U.S. Postal Service Mixes Technology With Antiquity : Mail: Automation was supposed to improve service. But efforts to automate have been plagued by poor management and planning, costly changes of direction and scandal.

At the gigantic mail-processing center in New Orleans, 22 clerks sit in front of pigeonholes, the kind used 214 years ago by Benjamin Franklin’s office, slowly examining each letter before placing it into its proper, numbered niche.

Mail handlers unload letter trays from trucks, wheeling them inside where others haul, lift, toss and sort mail all night and half the day.

In the middle of this scene from the 1950s is an island of innovation, the U.S. Postal Service’s link to the 21st Century: new, electronic sorting machines that flush 28,000 letters an hour past blinking electronic eyes and into one of 100 steel traps, each representing a carrier’s route.

But the sorted letters must be picked up again by human clerks and delivered by human carriers. In the course of being sorted and delivered, a typical letter is touched by 14 humans’ hands.

Decades after its first stab at modernizing, the Postal Service--a $41-billion-a-year, government-owned corporation with more employees than the U.S. Army--has undergone the most expensive, traumatic technological change in its history. The change has not yet been palpably beneficial.

Having poured $526 million into new sorting machines and other technology in the last 12 months, the Postal Service faces a $1.6-billion loss this year, declining business growth, lagging worker productivity and raids on its most lucrative business by private competitors.

“We’ve got to capture the savings dollar-for-dollar that these machines represent or we can kiss the Postal Service as we know it goodby,” Robert Setrakian, chairman of the Postal Board of Governors, told postmasters in September.

30-Cent Stamp Expected

Meantime, U.S. postal patrons can get ready to kiss the 25-cent stamp goodby. As Postal Service costs continue to rise nearly 1 1/2 times as fast as inflation, the board is prepared to raise postage rates again in 1991, probably to 30 cents for a first-class letter.

First-class mail delivery performance was at a five-year low last year, and complaints about late mail rose last summer by 35%, despite a sluggish 1% growth in mail volume.

Automation was to be the service’s hope for a turnaround. But efforts to automate have been plagued by poor management and planning, costly changes of direction, internal scandal and an inability to achieve the paramount goal of moving the mail with fewer people.

With 822 new sorting machines like the one in New Orleans installed across the country in the last two years, the post office’s total work force declined by only 1.1%. In the area most affected by automation, mail processing, the worker pool actually increased by 5,131 people, according to postal figures.

Work-force reductions are complicated by union contracts that provide postal workers with wages and benefits worth about $20 an hour and contain strict work and assignment rules, strong seniority rights, restrictions on the use of part-time employees and bans on layoffs.

The New Orleans post office is one example of how poor planning from above and labor restrictions from below can play havoc with efforts to cut costs.

Within an eight-month period, the facility received seven new 60-foot-long letter-sorting machines, had two others taken away and another four already in the plant retrofitted with new equipment. To make room, concrete walls were knocked down overnight and some of the new equipment was used to hold down still-drying floor tile.

Despite drastic decreases in the volume of mail handled, the service had to hire additional employees: technicians to run the new machines. Postal managers were unable to lay off people whose jobs were made redundant by technology. Instead, they transferred employees to areas where there was more work and adjusted work hours to better coincide with the new mail flow.

Morale Plummets

The changes affected workers’ personal lives and depressed morale. “You’re talking upheaval,” said postmaster Charles K. Kernan, general manager of the New Orleans division.

About 550 processing clerks on the late-night shift downtown were told to begin work at midnight instead of 10 p.m. This meant a 10% pay cut because more of the shift occurred in daylight hours. The change also made it impossible for many parents to get home in time to send their children to school.

Wayne Cola, who works the letter-sorting machine, said his three children now must spend the night with his mother-in-law because he gets off later in the morning. “The kids don’t like it,” he said.

Postal officials in New Orleans also centralized mail processing so they would have more mail to feed into the machines. As a result, 22 of the 34 manual clerks in a nearby suburb were forced into the downtown processing center because there was no work for them elsewhere. They were put in one corner of the facility where they spend the day under-employed, sorting letters by hand.

“The mail is not coming in here so we have to slow down” to avoid looking idle, said C. J. Roux, a postal clerk. “We don’t want to work ourselves out of a job.”

The transfer infuriated some longtime employees, who had thought that they would be protected in desirable jobs because of their seniority.

“They shuffled me away like an old piece of furniture,” said Alvin Coulon, a 27-year veteran of the post office and one of those transferred to the midnight shift in New Orleans. “Nobody knew nothing” about the change. “Nobody can do nothing about it,” he said.

With more mail being sorted in processing offices, the goal across the country is to have letter carriers spend more time on the street, with larger quantities to carry. But some carriers are not happy about that possibility and they, too, admit to slowing their work pace.

“They know the future,” Joseph Williams, manager of the Carrollton post office in a section of New Orleans, said of his disgruntled carriers.

Although automation was planned for years, some offices were caught off-guard when it finally arrived. For example, last fall a planned upgrade of some of the sorting machines in the main District of Columbia processing center, which serves Washington, as well as Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland, caused a drop in on-time deliveries from 93% to 79% because postal managers were unable to adjust to the temporary shutdown of some equipment.

The standard is 95% on-time arrival.

The most advanced machine in the current automation plan is called a “multi-line optical character reader.” Its electronic eye can read a five-or nine-digit typed or printed ZIP code and up to four lines of address. The machine translates the address or ZIP code into a bar code symbol, which it sprays on the envelope, then sorts to a particular tray that represents a carrier’s route. Bar code machines read and sort envelopes that contain the codes.

