I know that most people here are a fan of public sector unions, but... come on. Standby time? Really? I don't think you have to be against public sector unions in general to think that this is pretty ridiculous.
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I am not a union worker yet if my computer goes down or the power goes out or even if a day is slow and I have time to post on Hatrack I still get paid. Why does that seem strange to you?
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The post office is one public good that has definitely outlived its usefulness, but I'm not inherently opposed to standby time.
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I don't think that it's all that ridiculous, provided it represents a relatively small proportion of the overall working hours, which appears to be the case. Taking the most conservative interpretation of "hundreds of millions" of employee hours every year gives us 200 million hours. 170,666 hours of standby time represents 0.09% of those hours, or about 25 seconds of each eight-hour shift. That's a rounding error, not a scandal.
EDIT: Oops, my bad. That was just the first six months. So make that 50 seconds of each shift.
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Is it better if the Postal Service instead simply fires and rehires people based on mail volume trends?
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While I agree in spirit with the idea that we shouldn't be paying people to sit around and do nothing, looking at the actual numbers, even if this problem was completely wiped out, it still wouldn't help the postal service.
The article said in the first six months of 2011, standby time totaled $4.3 million, making that $8.6 million for the year of the numbers hold. Two years ago that number was $31 million, so even right there we can say that this number has been cut by 75% in two years, a pretty significant improvement right there.
But the article also said that the postal service is announcing $7 billion in losses (what range of time is that for? Let's assume a year). So yeah, 8 million dollars is certainly significant, but is maybe .1% of the postal service's problems.
But also, think about the alternatives. Okay, lay off some amount of employees (many of those employees will receive benefits, so lets not forget those numbers), and only hire what, seasonal help during busy times when more employees are needed? The process of hiring and training costs money too. Is it cheaper to pay trained people to do nothing than pay former employees benefits and pay for the job hiring and training process on a regular basis?
Anyway, yes, I'm sure the system can be reformed to not be so wasteful, but I think it's short sighted to make proclamations about how the union system is ridiculous, without thinking the issue through more. And anyway, plenty of people who work in private industry have tons of down time and spend it playing around on the internet. What's so different about that?
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I'm much more annoyed at the postal service not hiring enough people to work their offices. Lines are routinely long to an extent that isn't tolerated at UPS and FedEx (with plenty of counters to put more customer service people at). I'd be all for hiring more people to bring levels of customer service up, even if they ended up sometimes having a few too many.
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Assuming $8 Million is lost in a year due to downtime, and they are expecting $9 billion lost total this year, that is less than 1%. It is a tiny fraction: .00088. That is .08 of 1%. Not even a drop in the bucket. I am not saying ignore the issue, but it begs the question of where the other 99.92% of their 9 billion in losses this year is going to come from.
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quote:Originally posted by Marlozhan: Assuming $8 Million is lost in a year due to downtime, and they are expecting $9 billion lost total this year, that is less than 1%. It is a tiny fraction: .00088. That is .08 of 1%. Not even a drop in the bucket. I am not saying ignore the issue, but it begs the question of where the other 99.92% of their 9 billion in losses this year is going to come from.
Well a few years ago the standby time, including looser management was costing $30 million, but that is still only 0.3% of the problem.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: I don't think that it's all that ridiculous, provided it represents a relatively small proportion of the overall working hours, which appears to be the case. Taking the most conservative interpretation of "hundreds of millions" of employee hours every year gives us 200 million hours. 170,666 hours of standby time represents 0.09% of those hours, or about 25 seconds of each eight-hour shift. That's a rounding error, not a scandal.
EDIT: Oops, my bad. That was just the first six months. So make that 50 seconds of each shift.
Yeah, this raises a very good point. I was reading it as individuals who had nothing to do spending their whole day, well, doing nothing, because there wasn't the volume to support them. Whether or not these individuals are a statistically insignificant group or not, they still should not exist. But if, in fact, it's actually spread out over most of the employees, and it just translates to a few minutes here or a few minutes there of "Standby", I have much less problem with it.
But the article seems to imply the former, not the latter. I wonder which is more accurate.
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I'm sure that in some cases it represents entire shifts that aren't worked, or even multiple weeks or maybe even months without work for some individuals. I was just pointing out that as a proportion of their overall labor it's insignificant. Inefficiencies of that magnitude are the things you don't bother spending your time on while you hunt down the real problems in your organization.
It might even be the case that such a policy is a net driver of efficiency - there's motivation to fix the broken equipment more quickly and hire more carefully if you know that idle hours are going to be expensive.
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quote:I was reading it as individuals who had nothing to do spending their whole day, well, doing nothing, because there wasn't the volume to support them.
