On Rolls and Paid Employee (ORPES) published this week show that USPS career employees numbered 696,138 at the end of the 2006 fiscal year, a drop of 8,578, or -1.2% from the prior year. The biggest decreases came in the APWU-represented clerk craft, down 7,725 employees, or 3.5%. City carrier numbers declined by 1.7%, a loss of 3,878 carriers. Mail handlers, the smallest of the crafts, increased by 1,130, or 2%. But the biggest increase came in the ranks of rural carriers. Full and part time rurals increased by 2,009, or 3.1%. Rural subs, who are not considered career employees, increased by 2.9%, or 1,676 employees.

Workforce flexibility also declined somewhat, as Part Time Flexible (PTF) numbers dropped by 5%, while Full Time complement was down less than a percent. This demonstrates the difficulty the service has in maintaining flexibility as staffing declines. The vast majority of the (net) 8,578 career employees the service lost were, no doubt, full time regulars. Yet full time numbers dropped by just four thousand. Why? Because a lot of the full time regulars that left had to be replaced- by promoting PTF’s. So a pretty good guess is that about 8,000 Full Time Regulars left the USPS, and that half of them were replaced by promoting PTF’s. The work of the remaining 4,000 either shifted to overtime, or was ‘absorbed’.

Headquarters added 107 employees for a 4% increase, and the Office of Inspector General added 228 for a 27% increase. Inspection Service staffing, on the other hand, decreased by 12.3%, or 437 employees.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 5:55 am and is filed under postal, staffing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.