U.S. Postal Service sued over church-run post office

[Khephra]

MANCHESTER, Conn. -- A Jewish veteran and a civil liberties group sued the U.S. Postal Service on Friday, challenging a church-run post office that distributes Christian material.

The Full Gospel Interdenominational Church operates the downtown Manchester post office, where customers can buy stamps, ship their packages, pick up religious brochures and donate money to Christian ministries.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Hartford by Bertram Cooper, 77, and the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, said the relationship violates the Constitution's First Amendment, which calls for the separation of church and state.

"It upset me," said Cooper, a Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War. "I'm walking into a place that's doing government business _ selling stamps, mailing parcels and so forth _ and they're doing this religious bit."

more.............

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ct--postalchurch1003oct03,0,7073473.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire

[BattyDem]

1. Why is a church ...

running a government service? :wtf:

[Zhade]

2. Um...how did this one slip by...? This is just wrong. And illegal.

NT!

[Occulus]

3. A common misconception

Sorry, folks. I'm a postal employee; I can give you some info on this.

The USPS (United States Postal Service) is not a government agency. The USPS makes its money from the sale of stamps, expedited deliveries, and bulk packages; you should see the TV Guides, for example- skids and skids of them when they're published. All of this is charged at a specific rate (my beef is that the bulk mailers are given what amounts to a subsidy in the form of a reduced rate for mailing in bulk. The power of money speaks louder than you do, friends).

The fact is that this office ought to be run by postal employees. It was under contract to the church, according to the article. Well and good, but the religious aspect should have been seperate from the business aspect. As a postal employee, while I respect the charitable work of this church and feel that work should be promoted, I also feel it should not be presented in any way in a business area. Doing so intimates a bias between the USPS and a specific religion, which is anathema to the cause of the postal service.

Let me be honest. As a postal employee, I take seriously the guarantee we as a company provide to the American people regarding their right to private communication. The introduction of large-scale automation into the process has furthered that goal; individuals are much less likely to handle your written missives here in the US than ever before in human history. I say that last with confidence; the USPS runs the most efficient mail system in the world-- by the way, we can thank ElectroCom Automation, Westinghouse, Lockheed Martin, Silicon Graphics, RedHat, Inc., and many, many other companies for providing the equipment that makes this possible. Not everything these companies do is bad; some of their more lucrative and permenant contracts would actually further the cause of freedom, as is the case with the USPS.

Understand I'm not trying to preach or grandstand here; I will be the first to say that the USPS is and has been for many years a fundamentally mismanaged organization. Our postal service promotes from within, and while this is a good thing for the employees, the promotions are made on a basis of volunteerism and/or seniority rather than merit, and as such render the supervision and direction aspect of the superior's job a rather pathetic joke. There are also "not enough Injuns and too many Chiefs" in one union member's parlance, a statement I would heartily agree with: For my shift we have an automation supvisor, a flats supervisor, (sometimes) a manual letters supervisor, a dock supervisor, a maintenance supervisor, a manager of daily operations, and (occasionally) the plant manager.

This for one shift of less than two hundred people.

Lordy.

The problem isn't the offices or the employees, the problem in the USPS is the people in charge. But back to my first point: the USPS is not a government agency. It is a business (which must break even each year but has to operate as if it were a business) which subsists on the sale of stamps and mailing services. Serious, serious policy decisions are made by the Postal Board of Governors.

We're only federal employees when it's convienient for us to be federal employees.

[E_Zapata]

4. Well, your PENSIONS come straight from the US Treas

and that's a fact.

It is a huge misnomer that the USPS is self-supporting.

[Occulus]

5. See?

You only underscore my point- the organization is fundamentally mismanaged. All the money is supposed to come from the sale of stamps and services, and I'll admit that Congress can give the nod to funding.

When you're talking about pensions, I think you're talking about FERS- the Federal Employee Retirement System. I do believe the USPS was required to go along with that system instead of CSRS, the Civil Service Retirement System (I may have my acronyms totally wrong here, folks- DBCS, ISS, OSS, AFCS, LCTS, LIPS, PICS, CFS, AFSM... there are so many for me to remember) because we were considered federal employees at some point. We are; we enjoy both federal and State holidays, but for some reason didn't get Christmas Eve off last year, even though * gave it off for federal employees.

Go figure.

edit: I'm going to bed. PM me if you want more info on the USPS- I'd be happy to provide a copy of our contract, for example- a contract management regularly violates...

[Desperadoe]

15. straight from the US Treas

Oh really now. My pension doesn't come from the US Treasury. You should also differentiate betweem the CSR retirees and the FERS retirees if you are such an expert. If it's such a huge misnomer that the USPS is self-fupporting then why don't you support your statement with some facts.

