process with many stakeholders. The primary goals of the postal automation program are to improve service while reducing labor costs. Several obstacles interfere with the achievement of these goals. Federal government demands that the post office contribute money to reduce the federal budget deficit limits the availability of funds to pay for automated technology. Rate incentives that support the privatization of mail processing take work away from the post office, reduce postal revenues, and leave existing automation equipment underutilized. The private presort industry also undercuts the post office since it pays employees much less than postal wages to prepare shipments of mail for distribution and delivery by the Postal Service.

The United States Postal Service employs more than 725,000 people to provide a universally available service that is delivered at a fixed price. The delivery of this service has historically been tied to the politics of economic growth as governed by the U.S. Congress and the Post Office Department (POD). A combination of entrenched subsidies for particular postal customers, frustrated demands of postal workers for wage increases and expanded collective bargaining, and historic checks on the arbitrary power of Congress and the POD all slowed the modernization of mail processing in the 1960s. These impediments to modernization were formally addressed in 1970 with passage of the Postal Reorganization Act.

It is clear that integrated automation will eventually replace mechanization as the core technology used to process mail. Those responsible promise that postal automation will reduce or eliminate the disadvantages of letter sorting machines (LSMs) and pave the way for much more rapid and efficient processing of mail and improved mail service. Postal officials believe that 30 years is enough time to learn the limits to how fast and accurately human beings can press keys on LSMs. Operator resistance and high training costs are additional problems that postal managers hope to solve with automation technology that is supposed to eliminate the need for most LSMs and LSM operators.

This book discusses the way in which economic activity is organized by the state in a capitalist society. The major focus is on how technology and labor are combined to deliver a universally available public service in a highly stratified society. It is important to remember, that the government owns and operates the Postal Service. This controversial arrangement creates pressure on government enterprises that must achieve politically defined social goals as well as economic ones (Batstone, Ferner, & Terry, 1984, p. 8). The influence of parliamentary and bureaucratic politics on postal policies is therefore significant, and sometimes creates irrational outcomes that reinforce claims of those who support the proposition that private enterprise is always superior to government organization of economic activity. As a result, postal policies are contentious and postal performance is always evaluated through an ideological lens.

Creation of the postal corporation extended the authority of postal managers to engineer jobs and scientifically manage employee performance. Mail processing technology has progressed from predominantly unit output by manual laboring clerks to large batch and mass production with 900 multiple position letter sorting machines (MPLSMs), and automated continuous processing with computers and optical character reader (OCR) technology. The current mail processing system also incorporates high-speed culling, facing, and sorting of the mail. Postal managers and bargaining unit employees all envision the day when the work involved in mail processing will consist primarily of the feeding, sweeping, and maintenance of machines.

The collective bargaining impasse inside the post office and the lack of progress in the mechanization of mail processing, placed a drag on postal operations and postal finances in the late 1960s. Quality of service stagnated while the volume of mail and the number of employees required to move the mail increased significantly. Postal budget deficits increased at a time when the Vietnam War mobilization and a weakened dollar drained federal resources, and an impending fiscal crisis threatened overall government spending. Reorganization of the post office gained prominence in policy discussions, but actual implementation required strategic alliances between postal managers and representatives of the nation’s largest business interests. This alliance was necessary to overcome resistance to reorganization from postal labor and some business interests (e.g., publishers, advertisers) who depended on postal subsidies.

The next two chapters analyze the historic role of the post office in American society. An examination of the history of mail service reveals that the post office is deeply embedded in the American federal system where political power is fragmented into many centers that make competing claims on the government. The goals, structure, and technology of the post office have been shaped by competition between important business interests that produce and consume postal service; elected officials and postal bureaucrats who make policy and administer postal affairs; and organized workers who collect, sort, and deliver the mail. This constellation of forces, and not the evolution of rational management, technology, or the structural requirements of capital accumulation, most profoundly govern development of the U.S. post office.

This chapter is about changes in the organization of work in the post office that accompanied industrial growth, mass consumption, and increases in the scale of postal operations. Wage-earning clerks and carriers were hired to occupy most of the positions as postal employment grew from 71,671 in 1884 to 741,216 in 1970 (USPOD, 1884, 1970). Economic growth and growth in employment were also associated with an unequal distribution of rewards, and demands from working class men, women, and racial minorities for political representation and a modest redistribution of the benefits of industrial capitalism Political struggles between contending social forces were an essential stimulus to creation of a bureaucratic post office.