Ironically, I don't think you're going to see as much of that at the USPS as at WU or UPS
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Yeah, I've never been in a Fedex or UPS store where I had to wait longer than about 2 or 3 minutes to get service. They are much, much more efficient than the USPS.
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Yeah, I've never been in a Fedex or UPS store where I had to wait longer than about 2 or 3 minutes to get service. They are much, much more efficient than the USPS.
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I've never had to wait longer than maybe 10 min at a USPS location...but the volume is also exceptionally higher than anything I see at UPS locations. The lines always seem twice as long with the same number of people working. I'm not entirely positive that it's purely a manpower issue. The post office offers more services than places like UPS, it's not always a matter of just slapping a label on a box and sending it on its way.
Part of the problem is that USPS has tried opening smaller branches, and closing them as well, since they simply cannot support so many brick and mortar locations with their diminishing resources, but the foot traffic doesn't seem to have dropped off in tandem with their decreased physical foot print. That's a big part of the lines.
Seriously though, if we just got rid of the post office, who would deliver the mail? I think if we offered to privatize it, UPS and Fedex would say "I don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole."
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USPS is also the sole brick and mortar contact with the federal government that most people experience in their regular lives. They mediate various federal services aside from the post.
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quote:Originally posted by Belle: Yeah, I've never been in a Fedex or UPS store where I had to wait longer than about 2 or 3 minutes to get service. They are much, much more efficient than the USPS.
I only add my caution to this statement, that the conclusion you apparently draw is not in fact supported by the evidence you supply.
Shorter wait times do not directly indicate higher efficiency.
And further, as I mentioned above, streamlining for the sake of efficiency is made more difficult by the need to provide a more comprehensive and generally more complex list of services, and to service a greater number of needs in a given amount of time.
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Now... I don't know much about the situation in the USA, but over here the postal service has been privatised. And the results were both good and bad. Since the postal service is now a business, there are fewer benefits for the employees. It used to be that the postal workers could do their routes at a leisurely pace. They also had the same route every day, which enable them somewhat form a bond with people living there. Of course, when I joined about 7,5 years ago, this had already changed. But in the meantime they have been trimming down even further. For example, they used to have some spare bikes around, just in case your own bike suffered a malfunction. Not anymore. They also used to pay for repairs to your bike; while they still do it, it takes a long time to get your money back. A third example is the fact that they are less pliable whenever you request a day off. Where they used to work with fulltime employees, now they want part-timers. Most of these don't even get a full set of company clothing anymore.
I only deliver the mail on Saturdays (unless I'm in between jobs, then I can always do some extra routes during the week). My contract states that I work 17,2 hourse each month; which basically boils down to 4 hours each Saturday. Currently I have two routes that together take between 3 and 3,5 hours to complete (depending on the volume of the commercial folders and of course the weather conditions). But I always get paid for the full 4 hours. In the past I have had some other routes, which took me closer to five hours; then they also paid me for 4 hours. Unless you report the extra time separately.
Anyway, this has been a look into the postal service ofanother country... I'm not complaining though. I keep the job because I rather like it and because it helps my belly from expanding too quickly. Posts: 1100 | Registered: Apr 2008
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quote:Shorter wait times do not directly indicate higher efficiency.
No, but nor is that the only thing I've taken into account when forming my opinion.
The FedEx store I frequent offers faxing, copying, printing - has computers available for use, etc. They will also pack the item for you, which the USPS will not do. I use a FedEx office location and there are always people in there and something going on, but it is so well designed that it is extremely efficient. The copiers are all self-serve and take cash, coins, or a credit or debit card. Many things are automated and the employees are courteous and know their job. When I have a package to send, it gets packed for me, weighed, and shipped with minimal fuss. The location I have the most experience with is set up for efficiency and very, very well designed to make things easier and faster for the customer's benefit.
Inefficiency to me is having all business go through a counter clerk like at the USPS. The FedEx store offers a larger variety of services, makes things easy for the customer to use, and when I do need contact with a live person I rarely have to wait. That fits all my definition of efficient.
In contrast, the USPS in my hometown has a small room with one window where they will conduct business - there is a door separating that from the lobby where the PO boxes are. You have to line up outside in the PO box lobby, and wait for one person to leave the smaller room so you can go in, because the door cannot be propped open and there is only room for one person at the counter and one person waiting inside the tiny room. Mailing one package takes waiting in line, shuffling forward, checking to see if it's your turn to open the door and go in, if you open the door and there is nowhere for you to stand the clerk tells you to close it and wait outside, you have to let people slide through your line on their way out once they are done - it's a nightmare of inefficiency.