If you're going to post BS statements like these, then how about backing them up with some statistics and figures to support them.

The USPS is as close to being self-supporting as any government corporation or entity you will see in this country. In fact, not only is it self-supporting but it is required by law to support all the "Welfare Mailers" such as Non-profits (can you say religous orginizations), Bulk Business Mailers, and our very own Congressmen.

The OP is correct that it is somewhat top-heavy but having done a few of those jobs(FSM Supv., Dock Supv., etc.)for 35 years, I assure you it is not in the local management.

If the rest of the Federal Government was as effecient as the USPS we could all have tax cuts and still maintain the budget without defecits.

[Occulus]

19. You mentioned supervisor jobs

and being a supervisor (I presume that's what you meant) "for 35 years", I must ask a couple follow-ups:

How long has it been since you worked on the floor as a clerk?

and

Does your facility have an active FMLA opposition policy, or an active policy requiring repeated FMLA documentation requests?

What about the "casuals in lieu of" issue?

(I'm curious as to whether these are national problems or if they're confined to my facility. Message to eddie: You might notice that I deleted most of my original message. I mistakenly believed you were responding to me. I sincerely apologize if I accidentally offended you. I assure you, it was an accident. Please accept my very humble apology.)

I'll agree that mass mailers are a kind of leech. The USPS should have the authority to declare that everyone using the system pays the same rate for the same service. That is one of the things that could dig the company out of the hole. It would also end up costing advertisers more. I'll leave that to the accountants to address that if it ever happens.

[Desperadoe]

24. Already read the original post

and you should not have deleted it because it was very good.

The "BS" I was referring to was not your post but the one that mentioned that pensions come from the Treasury. A little time spent reading the Postal Reorginization Act of 1970 would explain a lot of things that the public has misconceptions about. CSRS was replaced by FERS simply because the funds in CSRS could not be manipulated and "used" by the crooks in Washington. It should never have been allowed to happen.

Your information is very good and to the point and I won't refute it or try to. I fully realize that local management, in some Plants, is indeed very poor but I haven't found that to be the case in all instances. Over the years I have followed the various cases of labor/management local problems, especially in the situations where violence took place and I can assure you that these situations are not a national problem. Most of these type of policies are the direct result of the District and Plant Managers and the style of management that they pursue. I have seen both sides of this issue and that is why I will not refute your statements.

The case in point though deals with a Contract Station which is just the USPS version of contracting employment with outside contractors. This procedure should have been abandon years ago as noneffective and damaging to the image and integrity of the entire USPS. These people are NOT Postal employees. These units only exist because of community pressure to maintain a retail facility where the USPS deems none to be cost effective, usually, as in this case, where a new facility is built outside of the downtown area.

On this issue of FMLA, I am not up to date on the issue since I am retired for over two years. I will say that my experience with it was horrible, if only because the interpretation was never clear. ASFIC it is a poorly written piece of legislation that should never have been implemented in the USPS or anywhere else in the Federal Government. It will take the courts forever to make this thing work the way it was intended to work because it is so poorly written.

As far as Causals............wished I would have never heard the word. They were my worst nightmare as a manager.

[Occulus]

25. Well, then!

That certainly does answer every question I had. Now I do wish I had left it up, even after I realized my mistake.

Thanks!

[Zhade]

6. Kind of the way the Federal Reserve isn't a government agency.

Thanks for the info - it always helps to get it from someone in the business being discussed.

I must confess to some confusion, however: if the USPS is already a business, why all the talk about privatizing mail?

Also, on a random note: I've seen commercials for the USPS (I think) in which machines seem to scan letters as they pass under them on a conveyer belt. What plans are there for chipping mail and stamps so they can be traced?

[Occulus]

7. they are and are not

a business.

The USPS must run itself like a business, but show no profit for it. It must break even.

Yeah, that sucks.

[Occulus]

16. I've heard about that as well

But I don't have any official information. Sorry.... as an automation clerk, I'm usually one of the last to know anything like that. However, I'm friendly with a couple of our electronic technicians at my plant; I'll be sure to keep myself appraised of anything like that through them.

Mail is currently sorted using a variety of methods, most of them variations on the optical scan process. Mail moves from your mailbox to to local office, where it is sorted by hand into simple categories such as local and outgoing mail, parcels, FAA target mail, etc. (FAA target mail is any parcel weighing more than 16 ounces; such mail is NOT allowed to travel by air for security reasons). Note that, during this process, only the type of mail and the first few digits of the ZIP code are even examined by the employees; we don't know (or care) what it is or who's sending what.

