Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor the L.I.E.
Postal workers rerouted in 120-mile commute
By T.E. McMorrow
(Aug. 20 ,2009) In the darkness of 3 a.m. on Monday, July 6, Carolina Shellman left her apartment on 171st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan, got into her 2001 Chevy Impala, and began her drive toward East Hampton. At Seventh Avenue and 111th Street she was joined by Michele Morgan, whose destination was Montauk.
 T.E. McMorrow
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The two women were not driving east to swim or surf or shop on Main Street. They were going to work for the United States Postal Service, Ms. Shellman at the post office in East Hampton, Ms. Morgan at the Montauk branch. At the end of the day, they got back in Ms. Shellman’s car and returned to the city.
Since then, they have made this round trip together about 25 times — a minimum of seven hours a day in transit to work a straight seven-hour shift. They have no choice. If they refuse, they will be fired. They have been, in USPS-speak, “excessed.”
Mail use by Americans has been declining in recent years as more people switch to the Internet to pay bills and communicate with friends. Then came the crash of 2008. As the stock market fell, so too did the volume in the postal system. In June of this year, the USPS determined that it had 110 extra employees in Manhattan. That is when the excessing process began.
“According to our contract,” Ms. Morgan explained, “they are allowed to excess us. They are allowed to reassign you to another craft,” that is, a nonsupervisory position such as that of a window clerk or mail carrier.
“They can’t cut your pay or your benefits. But according to the contract, they have the right to send you within 125 miles from home.“
“They notified me July 2 at 7:50 p.m.,” Ms. Morgan said. “We were called into a room one at a time. They had people from the union and management there.” When she was told to report to Montauk the following Monday, she had to look at a map to find it. “I went to MapQuest — 118.1 miles away.”
The excessing process is based on seniority, or, as Ms. Morgan put it, “juniority — the more junior you are, the farther away they send you.” Ms. Morgan was last in the seniority line, and so was sent the farthest away.
Actually, she has worked for the USPS longer than most current employees, having started in 1983. But she worked as a supervisor from 1998 through 2006, and, while this time is credited to her pension, it makes 2006 her effective year of hire as a “crafts person.”
Ms. Shellman has worked for the Postal Service since October 2005. “I worked as a mail processor,” she said. “I was able to take the class and become a window clerk, May 2008. I felt I was on a good track to move within the organization. But I had an accident at work in February. A metal cage had run over my foot. While I was on sick leave, I got a letter saying I was being excessed.”
She was told to report to the Morgan Post Office in Manhattan, where she was placed in the “blue room.” This is where she met Ms. Morgan.
The blue room was originally used as a pool room, where USPS workers who weren’t being used at the moment would await an assignment. Today it is a form of purgatory where employees do nothing for eight hours a day.
“You are not allowed on the work floor,” Ms. Morgan said. “You have to sign out if you go to the bathroom.” The blue room is no longer painted blue. “Perhaps they called it that,” Ms. Morgan laughed, “because that is the way it made you feel.”
Next, they were excessed, with Ms. Shellman being transferred to East Hampton. She had never been to Long Island before. “It’s 120 miles when you take a straight line, but when you actually do the driving, it is a lot more than that.”
Ms. Shellman knew that Ms. Morgan did not have a car and asked her to join her for the ride. Ms. Morgan arrives with Ms. Shellman at about 6:30 a.m. at the East Hampton Post Office, where she is picked up and taken the rest of the way by the officer in charge acting as postmaster in Montauk, Laurie Brunson.
Ms. Morgan then works straight through until 2:30 p.m., when she rides the dispatch truck carrying mail out of Montauk to return to East Hampton.
Ms. Brunson has been the postmaster at the Montauk Post Office since the end of June. “I found out a couple of days after I was here that I was getting a new person from Manhattan,” she said.
“There was no way for her to get from East Hampton to Montauk, so I figured I would leave East Quogue a bit earlier and pick her up in East Hampton to make it easier for her.”
Asked why she thought the USPS had transferred Ms. Morgan to Montauk, Ms. Brunson said, “I don’t know. I am on the receiving end. By me receiving another person, I am over budget by 40 hours.”
After considerable effort, Ms. Shellman and Ms. Morgan found someone who would rent them a room in Springs for three nights a week. Now they make the trip out to the South Fork on Monday, return to the city Wednesday night, spend a day off with their families on Thursday, then travel back out east Friday morning and back to New York on Saturday night.
“It is difficult to leave my home at 3:30 in the morning,” said Ms. Shellman, a single mother who supports her ailing parents, “and know I’m not going o see my kids for two or three days. When I come home, I am a zombie.
Given the cost of rent and gas, she said, it is as if “a third of my salary has been slashed. I still have the same bills, but I have to pay all this money.”
Her parents look after her children while she is away, but her mother does not speak English, and her father is recovering from open-heart surgery. Ms. Shellman learned that he had been hospitalized with a relapse last week as she was driving home. “I had to miss a couple of days of work,” she said.
Ms. Morgan’s husband took a second job to put money aside, but they find that income now is going toward the added expenses of Ms. Morgan’s job. The separation from her husband is wearing them both down, she said, and joked, “He is not a happy camper.”
Still, the women’s spirits are buttressed by the workers and people they meet. “The people in East Hampton have been great to me,” Ms. Shellman said. “My co-workers, the postmaster, the customers. The customers come to the window, they see I am different,” she laughed — she is from the Dominican Republic. “They are really nice to me.”
Tom Gaynor, a spokesperson for the USPS New York Metro area, said that the postal system volume is projected, with one month left in the fiscal year, to drop by 38 billion pieces per year since 2006, by far the steepest decline ever.
“There is an excess of employees in certain offices,” Mr. Gaynor said. “All reassignments and personnel actions are being handled in strict accordance with the national agreement between the Postal Service and the Postal Workers Union.”
Asked if the USPS were making highly undesirable transfers in hopes that the workers would simply quit, Mr. Gaynor said, “We are abiding by the terms of the labor agreement with the union.”
“That’s a bunch of hogwash,” said Clarice Torrence, the president of the New York Metro Area Postal Workers Union. “There isn’t a station in New York where you don’t stand in line for an hour or more.”
“They are making their lives so miserable hoping they will quit,” Ms. Torrence said. “We are grieving it. But that is a long time down the road. This issue will be going to court.”
“I never want to be on welfare,” Ms. Shellman said. “I want my kids to know I am responsible. I am setting an example for my kids. I can offer the post office a lot. I want my job.”
“This is only the beginning,” Ms. Morgan said, and it goes beyond her own fate. “Supervisors have no protection,” she said, “so, at the end of the month, many of them will be laid off.”
Will Ms. Morgan and Ms. Shellman be excessed again? After Montauk and East Hampton, for all they know Connecticut could be the next stop. “That is my worst nightmare,” Ms. Shellman said. “I don’t know. Am I protected? I am afraid.”