A Better Way to Move the Mail

Part Two: Communications Breakdown

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” says the oppressive warden known as the Captain after knocking the recalcitrant main character Cool Hand Luke, into a ditch in the 1967 prison drama starring Paul Newman. “Some men you just can’t reach.” Later in the film, after suffering many more indignities at the hands of his oppressor, a defiant Luke mocks him by repeating his speech and Godfrey, the warden’s Walking Boss, put a fatal bullet in Luke’s neck. I mention Cool Hand Luke because it was a popular movie among postal workers when I worked for the organization, no doubt because the failure to communicate has been such a festering problem between the rank-and-file and their autocratic supervisors over the years. It’s no secret that adversarial postal managers have a well-deserved reputation as poor communicators, but so far they haven’t shot anyone in their zealous efforts to control subordinates. Although there’s been plenty of violence in postal workplaces, the bullets have mostly been flying in the other direction. A disturbing May 16, 1996 Wilmington, Delaware News Journal article, for example, that listed local citizens licensed to carry concealed firearms, identified one individual as a postal supervisor who said he brings his gun to work for protection from violent employees. But most troubling of all about the revelation is the knowledge that the supervisor’s fear was justified.

Early in the morning of May 6, 1993, 45-year-old Larry Jasion, a mechanic who was recently passed over for a promotion, opened fire at the Dearborn, Michigan post office garage, killing one co-worker and injuring three others before killing himself. Before he started shooting, Jasion reportedly said, “It’s time to educate the supervisors.” Four hours later, bullets flew at the post office in Dana Point, California where Mark Richard Hilbun, 38, a postal worker fired a year before, killed a former co-worker and injured two others. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Psycho,” Hilbun also killed his mother and her dog the day before he murdered a letter carrier at the post office. These and many other violent incidents have earned the Postal Service a reputation as one of the most violent institutions in America. The high frequency of violent acts in postal facilities around the nation has underscored the scope of the problem and added a new term to describe the actions of employees who go berserk and kill their associates at work—”Going Postal.”

Of all the hazards postal workers face on the job—from nasty managers and vicious dogs to unsafe equipment and dust—none compares to the threat of deadly force. Between 1983 and 1989, 57 percent of work-related murders at the Postal Service were committed by co-workers or former co-workers compared to only four percent in private industry. Ever since a postal worker in New Orleans murdered his supervisor for refusing his request for leave, the USPS has become the most publicized workplace killing ground in the nation. Between 1983 and 1997 there were 14 documented murderous outbursts committed by employees in postal facilities. The worst postal massacre, which is also the worst workplace shooting in American history, happened at the Edmond, Oklahoma post office in 1986 when 44-year-old Patrick Sherrill went berserk and killed 14 fellow employees before shooting himself in the head. Yet another infamous act of postal violence happened at the Ridgewood, New Jersey post office in 1989. The tragedy there began to unfold when Carol Ott, a supervisor at the Ridgewood facility, fired clerk Joseph Harris. Harris declined to file a grievance over the matter, telling union officials he’d “take care of the problem in his own way.” About eighteen months later, making good on his promise, he broke into Carol Ott’s house and hacked her to death with a samurai sword. After killing her boyfriend, Harris continued his rampage at the Ridgewood post office. Dressed as a Ninja warrior, he shot two mail handlers to death as they arrived for work on the 2 a.m. shift before continuing on his mission. A note found by police in Harris’ apartment complained of “unfair” treatment by supervisors and co-workers.

Tragedy struck yet again in November 1991 in Royal Oak, Michigan, when a recently fired letter carrier sprayed the post office with a semi-automatic weapon, killing four people and wounding six others before using the gun on himself. Employees at the facility said they weren’t surprised when Thomas MacIlvane, who had been fired two days before, went on his early morning shooting rampage. A 15-year postal veteran at the Royal Oak office told the Associated Press that supervisors rode employees all the time. “You couldn’t even use the bathroom unless it was your break,” he said. “They sent a guy home this morning for whistling, for whistling!”