From the local offices, mail is trucked to the nearest or most logical processing and distribution center, which is where I work. From the trucks, mail on the loading dock is further categorized by the mail handlers (a seperate craft from the clerks), with parcels and letters being kept (reasonably) apart from one another. Letter mail goes into a different tub than parcels or oversized envelopes; skids of magazines come in apart from all the rest, for example.

From the loading dock, the mail moves to various parts of the plant for the actual processing. This is the point where human intervention is at a minimum; letter mail geos into a giant hopper/sorter we call Barney (because the machine is big and purple) and is conveyed en masse to the AFCS machines (Automated Facer/Canceler/Sorter). This machine uses an optical character reader, or OCR, to read mail being transported in front of a camera via a dual-belt system: mail is sandwiched between two conveyor belts which move at high speed and the machine reads the handwriting on the envelope, sprays a barcode on it if it's readable, and that gets sorted to a series of bins.

From there, several things can happen. If the mail received a barcode, it gets run on a similar machine to the AFCS, the Delivery BarCode Sorter, or DBCS. The DBCS is a high-speed barcode reader, and that's basically it- 172 individual stackers, one for each three-digit prefix in a zip code, or part of a delivery walk sequence (these machines can actually place the mail in the order of delivery for the carriers' routes!). If, however, the address cannot be read on the AFCS, it goes to the ISS (Input SubSystem). The ISS scans images of the front of the mailpieces and those images are sent via high-speed leased lines to a remote encoding center, or REC site (I've worked at one of those as well).

At the REC site, postal employees code in the necessary information for the image to be properly sorted. For example, were the address the machine couldn't read "1234 Clinton Trail" because it's too garbled or the handwriting is too shaky, the REC site employee would code in "1234CLIT" and the system would know that they're referring to Clinton Trail in the national directory.

After the information has been coded, an ID "tag" (really only data in memory of a computer) is attatched to the information and it's sent back to the plant, where another automated system, the OSS (or Output SubSystem) matches the ID sprayed on the back of the envelope (that's that funny orange barcode on the back of some of the mail you get) to the ID "tag" the REC site people generated. If they match, the envelope is sorted and eventually dispatched to its main location, where this entire process (with a couple unnecessary steps removed) is repeated directly prior to local delivery.

If everything fails, or if someone tried to mail a pen or audiotape that could fit into a "normal" envelope but never be automated, it goes to the "letter aisle" (as it's termed in my plant), a place where all mail is sorted by hand. Thankfully, the automated processes are good enough that the volume of mail being sent to the letter aisle for manual handling is becoming smaller and smaller, but there are always envelopes not suitable for our automated processes.

The machinery is reliable, as you might guess, as well as fast; our DBCS machines can sort around 42,000 pieces per hour, depending on how heavy the individual pieces are. Standard (or "third class") Mail is the heaviest; it's something of a truism that the problem with Standard Mail is that there is no standard :) FIM and DIS mail (FIM, I think, is Firms In Michigan and DIS stands for DIStant, although I'm probably wrong on that last) are the "lightest", being mostly bill payments, business reply mail, and other thin envelopes.

If you have a P&DC near you, give a call to the plant manager and see if you could take a detailed tour if you like. Most plant managers are very open to the idea of the public knowing how our mail is sorted, as it's really an interesting process when taken as a whole. The equipment we use makes it possible for us to rapidly and incredibly accurately sort millions of written missives per day, and that's only in one, large facility. I work at one of the smallest distribution centers in the country, and we still sort up to one million mailpieces every 24 hours.

As for the tracking chip,I'll say again that I've heard of it, but in this one, single case I don't see how there would be much to fear from it, as it would be utterly impossible for the average postal employee to even utilize the retrieval mechanism on any one piece. Also, if each stamp is chipped, how could personal information ever get there? The USPS doesn't know where and when you will buy your stamps; you just do when you need them. A chip in a stamp could reveal the general area it was purchased, and maybe even the exact machine, but beyond that I don't know how it could be misused.

Hope all this has helped you all understand how the Postal Service does what it does.

[BattyDem]

8. I understand it's a business and it needs to make money ...

but it must be controlled by the government. If not, how could Bush* form a commission to look into privatizing it? I think even the Cato Institute tried to get Congress to privatize it. I know it's not a government program like Social Security or Welfare, but it is a government business. The employees get Federal healthcare benefits and pensions.


On edit: I just read you second post. I get it now ... but damn, that's really weird, LOL!

