USPS Isn't Paying 45,000 Rural Postal Workers This Week

https://jalopnik.com/usps-isnt-paying-45-000-rural-postal-workers-this-week-1850797494

by rntn • 3 years ago

89 68 3 years ago

callalex3• 3 years ago

I don’t understand how this story is being framed as the union letting the workers down, when it is the employer who failed to pay the workers properly? And the Union has forced them to implement a workaround?

klyrs2• 3 years ago

The article mentions a decertification effort by some members of the union, which currently has ~9.2k of 36k signatures required.

https://decertifynrlca.com/

callalex3• 3 years ago

Yes, I understand that the workers are unhappy with the way their union has negotiated for them, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to the employer not paying the negotiated amount. Why is that a failure of the union like the article states?

dgrin91• 3 years ago

I think the union failure they are referencing is the weak accountability that the union is holding USPS to. The union signed off on this money order compromise even though it has significant disadvantages for the workers and gives full absolution to USPS.

The root failure here is USPS no question, but the union response is weak.

bobmcnamara4• 3 years ago

Jalopnik is owned by Gizmodo, who are notoriously anti worker and have been locked in mortal combat with the writer's guild for ages.

zlg_codes• 3 years ago

Aren't they all owned by Gawker, which was commandeered by Peter Thiel in the frivolous Hogan case?

I wouldn't trust a Gawker site for any information.

dahdum• 3 years ago

I doubt the union “forced” them, cutting checks manually is the standard practice for payroll screwups like this. I’ve seen it happen in a handful of companies, all but one outside their control. Two of them offered to cover any resulting overdraft fees.

The Union stuff is backstory and fluff to fill out the article.

rhaway84773• 3 years ago

Lol being let down by the union?

That sounds like the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard based on the article.

USPS had a “catastrophical” payroll error and has been unable to resolve it.

This is USPS’s job and they haven’t been able to do it. The Union has stepped in and implemented a workaround that will be very helpful to the vast majority of USPS’s employees until USPS fixes its fuckup.

How is that a letdown by the union?

akira2501• 3 years ago

The Union has stepped in and implemented a workaround

The USPS is, itself, an issuer of money orders. I assumed that's what they were referring to. I'm not sure at all how the union "implemented" anything here.

themadturk3• 3 years ago

From the article, it sounds like the union may have suggested or even demanded this as a solution to the problem. Under DeJoy, I wouldn't be surprised if the carriers otherwise would have been forced to wait another two weeks for a double paycheck.

bobmcnamara4• 3 years ago

It's standard substandard antiunion Jalopnik shoveltext, did you expect reporting?

CWuestefeld• 3 years ago

We should expect the resignation of the CIO, at the very least.

My classes in finance said that rule #1 is to make your payroll (followed closely by pay your taxes). Failure to do this - even when the problem isn't cash flow, but IT failure - is inexcusable. It's the CIO's job to ensure that any risks to this are mitigated.

stalfosknight2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, suits and other manager types rarely take responsibility for their failure of leadership. They'd rather blame a contractor or a junior IC than admit they don't know what they're doing.

abduhl4• 3 years ago

Why shouldn’t the contractor and junior IC also lose their jobs for this level of fuck up? This is literally someone’s kids’ food on their table. Why does anyone in the chain get a pass?

Fire them all. For cause.

mistrial9• 3 years ago

exactly yes - because in a large bureaucracy, "stall and blame" are the daily routine, and your skill at competitively doing this in a crowd, is how you got your promotion.. not everyone has seen this in action, but once you see it .. and it often takes years to see it.. you will know the truth of it..

I believe that this USPS situation is a degeneration of internal fights that are lasting more than a decade now.. it is about money and authority, indeed

trashtester2• 3 years ago

Fireing the CIO only helps if you give the next one enough power to solve the issues, even if it means serious disruption in the organization, with unhappy unions, middle managers etc, which may lead to resignations, short term cost increases and even operational downtime (though hopefully less critical services than payroll)

A lot of organizations, the company culture becomes so entrenched that almost no amount of C-level meddling will make a big difference. And this is especially common in government organizations (and in companies with very strong unions).

worik• 3 years ago

A computer failure. Again.

We have been doing payroll for over seventy years. To fail to implement a payroll is a dreadful mistake, and a person is responsible

When civil engineers make mistakes like this there is a postmortem and we learn what the mistake was and how not to do it again.

Until we start taking responsibility, like real engineers do, computer programmers, we, will continue to let people down like this

abduhl4• 3 years ago

It requires tech to move beyond the standard refrain that this is the manager’s fault. It’s hard to get somebody to accept liability when it can directly hit their pocket book.

_trampeltier• 3 years ago

It is standart exept in the software world.

ConorSheehan1• 3 years ago

Other engineers don't take direct responsibility either. I've never heard of an individual engineer getting sued because a rocket they worked on exploded, or a bridge they built collapsed.