Experts who have studied these tragedies believe that the stressful, autocratic management style that dominates postal labor relations makes USPS workplaces breeding grounds for violence. “Murder is becoming the U.S. Postal Service’s best known product,” wrote Ed Winsten in the December 2, 1991 Federal Times newspaper. “Most people agree that the major problem is the relationship of management and the labor force, a relationship strained by a strenuous workload and the introduction of automation.” Other factors that contribute to the rise in violence, these experts say, include the threat of layoffs because of new technology, wage cuts, loss of benefits, and the Postal Service policy of rewarding managers with promotions instead of disciplining them when they fail. Winsten’s front-page story in the May 24, 1993 Federal Times revealed that because of “toxic” conditions in the USPS, postal employees are “three times more likely to be slain by a co-worker than employees in the general population.” Winsten’s article also pointed out that workplace stress and the displacement of individuals in the wake of changing business cycles, such as the downsizing of the massive postal bureaucracy, are “ingredients for disaster.” Yet, despite the work of a task force formed to find ways to identify and reduce the causes, workplace violence remains an ongoing problem.

The point was made again in December 1996 by fired clerk Charles Jennings when he killed James Brown, a senior labor-relations supervisor at the Las Vegas post office. According to the December 30, 1996 Federal Times, Brown, 59, successfully argued a case against Jennings, a level-4 parcel and bundle sorter operator who had been fired for illegal time-clock rings. According to witnesses, Jennings fired several shots at close range, hitting Brown twice. After killing Brown, Jennings surrendered to Las Vegas police.

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Sadly, despite the continuation of violence into the millennia with three shootings in 2006, three in 2017 and one in 2021, legions of postal bosses continue to employ the autocratic, top-down management style they’re accustomed to— even in the face of overwhelming evidence that two-way communication is essential for good workplace relations and the better performance that results. Numerous surveys conducted by large American corporations over the years have cited a definitive relationship between quality communications and employee productivity. A 1992 Foster Higgins survey of chief executives of 164 large firms, for example, revealed that most top leaders believe “personal communications helps workers job satisfaction and commitment.”

Workplace surveys conducted in the Postal Service over the years confirm the belief that poor communications make relations between employees and managers tense and counter productive. “Despite the Employee Involvement/Quality Work Life process and other efforts to transform postal culture,” said a carrier who took part in a survey conducted by a National Association of Letter Carriers Employee Involvement team before the program was abandoned, “the work climate is terrible. We have far too many bosses who don’t care about getting along with people.” Eight-five percent of the carriers polled in the survey agreed that the work climate was tense and hostile because workplace decisions were made by management without genuine input from workers. Ed Abbey, a former NALC Employee facilitator told me that “Cooperation in the workplace is only possible when management and labor become partners, and that can’t happen as long as the people at the top are unwilling to change their command-and-control attitudes.”

Douglas McGregor’s classic studies of the 1950s suggest that people are better motivated by clear communications rather than tyrannical supervision. McGregor’s findings, espoused as “Theory Y” portrayed workers as “untapped Human Resources” who respond best to creative opportunities to merge their personal needs with the organization’s goals. Unfortunately, in the Postal Service McGregor’s participative management approach was shelved in favor of the hard-line autocratic “Theory X” paradigm. Numerous independent surveys show that employee reliability and responsiveness largely define the quality of service performance in customers’ minds, but such virtues are impossible to develop without the participation of the workforce in an atmosphere free of fear. Marvin Weisbord, author of the classic Productive Workplaces, defines such climates as “those where people learn and grow as they cooperate to improve an organization’s performance.”¹ Managers in Weisbord’s world are flexible, learn new skills quickly, and are capable of communicating clearly. “The essence of an effective organization is learning, not coercing and controlling output,” he writes, “and involving employees in designing their own work.”² Effective managers, moreover, are people who understand that teamwork pays and encourage workers to think for themselves. “The leaders I have learned the most from seem to me to have certain knacks,” observes Weisbord. “They focus attention on valued aspirations. They mobilize energy by involving others. They face the unknown without answers.”³

Weisbord’s vision is at odds with the philosophy of a large number of postal managers who seem to suffer from a sort of “cognitive dissonance,” a process that psychologist Jeffrey Race described as the tendency to suppress or gloss-over important issues raised by employees at the bottom of the organization, especially when management views the information as negative or discordant. A 1991 Duke University study commissioned by former Postmaster General Anthony Frank revealed that the autocratic culture of the USPS places budget first, service second and people last. The majority of workers interviewed contended that postal managers are loath to lend an ear to viewpoints that are antagonistic to the official line or that fail to report what “they don’t want to hear.”