Officials point to San Diego as a model of the way automation should work. The success there is due largely to the innovative work of local managers who devised their own strategy for using the machines and, more important, figured out how to stop the workers from feeling threatened by the change.

“It’s like a rock in the water,” said San Diego division postmaster and general manager Margaret Sellers. “You start out with a ripple; if you don’t do planning, you get a tidal wave.”

First, Sellers created an automation team, with five subcommittees to manage the change and to sell it to employees. When she received the first sorting machine, she put it on display at a post office open house and then persuaded union leaders to hold meetings and to walk the workroom floor explaining to workers what the machines could and could not do.

“Our reaction at first was against it,” said postal clerk Gary Pattee, an eight-year veteran. “It was hard to sell it to us because we thought we were out of here.”

Instead, Pattee, like other workers, was encouraged to learn how to operate the mechanical letter-sorting machines, and he was paid for doing it on his own time. Now his skills and his position are more flexible.

Fast-growing San Diego has been insulated from some of the problems experienced elsewhere because redundant employees are used to handle an increasing volume of mail. Still, the office has been able to reduce the number of manual sorting clerks by 10% during the first year of automation.

The mission of the U.S. Postal Service is indisputably ambitious. Each day a work force of more than 800,000 employees in 40,000 post offices and processing centers across the country flies, ships, trucks and carries an estimated 537 million pieces of mail to 92 million households and 7.3 million businesses.

The United States alone produces 40% of all the mail in the world and has kept the cost of its first-class stamp well below that of every other major capitalist nation.

Postal officials are lobbied by no fewer than 70 industry groups and must negotiate compensation and working conditions with four labor unions and three managers’ organizations. Once a repository for political patronage jobs, its relationship with Capitol Hill today consists of 24 annual oversight hearings before committees in both houses of Congress.

Its work has been made no easier by constant turnover at the top--there have been four postmasters general in the last five years.

The history of the service’s efforts to automate is one that “makes me want to cry when I rehear it,” said Deputy Postmaster General Michael S. Coughlin.

D. H. Shepard first invented an “apparatus for reading” addresses in 1951, according to records of the Patent Office. A handwritten memoir by Omer M. Long in the postal archives shows that during the late 1950s and 1960s the then-Post Office Department had the lead in optical character readers.

“We were visited regularly by the foreign engineers trying to learn the state of the art,” Long wrote. “Unfortunately, management . . . changed so often . . . (or was) totally unsuited for the position . . . that we lost all respect for lack of performance in the field.”

Lawrence F. O’Brien, postmaster general in 1965-68, called the post office’s 1960s research and development investment “laughable.”

In 1978, then-Postmaster General William F. Bolger announced the invention of a nine-digit ZIP code, which made it possible for new machines to read an envelope and sort it to a particular carrier’s route. Reacting to opposition from commercial mailers and the public, Congress put a three-year hold on the idea. When the nine-digit code finally became policy, many fewer mailers used it than predicted.

There were other problems as well. In one 18-month period, the Postal Service gave $25 million in rate discounts to business mailers for using a nine-number ZIP code that the new machines could process, but then failed to process them on the machines, according to the General Accounting Office.

In 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan appointed Peter E. Voss to the Postal Board of Governors. In 1986, Voss pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks from a Michigan lobbying firm for his help in trying to steer a $250-million sole-source contract for optical scanners to Recognition Equipment Inc., a Texas firm.

Postmaster General Anthony M. Frank said the Voss scandal set the agency back 18 months in its effort to automate.

Foreign firms now dominate the field of mail-automating equipment. Contracts for many of the newly installed machines went to a Texas licensee of a West German firm, AEG Telefunken.

This month, reaffirming its long-term commitment to automation, the Postal Board of Governors endorsed a five-year strategic plan that will cost more than $5 billion. Frank has promised to keep costs 2% below inflation, to achieve historic productivity gains and to increase revenues.

“This is not a speedboat here. It doesn’t turn on a dime,” Frank said in an interview. “It is changing, it is slow, it is frustrating once in a while, but so is every large corporation.”

Those Who Mail Most. . . Cards and letters mailed in 1987. United States: 82,642,680,000 (41%) Japan: 17,052,890,000(8%) U.K.: 13,568,100,000 (7%) France: 10,699,900,000 (5%) India: 10,332,810,000 (5%) Soviet Union: 8,094,000,000 (4%) W. Germany: 7,859,570,000 (4%) China: 5,478,920,000 (3%) Canada: 4,541,920,000 (2%) Italy: 4,335,070,000 (2%) Spain: 3,079,040,000 (1.5%) Australia: 2,797,660,000 (1%) Netherlands: 2,731,400,000 (1%) Note: Shows domestic and international mailings. Source: The Washington Post . . .And What It Costs Where The cost of mailing a domestic letter, converted and rounded to the nearest U.S. cent, based onforeign exchange rates published in The Washington Post Oct.27,1989. W. Germany: 54 cents Italy: 48 cents Japan: 44 cents Norway: 44 cents Austria: 39 cents Sweden: 38 cents Netherlands: 36 cents France: 35 cents Belgium: 34 cents Canada: 32 cents U.K.: 32 cents Australia: 32 cents Switzerland: 31 cents United States: 25 cents Source: The Washington Post