To Oak Park Postmaster Ronald Pusateri, his 34-year career with the U.S. Postal Service is a dream come true.
In his paneled office in the western suburb, Pusateri points to a framed photograph of his son, Michael, and declares “This wonderful company gave me the opportunity to send him to Purdue and to grad school at the University of Illinois.”
But for Steven Coppola, the 23 years he has spent handling and delivering the mail are a reminder of dashed dreams.
In a basement staging area in the same building, Coppola, 42, talks about getting caught in “the middle-class trap” of the Postal Service’s good pay and benefits.
“I was going to be a writer or a musician,” he said, but now “I’m just a mailman.”
Twelve years ago Coppola channeled his talent and ambition into a successful run for president of the local mail carriers union. But his disenchantment with his job represents one of the greatest challenges facing the Postal Service and its nearly 700,000 employees.
While Coppola says he tries to do his job well despite his frustration, others do not. And when workers are unhappy, customers pay a price. By the Postal Service’s own measuring stick, customer service in Chicago is the worst in the United States.
Mail has been burned, dumped in garbage cans and stowed by the tons in letter carriers’ homes rather than delivered. Deliveries are late, letters are lost and clerks are rude. Customers who can afford it opt for alternative delivery service or new technologies like electronic mail and telephone facsimiles.
Nothing short of a revolution is needed to make postal operations truly first-class, the only defense against the tide of customer defections, according to Postal Service officials and management experts.
To achieve that goal, the Postal Service is attempting sweeping changes in its culture, one historically rooted in politics, patronage and dictated by a paramilitary philosophy.
The objectives are ambitious. A racially and culturally diverse workforce must improve tolerance and sensitivity. The historic opponents-management and labor-must work as a team. A mammoth bureaucracy must be transformed into an organization that caters to its customers.
Like most revolutions, it must have the support of the masses.
“We have to be committed to our employees,” said Postmaster General Marvin Runyon during a recent interview in his Washington, D.C., office. “If you’re not committed to your employees, they won’t be committed to the customers.”
In the Postal Service of the ’90s, middle-management positions have been eliminated. Employees are evaluating supervisors. And opinions-hundreds of thousands of opinions-are being sought, gauged and used to formulate policy.
“This is not rocket science,” observed John Simmons, president of Participation Associates, a Chicago management consulting firm.
But change is not an easy task, he said. “But it has been done. Ford did it. Xerox did it. General Motors has gone a long way toward it.”
But unlike private industry, the Postal Service must deal with non-performing employees and managers whose jobs are protected by layers of union rules and federal legislation.
Runyon, a former auto industry executive well-schooled in the concept and practice of cultural change in the workplace, decries the “autocratic” history of Postal Service operations. But he admits that it is “very difficult” to fire managers who resist change.
Even in Chicago, where service has been abysmal for years, it apparently was impossible to dismiss the three top managers who presided over the debacle. Instead, they were transferred to other cities.
One of the chief causes of postal workers’ unhappiness is what they perceive as tolerance of shoddy work, according to an opinion survey conducted by the Postal Service.
A stunning 76 percent of the more than half million workers who responded to the 1993 survey said poor performance was tolerated by management-up from 72 percent the previous year.
Suzanne Henry, vice president of employee relations for the Postal Service, acknowledged that the finding was “a concern to us that we do better in that area.”
Legions of Chicago postal workers have complained about management’s unwillingness or inability to discipline workers who drink or use drugs on the job or who fail to do the job at all.
Nationally, one-fifth of workers surveyed said alcohol abuse was a workplace problem; another 13 percent said fellow workers abused drugs on the job.
“People don’t do the work and management doesn’t enforce the rules. Management’s afraid of retaliation,” said a seven-year Chicago carrier.
Sixty-two percent of employees felt that “it is nearly impossible to fire an employee who should be terminated.” Coppola, the Oak Park union official, agrees, saying there are many steps that must be taken before firing can even be considered.
Military veterans, he said, receive an additional layer of protection-they can take their cases before the Postal Service’s merit review board.
Veterans constitute more than 37 percent of career employees in the Postal Service, and it is the largest single employer of disabled veterans with 70,000, Postal Service officials said.
There are two schools of thought on the huge number of workers and managers with military backgrounds. One holds that their command-oriented thinking can hinder Runyon’s cultural revolution; another values their leadership abilities.
Pusateri, 52, likely belongs in the latter. A veteran himself, he donned a parka and boots for three days during last winter’s most bitter cold spell to fill in on mail routes.
“I’d rather go out and deliver the mail than sit here and take telephone calls from people not getting their mail,” he said.
Postal workers like their pay: 83 percent of workers surveyed say wages are good or excellent.
Letter carriers and clerks earn average annual salaries, benefits and overtime of $42,711 a year, wages similar to those paid to Chicago public schoolteachers with bachelor degrees.
But pay is no longer enough to guarantee on-the-job happiness.
It used to be that workers were happy with a job that promised decent wages, solid benefits and security for the future, observes James Holmes, manager of training for the Postal Service.
“Coming out of the Depression, all people wanted was a job. . . . But as a nation, we’ve changed. Our workforce is more educated, more questioning,” Holmes said. “Today, they want to participate. And the more we let them participate in decision-making, the more `buy in’ they’ll have with policies and the better the execution they’ll have on the job.”
Several disturbing trends have emerged since the Postal Service began conducting the opinion surveys in 1992.
Nearly one-third-31 percent-of all minorities and 14 percent of non-minorities reported experiencing racial discrimination in 1993. Nearly 1 in 5 of the females responding to the survey reported sexual harassment from other postal employees.
Henry said the Postal Service is working toward improvements with training in cultural diversity.
“We have to do a significantly better job in preventing discrimination, harassment and improving safety issues,” she said. “That data was very disturbing.”
Statistics show the Postal Service has been an equal opportunity employer. Six percent of workers and management are Hispanic, mirroring their representation in the national population. Blacks account for 21 percent of the labor force and 14 percent of top management jobs, outpacing their 12 percent representation in the population at large.
The survey gauges only perceptions. Those vary greatly.
Less than two weeks ago, local NAACP officials lambasted the postal hierarchy for transferring the three black Chicago postal executives blamed for the mail mess.
The Postal Service responded by saying, “We have a good record in providing minorities with full and equal employment opportunities.”
George Morrison, an African-American with 22 years as a mail carrier, said, “In all my years in the Postal Service, I have not experienced (racial) discrimination.”
“I can’t think of anyone personally who has,” added Morrison, 48, saying however that he’s “sure there’s that possibility.”