In his acerbic 1971 novel Post Office, Charles Bukowski focused on another unattractive aspect of post supervision in his description of a mean-spirited boss named Johnstone whose autocratic style is repugnant to the book’s main character, Harry Chinaski, a hapless worker whose unhappy postal career “began by mistake.” Many postal employees I worked with agreed with Chianski’s assessment of typical postal supervisors. “They looked at you as if you were a hunk of human shit.” ⁴ Meanwhile, back in the real world, the abusive attitudes of Bukowski’s “Johnstones” who attempt to dominate subordinates stand in strong contrast to effective business leaders of who see themselves as collaborators instead of intimidators, who use their authority to encourage innovation and creativity and who understand how to use their own power to empower others. As management guru Peter F. Drucker points out in The Effective Executive, the task of the leader “is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of the Ten Talents, the task is to multiply performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.” ⁵

Drucker’s vision of leadership is reflected in the operating policies of America’s best-managed companies. 3M, for example, the manufacturer of Scotch Tape and the ubiquitous “Post-it” note pads, has a unique philosophy central to its success that Forbes Magazine called the “ability to nurture creativity.” The company policy of Proctor and Gamble, one of the most successful consumer products firms in the nation, runs along the same lines in an effort to “recognize that its interests and those of its employees are inseparable.” W.L. Gore and Associates is another case in point, where success is achieved via what founder Bill Gore called the “lattice system,” a process that enables information to flow laterally instead of from the top down, allowing people in the organization to interact directly with each other, avoiding the pitfalls of traditional hierarchical structures. The cornerstones of good performance at Gore are: respect for individuals, an almost fanatical devotion to doing right by the customer, and a dedication to excellence.

In the U.S. Postal Service, on the other hand, most of the practices that define Gore’s healthy workplace culture are absent. Postal management has not shown any genuine interest in the values that drive employee and customer satisfaction at an organization such as W. L. Gore, virtues that comprise the key to ending what philosopher E.F. Schumacher called the “technological serfdom” of the workplace. In calling most forms of work today “utterly uninteresting and meaningless,” Schumacher defined the problem and challenged future generations to create alternatives to the dreary world of work common in western industrialized countries. “We have people in the Postal Service who hate to come to work,” former Postmaster General Anthony Frank once remarked. “What an awful thing. I’m not asking people to go into hysterics about going to work. But when people dread coming to work, the organization can’t last. We have to make things better for our people.”

Many factors contribute to the poisonous atmosphere of the postal workplace, but the predominate issue appears to be the lack of clear operating principles, a characteristic that Frank noted when he described the USPS as an “anomaly” among government institutions. “It’s non-partisan, it doesn’t use taxes,” Frank said. “It’s regulated as to its prices. It has 40 oversight hearings a year in Congress. It has a full-time Government Accounting Office staff investigating it. So it is neither fish nor fowl, that is the difficult part. It isn’t really government service in some ways, and yet it is. And, we are required to pay private-sector wages to our employees by legislation, and no other government entity has got that requirement.”

Frank’s assessment partly explains the Postal Service’s “identity crisis,” but there are deeper reasons that have little to do with structural inconsistencies. Management’s quest to redefine the organization as a “business” instead of a universal service and the inherently authoritarian nature of that effort, clashes with labor’s attempts to change the organization into an open system that reflects the pluralistic ideals of democracy and community, which is really the crux of the crisis. Frank’s recognition of the problems didn’t acknowledge that issue, but he did kick-off a national inquiry into USPS management practices in order to find out what’s behind the spate of workplace killings and volatile public expressions of dissatisfaction on the part of postal workers. In its investigation into the matter, the General Accounting Office found a direct correlation between the budget and workplace conditions. When there aren’t enough hours in the budget, that means overtime and that can mean undue stress for front-line employees, the GAO pointed out. The Postal Service is a public enterprise, but its operating practices mirror those of private corporations in many ways. Excessive overtime use is one example. Juliet B. Schor, author of The Overworked American, reported that from 1980 to 1987, overtime hours per employee rose by fifty per year in the manufacturing sector of the economy. ⁶The increase in the overtime rate in the Postal Service has been equally dramatic. In 1971, postal employees worked 42 million hours of overtime. A decade later, that figure totaled over 75 million hours. Many labor leaders contend that these trends reveal an exploitive attitude toward workers that only worsens performance problems.