Granted, I'm only recounting anecdotal evidence and we all know how valuable that is in forming conclusions. But, I think I can competently judge efficiency on more than just the wait time at the counter. Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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The difference is that you can pay for the better service at FedEx. We need the USPS for those folks who can only pay for a stamp to send a letter or who depend on the post office to deliver things to areas that would not be profitable to serve for FedEx.
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All I know--calls to outsource more government services as efficient meet head long into the news that 60 Billion of the money we paid contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq were lost to fraud and corruption.
The savings that the market forces generates are often overwhelmed by the profit demands the market requires.
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quote:Shorter wait times do not directly indicate higher efficiency.
No, but nor is that the only thing I've taken into account when forming my opinion.
No, it's just the single piece of evidence you listed in your first post, and it wasn't very strong. Unfortunately that kind of facile logic is as far as most people get.
Everything you listed, by the way, is convenience, not efficiency. Efficiency is doing the greatest amount of work with the minimum allocation of resources in the fastest possible time. You pay FedEx for convenience, but that doesn't make their system necessarily more efficient from a holistic perspective. It is not evidence that a private company can or should be responsible for the same job.
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quote:Originally posted by Darth_Mauve: All I know--calls to outsource more government services as efficient meet head long into the news that 60 Billion of the money we paid contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq were lost to fraud and corruption.
The savings that the market forces generates are often overwhelmed by the profit demands the market requires.
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I know of no business that can keep all of its employees occupied 100% of the time. "Hurry up and wait" is a pretty common expression.
As I read the headline, it seems that the USPS is keeping track of standby time better than any company I've ever worked for, and is doing something to reduce it.
After all, how many people here are posting from work...?
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A lot of it also has to do with retaining trained workers. You can't expect people to be okay with a job that says "sorry, we don't need you today...check back tomorrow!" There's a reason that system more or collapsed in the middle of the last century. People like to know where tomorrow's paycheck is going to come from.
If they kept firing and rehiring people, all those that could would probably try to find steady employment elsewhere.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: A lot of it also has to do with retaining trained workers. You can't expect people to be okay with a job that says "sorry, we don't need you today...check back tomorrow!" There's a reason that system more or collapsed in the middle of the last century. People like to know where tomorrow's paycheck is going to come from.
If they kept firing and rehiring people, all those that could would probably try to find steady employment elsewhere.
Oh you'd think that, and you might even be right much of the time. But many jobs out here do send people home early routinely, and those people stay because while they want a job elsewhere, they just can't find one, and so they stay, they can't afford not to work.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: A lot of it also has to do with retaining trained workers. You can't expect people to be okay with a job that says "sorry, we don't need you today...check back tomorrow!" There's a reason that system more or collapsed in the middle of the last century. People like to know where tomorrow's paycheck is going to come from.
If they kept firing and rehiring people, all those that could would probably try to find steady employment elsewhere.
Oh you'd think that, and you might even be right much of the time. But many jobs out here do send people home early routinely, and those people stay because while they want a job elsewhere, they just can't find one, and so they stay, they can't afford not to work.
Well yeah it's like that NOW, but this recession is only a decade old. The practice we're discussing is decades old. My point was more the historical formation of the practice. I see what you're saying though.
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One of the worst things about production based jobs, and I was working one fairly recently is that you are so terribly dependent on whether or not there is work.
My wife works production with a press clipping agency, which unfortunately is tied to the dying print media. There have been massive closing of offices, and it's quite common for her to get sent home early on Friday, or be told not to come into work on Monday until such and such time.
Because one of us needs to be home with our son, we are limited to whatever job she can work that will let her work from about 6:00am until 1:00pm, because my job starts at 1:00pm. It took me four months to find the job I'm in now. All I can do is make this work for now and see about going back to school so that hopefully I can work a full time job and make enough that she can just stay at home.
Fortunately at my job, we are quite busy, and if our normal work volume drops, they come up with projects for us to do on the side so we don't have to go home early. Still once in awhile, it happens.
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quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: I know of no business that can keep all of its employees occupied 100% of the time. "Hurry up and wait" is a pretty common expression.
Yeah, and as far as I've heard, you can end up doing plenty of being paid to do nothing at more than a few WU branches.
I guess you might see the same at a few BFE branches for the usps but they have never seemed to lack for work, either.
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My computer was down for almost half an hour and they didn't dock my pay! I also get paid for lying around in bed (sick days) and even goofing off (vacation time).
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There are plenty of "Homer Simpson" type jobs also. That is, where the person is supposed to supervise an automated system, just in case something goes wrong. Then there are security guards, who basically have to keep themselves awake through their shift, unless someone actually tries to break in.
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