TESTIMONY OF JAMES RADEMACHER, VICE PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF LETTER CARRIERS, WASHINGTON, D.C., ACCOMPANIED BY J. STANLEY LEWIS, SECRETARY-TREASURER, AND JOSEPH H. JOHNSON, FIELD DIRECTOR

Mr. RADEMACHER. Happy to.

I am accompanied by our very able Secretary-Treasurer, Mr. J. Stanley Lewis, on my right, who will later enlarge on testimony on labor-management relations. On my left is our able national officer, national field director of the Washington, D.C. region, Mr. Joseph H. Johnson, of Richmond, Va. Mr. Johnson services the needs of our members in Washington, D.C., the States of Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia.

We are happy to have him join us today.

I am vice president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, with headquarters at 100 Indiana Avenue NW., Washington, D.C. We have more than 200,000 members located in close to 6,500 branches in every State and possession of the United States.

I am delighted and very grateful that you have permitted us to appear before you today. It is seldom that we get the opportunity to inform a committee of problems existing in any but the major areas of our concern-such as pay, retirement, insurance, and the like. Yet there are many other areas which are comparatively minor, but, when put together, add up to a major cause of failing morale, diminishing performance, and widespread dissatisfaction and disenchantment. "Man does not live by bread alone," as you so well know. Thanks to the determination and steadfast resolution of the Post Office Committees and the general membership of the Congress, letter carriers, although not yet at the true level of comparability, are enjoying wage improvements. Yet, morale is not high amongst all employees because there are unsatisfactory conditions of work which together with so many postal pay steps, tend to make for unhappy employment.

I am going to cite a number of specific instances today, but I want to make clear that these examples are merely symptomatic of an unhealthy condition which is widespread in the service.

I don't think there is any quasi-industrial organization of any size in the Nation which tries to get by with untrained supervisors in the way that the Postal Establishment operates.

Although a start is at last being made in this area-after 179 years of total inaction-the efforts to produce a trained skilled body of supervision in the Postal Establishment are pitifully inadequate. Supervisors who know they are not sufficiently trained in their jobs are inclined to compensate for their inadequacy through bluster and petty tyrannies. We have this condition throughout the service, but not all supervisors can be categorized in this fashion.

Of course, this attitude is encouraged by the peculiar conditions which surround postal employment. We have not sought, nor are we currently seeking, rescinding of our restrictions against striking. I want to make that very clear. But the fact remains that, since employees are deprived of any really effective weapon of legal retaliation, some postal supervisors and many postmasters are inclined to exploit their workers and treat them in a manner which would cause instant work stoppages in almost any industry in the private sector.

What we think, therefore, that is most needed is a reform of the state of mind of postal management. This means intelligent training of supervisors-education in how to treat other human beings-instruction in the art of applying intelligent compassion-respect for the human family, and particularly those who work under management's direction. All this is lacking.

The average supervisor today is told by his elders-who have been untrained themselves-that he must dominate and tyrannize over his employees or he will lose control of them. This is all nonsense, of course, but it is part of the folklore of the post office.

The new supervisor is made to believe that he is a lion tamer, alone in the cage of wild beasts, armed only with a whip, a chair, and a gun filled with blanks. When the Clyde Beatty approach doesn't work, he is hurt because the lions snarl back at him.

The attitude and the training of supervision in the post office today has not emerged from the dark ages of the late 19th century despite certain well-meaning efforts to modernize management concepts. Perhaps, Mr. Chairman, this committee will be able to be responsible for dragging postal management, screaming and kicking, into the 20th century.

So much for generalizations, Mr. Chairman. I now would like to get down to specific symptoms of the illness which plagues the entire postal system.

Although our forthcoming national convention, which will be held in Boston, Mass., August 18-24, will act upon approximately 300 resolutions concerning working conditions in the postal service, today we want to mention just a few of the more important difficulties that postal workers are suffering in the areas of training, labor-management relations, attitudes of management, vehicles, and street observation.

