When the pandemic shut every little thing down, the US Postal Service (USPS) was essential in making sure people throughout the nation could get the goods and items they require. Yet a new report found the postal employees that delivered those items are being cheated of pay they should have, as well as the agency is hardly being held accountable.
The Facility for Public Honesty, a nonprofit media organization, launched a report on Tuesday that exposed the USPS “on a regular basis rips off” mail carriers out of their pay. Through exclusive adjudication records and also Freedom of Information Act demands, the record discovered because 2005, the federal government has actually mentioned the USPS 1,150 times for underpaying workers that resulted in $659,000 of shed pay.
However the Labor Department still enabled the USPS to pay back less than half of that amount to workers, as well as in 19% of the situations, it’s unclear whether workers got paid back in any way.
” Supervisors found to be unfaithful were rarely disciplined– frequently getting just a warning or even more training,” the record claimed. “In four cities, settlement files reveal, post office managers continued to modify time cards after promising union leaders they would certainly stop.”
Not only did workers not obtain their rightful pay, yet from 2010 to 2019, records disclosed that a minimum of 250 managers in 60 post offices were captured altering staff members’ time cards to reveal them functioning less hours, causing unsettled salaries.
Mail carriers claimed their supervisors are under pressure to keep overtime costs down, as well as even if they were functioning a lot longer than a 8 hr day, they were informed sometimes to clock out at eight hours and keep functioning without pay.
The USPS has know this issue for several years. In a 2009 letter to legislators, the company’s examiner general confirmed employees were being underpaid, yet the problems still persisted, as well as in 2019, the examiner basic discovered that, over a six-month duration, supervisors had actually removed more than 46,000 work hours from employees across the country.
Mail carriers told Public Stability they assume supervisors keep docking their hrs since supervisors’ yearly pay elevates depend on keeping overtime investing down. USPS did not talk about whether pay increases are connected to overtime investing.
This investigation adheres to records showing the dire conditions of postal employees quickly after the pandemic started. Insider reported in April of last year that as postal workers were providing mail during a global pandemic, a growing variety of them checked favorable for COVID-19, with a few of them passing away from the virus, as a result of insufficient testing and also failure to adhere to Center for Condition Control and also Avoidance (CDC) guidelines.
“A colleague specified that the supervisor coughed in his instructions less than a couple of feet away as a joke after the staff member had actually made a comment regarding [the coronavirus],” a USPS employee informed Insider at the time.