For many Americans who grew up during the 1950’s and 60’s, the post office was a symbol of reliability, punctuality and respect. From its beginnings in Colonial times, the mail system has remained the communications linchpin of our democracy. After the Post Office Department was reorganized in 1971, however, and became the United States Postal Service, the organization’s reputation began to change. Reorganization eliminated the public subsidy, mandating the USPS to break even. Not surprisingly, reorganization also marked the beginning of a continuous rise in First-class postage rates—from six cents in 1971 to 32 cents in 1995 and 42 cents today. The reorganization of the mails along corporate lines also brought a decrease in some customer conveniences, since to cut costs, management sought cuts in service. One example is the centralized cluster boxes that are now installed in new housing developments in order to eliminate to-the-door delivery.

Congress also added to postal woes by abdicating responsibility for the system, thus allowing management to abandon its mission to serve democracy and adopt a mercantile attitude. In an ad in the May 10, 1996 Wall Street Journal, the Postal Service announced that it now publishes its own symbol of American corporatism—the annual report. “We’re a business, not a bureaucracy,” the ad proclaimed, “a very businesslike business.” What the ad failed to mention was that the shift from public servant to big-business wannabe marked a radical departure from the democratic tradition of universal service established by the Founding Fathers. In the fifty years since the institution assumed its pseudo-corporate identity, the chance to restore its democratic ethos is threatened by the forces of neoliberalism and many critics now believe complete privatization is inevitable.

Reorganization has also meant hard times for postal workers. Despite all the rhetoric about “employee involvement,” the postal workforce is more insecure than ever before. After the USPS abruptly terminated the Employee Involvement process with the National Association of Letter Carriers in 1996, many postal workers concluded that the acrimony between the new breed of managers and the unions framed an important lesson for organized labor going forward—never trust management! It’s noteworthy that former APWU president Moe Biller maintained all along that management never intended to relinquish unilateral decision-making power.

In contrast to the hidebound autocrats running the Postal Service, smart executives are open to criticism from the ranks. “Clearly, the best-run, most respected companies in America,” as Peter Gelfond of the Hay Group management and consulting firm in Philadelphia has pointed out, “conduct regular employee surveys and use the information they get to more effectively organize and manage their people.” Over the years, postal employees concerned about the future of the organization have identified a broad range of factors that influence customer satisfaction. These include worker alienation, autocratic management, and fear of layoffs. Postal people have also articulated a wide array of recommendations to solve operational problems, asserting that the most pressing need is for greater employee involvement and trust at all levels. Managers who feel threatened by these ideas should remember that it’s an American tradition to challenge the status quo. The Constitution guarantees a citizen’s right to speak out and criticize the system. That’s what democracy is all about. The opportunity to challenge the nation’s institutions is what keeps them healthy and is precisely the reason the opinions of all the people in the organization are important. In a creative workplace people aren’t afraid to take risks and try new ideas, but in the Postal Service there’s no foundation of trust and teamwork to support initiatives for communicating ideas that empower the people that are vital to performance excellence. As Marvin Weisbord writes, “The quickest way to increase dignity, meaning and community in a workplace is to involve people in redesigning their work. That’s also the shortest route—in the long run—to lower costs, higher quality, and more satisfied customers.” ⁷

1. Marvin R. Weisbord, Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning, and Community, (Jossey-Bass, 1991).

2. Weisbord, Productive Workplaces.

3. Weisbord, Productive Workplaces.

4. Charles Bukowski, Post Office: A Novel, (Black Sparrow Press, 1971).

5. Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting The Right Things Done,(HarperCollins, 1985).

6. Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, (Basic Books, 1992).

7. Weisbord, Productive Workplaces.