Our secretary-treasurer, J. Stanley Lewis, who is accompanying me here today, will elaborate on the recent negotiations between our organization and the Post Office Department which terminated in a signed national agreement. He will want to also elaborate on how management attitudes have seriously affected bargaining between our branch leaders and representatives of management at the local level. Although President John F. Kennedy in signing Executive Order 10988 on January 17, 1962, intended the order to be a giant forward step toward creating a modern climate of labor-management relationship in the Federal service, the Executive order has been widely ignored; and union activity in these areas is meager with negotiations actually being ineffectual.

LABOR RELATIONS

Probably the reason for the ineffectiveness of the order in most instances is the fact the Post Office Department has overreacted and constructed a large bureaucracy within a bureaucracy to handle the machinery. A huge national election among postal workers was ordered and secret ballots were cast to determine which organization, or union, should represent them. The election became a monster popularity contest and the results proved what everyone knew in the first

place; letter carriers wanted to be represented by the National Association of Letter Carriers; other employees wanted to be represented by their craft-the clerks wanted to be represented by the clerk organization, and so forth.

It now appears that the policy is to have management do everything within their power to prevent union gains, rather than to attempt to work with the unions to establish the finest working relationships in Government service. As Mr. Lewis will discuss, our local negotiations this past few months have been labeled a farce by those who participated, and the instructions which were issued to postmasters became nothing more than mandates of destruction of existing local agreements under which both management and labor have been able to work successfully and cooperatively over the past 5 years.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the negotiations at the national level has been the habit of the Department to populate the negotiating table with second-stringers, men without the authority to make any meaningful decisions. The labor union representatives, on the other hand, are first-stringers who have such decisionmaking authority delegated to them. After many hours or days of wrangling over complicated issues, the departmental functionaries will arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, but will then retire to have their conclusion approved or disapproved by their superiors. We, therefore, find conclusions which have been reached through negotiations will be disapproved by superiors who have not participated in the discussion nor listened to the arguments.

Another reason for our organization to consider the negotiating process as being unsatisfactory is due to the inexperience of the Department's personnel in postal matters. There is not one key official who negotiates for the Department who has ever been inside a post office except possibly to mail a package. Each top negotiator for the Department has no postal experience whatsoever other than that which he has acquired over the past few years since his appointment. In the nitty-gritty atmosphere of solid negotiation there is far more need for practical knowledge than there is for theory. Yet, the Department's negotiating crew know nothing about postal work from a practical point of view-only from a theoretical point of view.

We are anxiously awaiting the recommendations of the special Presidential Panel which has been appointed to analyze the fulfillment of Executive Order 10988, and bring in proposals to amend this well-intended order to meet the modern demands of labor-management relations.

TRAINING

Much has been said about training and the Congress only recently approved expenditures of about $2 million for a postal training program. Oddly enough, this money is earmarked for the training of postal management. In fact, $300,000 of this amount was spent for the alleged training program which took place at the University of Oklahoma in February. It is true that in the very large post offices, because of the larger appropriations in these particular establishments, new employees do receive limited training.

However, there are 6,500 post offices in the United States where there are letter carriers. In about 6,000 of these offices postmasters have never been advised that appropriations are available for training new employees. In almost every instance, in the smaller post office the postmaster merely shows the new worker through the office, places a satchel on his shoulder and orders him to deliver the mail. What few errors do occur in the postal service today are caused by the untrained postal worker. It is penny wise and pound foolish for management to close its eyes to the need which exists for well-trained, thoroughly-oriented employees. The Federal Government is spending millions of dollars to train unskilled and uneducated workers in many fields. Yet the postal service which has an annual turnover of over 100,000 workers spends $2 million to train the bosses, and an insignificant amount to train the people charged with the security and sanctity of 83 billion pieces of the U.S.mail.