Plenty of tech companies do post mortems. This is almost certainly a failure of management. If a single engineer caused this, the process is broken.

What the tech industry needs is professional indemnity insurance and competent management.

tremon• 3 years ago

But it is the manager's fault: that's the person who holds all the cards in the decision-making process. If you want it to be someone else's fault, then start advocating a different chain of decision making, rather than complain about it being a default refrain.

bravetraveler• 3 years ago

RCAs have been fairly common in my experience as a systems administrator/SRE/architect

Though... I have managed to avoid both startups and government work

victorbjorklund• 3 years ago

Okay this is probably something that needs a very high level of stability. But many apps/websites arent about life and death. If hackernews goes down no one dies. If a bridge goes down people might die. That is why civil engineering is more regulated (and work takes more time than if it wasnt).

asveikau• 3 years ago

I think programmers can actually misjudge when their bugs are negatively impacting people's lives, especially when they are in the mindset to justify not fixing a bug or improving on a broken design.

I've had some experiences working on some popular software, and have definitely seen people trivialize the impact of a bug in ways that do not appreciate that end users are putting the software in the middle of their life, and hence not understanding what it means to the end user when stuff is broken.

So a programmer saying "dude relax, it's just a website" doesn't really hold weight to me. To you, a programmer who doesn't want responsibility or hasn't prioritized a bug, it's just a website. To the end user, maybe they are using it in a way you don't expect, they want it to work, and it actually is meaningfully harmful to them when it fails in some way. You can say it's on them for "misusing" your app but ... Again, that's blaming the user for your bugs.

A real world example I recall was a colleague who trivialized data loss and reasoned that nobody stores important stuff on that app. The customer complaint was that the "trivial" data that was lost was a recording of his deceased father, or something of the sort.

hn_version_0023• 3 years ago

Some software work requires the same level of engineering as public works like roads, bridges, electrical grids, pace makers, etc.

Most software probably doesn't require that level of rigor. IMO, those who work on critical software ought to be formally licensed like "normal" engineers who design roads, bridges, and so on.

I think about chiropractors when I think on this topic. They don't have the same training, the same level of rigor or skill (IMO). But they can still help people, hell some folks swear by it. But the point is, they aren't formally licensed in the same way and still make their living.

It isn't a perfect analogy, admittedly. Nor is it a welcome topic on this forum! Regardless, I believe some industries should require licensed software engineers.

brightlancer• 3 years ago

Industry standards are overwhelmingly better than government regulations (laws).

Okay this is probably something that needs a very high level of stability. But many apps/websites arent about life and death. If hackernews goes down no one dies. If a bridge goes down people might die. That is why civil engineering is more regulated (and work takes more time than if it wasnt).

Yeah, sometimes folks are working on something that doesn't matter at all, but that's the exception rather than the norm.

As a general rule, what we do can cost someone their life or their livelihood: sure my foul-up might not kill any users/ customers, but the lost ad revenue might cost some junior Nobody their job as part of budget cuts. That person loses their income for rent and for food, they lose their health insurance (maybe for their family), and I don't have a care in the world because my foul-up didn't impact me in any meaningful way.

Everything involves risk and we shouldn't punish individuals for taking a risk we told them to take -- but we often take risks without considering the consequences, and without _bearing_ any of the consequences. It's called a "moral hazard".

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

When civil engineers make mistakes like this there is a postmortem and we learn what the mistake was and how not to do it again.

We do that in software too. It’s called an agile retrospective. Somehow it leads to more of the same crap.

And thats because management usually doesnt allow for proper engineering. They call that getting lost in the details.

So then we end up with things failing miserably again and again. But agile books get sold, mckinsey and other bastardisation factories generate profits, and so on.

abduhl4• 3 years ago

In civil engineering there is a responsible engineer. Nobody cares what management says - business takes a back seat to public safety, the engineer is in charge. Designs and products are required by law to be backed by an engineer who is personally responsible so the business excuse of “management told us” no longer carries sway: management cannot release a product without a responsible engineer by law so management MUST ultimately be subservient to the math.

Software “engineers” cling to their management driven paradigm and resist true accountability and responsibility for engineers because, ultimately, it’s easier and more profitably personally to hide behind the excuse that “management” made the decision.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Yeah. We pretend to do it in software. If the liability isn’t placed legally on anyone’s shoulders, then it’s not actually being done.

That’s indeed what makes it easy for management to consciously or subconsciously allow outcomes that do real harm like people not getting paid. There is no incentive not to be a %#^*up. At worst a manager looks bad. But they can always blame the engineers since there’s a system in place, so it couldn’t have possibly been the manager being a %#^*up.

iancmceachern• 3 years ago

It's commonly done in software in regulated environments, i.e. iso 62304 for medical devices

jjav• 3 years ago

We do that in software too. It’s called an agile retrospective.

A retrospective is not an incident postmortem, very different things.

A retrospective tries to look at how the agile process went wrong again this past sprint, but is not focused specifically about one production incident.