[Occulus]

21. USPS

is 'controlled' by the postal Board of Governors, who set postage rates. I don't know of what their other duties might be.

[soothsayer]

12. Actually, you're quasi-government

That's the term they use so they can screw you out of stuff the rest of the feds get (like pay increases)

[jody]

14. Sorry, but the USPS is a government entity just like the CIA. See

Independent Agencies and Government Corporations
QUOTE
Independent establishments are created by Congress to address concerns that go beyond the scope of ordinary legislation. These agencies are responsible for keeping the government and economy running smoothly. Examples of Independent Agencies include the General Services Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
QUOTE

[Occulus]

17. except

the USPS doesn't use tax dollars unless granted or loaned by Congress.

[jody]

20. My reply was to your statement "The USPS (United States Postal Service) is

not a government agency." The USPS is a government entity.

You now say "the USPS doesn't use tax dollars unless granted or loaned by Congress." But no goverment entity uses tax dollars unless granted or loaned by Congress under its Constitutional authority "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law".

[Occulus]

22. from the USPS homepage

***BEGIN QUOTE***
The Post Office Department was transformed into the United States Postal Service, an independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States. The mission of the Postal Service remained the same, as stated in Title 39 of the U.S. Code: "The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities."

The new Postal Service officially began operations on July 1, 1971. At that time, the Postmaster General left the Cabinet, and the Postal Service received:

Operational authority vested in a Board of Governors and Postal Service executive management, rather than in Congress.
Authority to issue public bonds to finance postal buildings and mechanization.
Direct collective bargaining between representatives of management and the unions.
A new rate-setting procedure, built around an independent Postal Rate Commission.
Title 39, the Postal Reorganization Act, also vested direction of the powers of the Postal Service in an 11-member Board of Governors. Nine members (the Governors) are appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. They serve staggered nine-year terms, and no more than five Governors may belong to the same political party. Governors are chosen to represent the public interest generally, may not represent specific interests using the Postal Service, and may be removed only for cause.

The nine Governors appoint the Postmaster General, who is the chief executive officer of the Postal Service and who serves at their discretion, and these 10 people select the Deputy Postmaster General. All are voting members of the Board of Governors, which directs the exercise of the powers of the Postal Service, reviews its practices and policies, and directs and controls its expenditures. The nine Governors alone approve rates and classification changes following a recommendation by the Postal Rate Commission. The entire, 11 member Board determines when rates and classification changes become effective. The Postmaster General appoints all officers of the Postal Service.
***END QUOTE***

Result of a Google search on USPS history. The URL is http://www.usps.com/history/history/his3.htm#REFORM .

Hope that helped....

[jody]

26. That changes nothing I said. USPS is a federal entity and uses

tax dollars when appropriated by Congress. :shrug:

[Occulus]

28. I guess what I'm trying to say

is that, were all things equal and the money we do get from the sales of stamps and services were spent correctly, there may be no need for tax dollars to be used except in an emergency situation.

We aren't supposed to 'rely' on tax dollars for any of our normal operations. That's unlike other federal agencies- I'm not aware of any public service the CIA or FBI nominally provide 'for hire or sale', as it were.

[jody]

29. Consider AMTRAK. I believe we have exhausted the facts relative to your

orignal statement that USPS was not a government agency -- it is!
:hi: Have a nice day.

[izzie]

9. This sounds really nuts. Are you sure?

:shrug:

[Khephra]

10. It's from my usual AP source

It's real, unless they've been fooled or hacked.

[The Backlash Cometh]

11. We had one of these, but it was in the back of a Hallmark store.

It made sense since you could buy the cards and mail them in one stop. No Christian paraphenalia was around.

[Liberator_Rev]

13. I'd like to go over with whips and overturn their tables, etc.!

This is wierd ! and in my own state no less !

[sspiderjohn]

18. What exactly constitutes a "religion", anyway?

What IS a religion? Not all religions call themselves religions, do they? In fact, some intentionally do NOT in order to have government power. Once you get past the fact that an organization can be a "religion" without calling itself such, hello Pandora's box.

[revcarol]

23. I am so used to seeing Post Offices in the backs of rural grocery stores

that the enormity of this violation took awhile to sink in.This is one hot story!!So sick!!

The big P. O. story last year was who got the bonuses. Seems the rank and file were almost out of the loop and POLITICAL APPOINTEES got big ones,too. COMMENTS?

[Gman]

27. This is as absured and even unthinkable as anything this bunch

has ever done. Just the thought of any organized religion running a federal government agency is absolutely outrageous. No one of this countries founders ever envisioned anything like this.

I don't Bizarro World anymore. I want to go home. Now.