A press release issued by the Civil Service Commission on May 6 stated that one of every three Federal civilian employees received 8 or more hours of classroom training during fiscal 1967. This may be true in all of the 56 agencies mentioned by the Commission, but certainly in the postal service no such record has been established. Because of the failure of the Post Office Department to insist upon training the thousands of employees who are now required to drive vehicles for the first time, the motor vehicle accident rate in the postal service remains at a very high statistic of more than 28 accidents per each 1 million miles driven. This, naturally, costs the taxpayer considerable money and in many cases the employee suffers painful disabling injury.

Mr. Chairman, on June 1, the Postmaster General issued a press release announcing the signing of a $655,000 contract launching the most extensive management safety training program in postal history. It is all well and good that more than 37,000 postal supervisors throughout the Nation will now be trained, but none of these people are driving vehicles.

At two recent State conventions of letter carriers, we asked for a display of hands of employees who have been forced to use righthand drive vehicles in the performance of their work because of the Department's modern mechanization program. We were disturbed to note a large number of delegates raising their hands admitting there had been little or no training given. Certainly there should be several hours of training by skilled instructors when an employee is asked to drive a right-hand vehicle after a lifetime of driving the conventionaltype vehicle.

We are told there are no funds and there is no time allowance to train drivers. We believe that it would be of significant importance to this committee to ask for a report on driver training, such report to include the number of vehicles, the amount of training given to each driver of the vehicle, and the accident rate on new vehicles including the right-hand-drive trucks. This information should substantiate our charge that inadequate training has been given in this very serious

area.

MANAGEMENT ATTITUDES

It is natural to assume that postal management is particularly concerned about productivity. The postal worker is equally as concerned about prompt delivery of the mail. Letter carriers take pride in not only prompt delivery but in efficient delivery; and skilled, experienced carriers are proud of their enviable record of making correct delivery of misaddressed mail. These same carriers are responsible for forwarding millions of pieces daily to new residences of former patrons of their routes. It is the carrier's responsibility to see that the mail is forwarded to the new address.

In the concentration on productivity there is neglect of humanism in many post offices. Management fails to understand employees are human and are not machines. Attitudes of disrespect prevail in many offices. Employees are pressured to do more. There is rarely an expression of "a job well done" on the part of management despite the allout efforts of most of our membership. On the letter carrier's route he is a member of the family who stands 10 feet tall because of the services he renders. He is a man respected, loved, and honored. However, after completing his strenuous tour he finds upon his return to the post office that he becomes as unimportant as a piece of undeliverable thirdclass mail.

When the hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent in training postal management, certainly one of the classroom sessions should be devoted to the importance of the human element and greater emphasis should be placed upon the need of treating employees with respect and dignity. Postmasters and supervisors should not be permitted to answer a legitimate complaint of an employee with the terse comment "If you don't like it, quit."

In addition to respect for each other, management should be taught respect for the families of postal workers. So many times a wife or a mother in telephoning a report of her husband's or son's illness is treated rudely and angrily by a frustrated supervisor. In other instances, management has been derelict in its obligation to respond in the hour of need. We do not anticipate that each person who becomes a part of management shall be sympathetic to the problems which arise in an employee's personal life, but we do expect that, acting within the scope of their duties, postal management will do everything possible to assist postal workers.

This was not so recently, in a small town in Illinois, which will not be identified at this time because our investigation is pending. A letter carrier died and his wife visited the post office with the hopes of having the postmaster assist her in preparing the forms necessary for life insurance and widow's annuity. After waiting a reasonable time, the widow returned to the post office and was told that perhaps the delay was due to the fact that her husband may not have listed her as his beneficiary. The widow returned to her home and committed suicide because of this insinuation.

At Trenton, Mich., Letter Carrier Leo Schrieber was told each day for the first 6 months of his employment that if he did not like the conditions, he could quit. When he brought this complaint to his assistant postmaster concerning the daily harassment, Carrier Schrieber was