Companies should be doing incident postmortems on any incident of significance to identify action items to improve what went wrong on that specific case.

stefan_• 3 years ago

Who said the "computer programmers [..] let people down"? "A computer failure" is the rallying cry of middling bureaucrats all over the world because to them it translates into "no one is to blame", used most prominently of course when something is their responsibility.

If you can't make payroll with the payroll software, start hand signing checks, but don't blame "the software" and "the computer programmers".

unfocused• 3 years ago

Here is the (probably) one of the worst payroll system failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

As far as I know, no one was fired. The Phoenix pay system for the government of Canada is a good example of so many failures. People really need to stop thinking that building systems with 10s of thousands of business rules is « easy ».

plussed_reader• 3 years ago

More fruits from the DeJoy era of USPS. I do believe he is working as intended.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

And there is a large amount of advocacy for the USPS to take over consumer banking. No thanks. One thing about the government is that you can't sue them for their mistakes.

ddejohn• 3 years ago

And there is a large amount of advocacy for the USPS to take over consumer banking. No thanks.

Where are you hearing this? Only thing I've heard in the last few years is that the USPS used to handle simple banking for people, and that it would benefit rural and underserved folks. I've not heard anything about the USPS "taking over consumer banking".

One thing about the government is that you can't sue them for their mistakes.

Right, because for-profit banks have treated us so well in recent years...

stonogo2• 3 years ago

There are three sentences in this post and two of them make some pretty wild claims without any evidence. I've never even heard of this "postal bank takeover" idea before, so I'd really appreciate some links where I can learn more.

And of course you can sue the government; people do it all the time. If you're harmed by a federal official in the execution of their duty, you can sue. You'll have to prove damages and negligence/malice, of course. Both the federal government and the state governments have explicit tort law laying out the circumstances within which a private citizen may sue the government.

themadturk3• 3 years ago

Yeah, that's not a thing. It's been suggested that the USPS revive postal banking, which would merely make it another player in the banking system, not the sole banking entity in the U.S.

callalex3• 3 years ago

Where can I read about this claim?

sschueller2• 3 years ago

Why do US companies pay out every week instead of every month? Is there some sort of benefit to it? I would think the overhead is higher and makes things more complex especially if you have an outage.

h2odragon2• 3 years ago

USPS pays out every two weeks, that's very common.

jll29• 3 years ago

Agreed. And if you move apartments/flats, you will need several monthly rents to pay your deposit, so a two-week paycheck is not helpful, especially when you start a new job at the same time.

dawnerd• 3 years ago

I used to get paid monthly and hated it. Heck, I’d rather take daily payouts.

MerelyMortal• 3 years ago

Every two weeks is the norm in the U.S.

If I had to guess, it's an artifact from when people had to pick up their paper checks from their boss. Now with computerized direct deposits, I don't see why it can't be every week (or even daily).

orev• 3 years ago

Something as critical as payroll needs to be reviewed by a person before payout. Doing it daily would be insane.

The comment was asking why not pay monthly instead of fortnightly, which would be less frequently.

soultrees2• 3 years ago

Unless the money is in to your hands or in your account, it’s not yours. In fact, every day in between the day you worked and the day you were paid could be considered theft - as the value of your cash has gone down slightly in that period due to official government policies to devalue cash at a certain percentage every year, and the company is earning interest (or investment) until it’s in your account.

sschueller2• 3 years ago

The US isn't what I would call a "worker friendly" place so IMO the payout period is completely under the decision of companies yet most choose to pay ever week or ever other week while in Switzerland for example almost every company pays out monthly.

I was curious if there was some benefit for a company to pay more frequently when it appears to be more of an overhead.

themadturk3• 3 years ago

In the US some organizations pay weekly, some bi-weekly (26 times a year), some semi-monthly (24 times a year) and some even monthly. If any one of those is your organization's standard, your payroll's systems are set up that way and the "overhead" is built into your standard procedures.

The article emphasizes "this week" not because the USPS pays weekly, but because Friday of this past week was the standard bi-weekly payday.

h2odragon2• 3 years ago

There's still confusion over this; from what I hear most workers are saying they'll wait for the post office to work it out rather than have to pay back money.

I gather the problem is that while the regular schedule time was accounted for properly and paid, the unscheduled time, substitute routes and Sunday / holiday Amazon package deliveries and that kind of thing was completely left out. Many carriers do a lot of that class of work in addition to a scheduled route.

Many folks who do a lot of that are going to be demanding verification of their pay for previous periods now too. Who knows how long they've been screwing that up? It gets insanely complicated with postmasters pretty much estimating hours and pay rates differing from person to person based on arcane rules no one really seems to know.

sitkack• 3 years ago

DeJoy should be in prison for subverting the election to maintain Trump in office. These are aren't technical problems and they aren't accidents. This is willful, malicious infrastructure decay.

USPS Isn't Paying 45,000 Rural Postal Workers This Week

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