THE BULLETIN BOARD
January 2011
[January 1st]Happy New Year!
May it be a prosperous and healthy New Year for you and your loved ones!
[January 1st]Scholarships Available to PMAPWU Members
Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Scholarship Essay Contest
- Type: Academic Scholarship
- First Prize-$2,000.00, Second Prize-$1,000.00, Third Prize-$500.00
- Graduating high school seniors, all post secondary students, and affiliated Union members attending an accredited institution, are eligible.
- Deadline to apply is January 31, 2011.
- You can view all the details and download an application from the PA AFL-CIO website.
APWU Vocational Scholarship
- Applicants must be a senior attending high school or other corresponding secondary school. Applicants must be a child or grandchild, including stepchild or legally adopted child of an active member, Retiree's Department member, or deceased member of the American Postal Workers Union.
- Type: Vocational Scholarship
- $1,000.00 for nine months each year, up to three consecutive years of school, with total not exceeding $3,000.00..
- Application is to be received no later than March 15, 2011.
- You can download an application at the APWU's website.
The APWU E.C. Hallbeck Memorial Scholarship
- Type: Academic Scholarship
- $2,000.00 for each of four consecutive years of college
- Applicants must be a senior attending high school or other corresponding secondary school. Applicants must be a child or grandchild, including stepchild or legally adopted child of an active member, Retiree's Department member, or deceased member of the American Postal Workers Union.
- Applications are to be received no later than March 15, 2011.
- You can download an application at the APWU's website.
You may also visit the APWU's Scholarship Programs webpage where the various scholarships are discussed.
[January 1st]USPS Announces Changes To Mystery Shopper Program
from APWU Web News Article 158-2010
After years of APWU complaints, the Postal Service has notified the union that the Mystery Shopper Program will be altered beginning in January 2011. Retail Associates (RAs) will no longer be required to follow a precise script when waiting on customers; instead they will be permitted to "customize their questions to best address individual customer needs."
The questions have been a source of frustration, both to window clerks and the mailing public, in part because RAs were required to ask every customer mailing a package a litany of questions — even customers they knew well and whose needs they understood.
APWU Clerk Craft Director Rob Strunk praised the decision. "Finally, a manager with authority has realized that our Sales and Service Associates can determine on their own an appropriate method for communicating with our customers.
"The Mystery Shopper program has been misused, abused, and violated in so many ways," he said. "We can go forward now demonstrating our professionalism."
The Mystery Shooper program, which was recently renamed the Retail Customer Experience Program, has been a source of contention between the union and management since its inception. The program relies on management designees posing as customers and scoring retail clerks based on adherence to the script.
According to management’s Dec. 27, 2010, letter, the Product Offerings and Product Explanation categories will no longer be scored, and scoring in other categories will be revised.
[January 1st]Audit: Postal Service not always justifying mailing discounts
excerpted from FederalTimes.com
The U.S. Postal Service has frequently failed to justify millions of dollars worth of "workshare discounts" given to mailers for efficiency reasons and other grounds, a newly released audit by the USPS inspector general has found.
Under the discount program, mailers get reduced postage rates in return for preparing, sorting or transporting mail. The Postal Service is supposed to come out ahead by saving more in avoided costs than it loses from lower rates. A 2006 law allows for some exceptions, however, as when postal officials believe that reducing or eliminating the discount would get in the way of efficient operations.
But in 2009 the Postal Service failed to properly justify 19 out of 30 workshare discounts that exceeded avoided costs by $104 million, the IG found. Almost all of those 19 were allowed under the efficiency exception, but the Postal Service "did not identify specific operations that would be impeded, or quantify the potential impact of setting workshare discounts equal to or less than avoided costs," according to the Dec. 23 audit, which was released Thursday.
Postal managers agreed with the IG's recommendation to compile data supporting the amount of discounts granted under the legal exceptions. They balked, however, at a separate recommendation to document the decision-making process used to determine the reasonableness of discount amounts under the educational and cultural exception on the basis that the law did not require them to do so.
Read the entire article at FederalTimes.com.
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