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FedEx Home Delivery has always used contract drivers, operating their own vehicles (with FedEx logos), to make deliveries. Early on, however, some drivers challenged the contractor model, claiming that they were, in reality, employees of the company, and entitled to organize, and bargain collectively with the company.

The controversy intensified in February 2006, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that drivers at a Massachusetts FedEx facility were entitled to organize. From the Boston Globe:

“What basically was decided here is that FedEx exercises very substantial control over the employees and the way they perform their jobs,” said Bob Redbord , deputy regional attorney at the Boston NLRB office. Redbord said the drivers work to FedEx schedules and follow FedEx driving and delivery guidelines.”

The drivers subsequently voted in the Teamsters as their bargaining agent. While FedEx has said it will challenge the vote, it has also tried another tactic- making nice. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Fedex

“recently began stationing 18 contractor “advocates,” some pulled from the ranks of contract drivers, across North America. The company says they are responsible for helping drivers increase their shipment volumes, solve problems they might have with management, and other duties. The company also is creating an executive position in charge of contractor relations, reporting directly to the head of the ground unit. FedEx also has increased fuel subsidies to drivers who operate multiple trucks and is eliminating some fines on drivers resulting from customer claims of failed deliveries.

The issue isn’t limited to Massachusetts- according to Traffic World:

The union effort is part of a larger campaign FedEx is facing over the status of some 15,000 FedEx Ground drivers. The company is fighting nearly 30 lawsuits around the country from drivers who say they are illegally denied classification as employees, leaving them without benefits. A California judge last month reaffirmed his earlier ruling in a class action case that drivers who drive single routes should be classified as employees. Several state labor boards also have taken after the FedEx Ground model, saying it circumvents taxes.

Agency Awards Northrop Grumman $874.6 Million Contract For Mail-Sorting System

WASHINGTON, March 1 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Postal Service has moved forward with another initiative to improve its delivery capabilities by awarding Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation an $874,639,000 contract to build a sophisticated system that will sort “flats” — large envelopes, magazines, newspapers, catalogs and circulars — in the order in which they are delivered.

Letter carriers today spend a portion of their workday in the “office” manually sorting flat mail, a labor-intensive process. The Flat Sequencing System (FSS) — designed in collaboration with Postal Service engineers - sorts mail in delivery sequence at a rate of 16,500 pieces an hour, helping letter carriers start delivering mail earlier in the day.

“The Flat Sequencing System will enable the Postal Service to provide more efficient service to our business customers, who rely on the mail to advertise, generate revenue, and get information into their customers’ hands as quickly as possible,” said Walt O’Tormey, vice president, Engineering.

A pre-production FSS will be installed and tested in Dulles, Va., in August, and nationwide deployment of 100 systems will begin in summer, 2008.

Last year, the Postal Service delivered 53.2 billion flats, consisting of 8 percent First-Class mail, 17 percent Periodicals, and 75 percent Standard mail.

BALTIMORE, March 1, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) — Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has been awarded a $874.6 million fixed-price contract from the United States Postal Service (USPS) to provide 100 Flats Sequencing Systems (FSS) designed to further automate the flats mail stream, which includes large envelopes, catalogs and magazines.

“The FSS award is the latest in a series of programs reflecting our strong relationship with the Postal Service to integrate Northrop Grumman flat mail technologies into innovative postal automation solutions. We have focused on developing a comprehensive system that will enable the agency to realize operational efficiencies, and we are extremely proud and excited at the opportunity to make FSS a reality,” said Vicki Spira, vice president of Postal Automation at Northrop Grumman’s Government Systems Division.

Northrop Grumman’s first generation of flats sorting technologies is in operation at Postal Service processing centers nationwide. FSS represents the next generation of flats automation by sorting mail to the delivery sequence of each carrier, thereby reducing manual sorting. Flat mail is a labor-intensive category of mail to process and deliver due to variations in size and thickness

Northrop Grumman is serving as the FSS prime contractor. The company jointly developed the key technologies incorporated into FSS with Solystic, a company subsidiary in France, and Siemens Energy & Automation, Inc. in Arlington, Texas. This team will field a pre-production version of the system later this year, which will be used by USPS to develop system operational procedures.

Installation of the first FSS production units at USPS facilities nationwide is expected to begin in 2008 with the remaining FSS installations scheduled for completion by 2010.

Northrop Grumman Corporation is a $30 billion global defense and technology company whose 120,000 employees provide innovative systems, products, and solutions in information and services, electronics, aerospace and shipbuilding to government and commercial customers worldwide.

I have no idea… from Flickr:

Cliff Clavin may have been violating postal service rules by hanging out at the Cheers bar in is letter carrier uniform all those years, but if he’d patronized his local VFW post instead, he’d have been in the clear. That’s the gist of a Federal Appeals Court decision handed down earlier this year, and confirmed this week by the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The case involved Ohio letter carrier Gary Gose, who was terminated ”on a charge of unacceptable conduct for consuming alcoholic beverages while wearing his Postal Service uniform at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 9927 in Kettering, Ohio”. The Postal Service claimed that this violated section 661.54 of the ELM, which forbids the consumption of “intoxicating beverages in a public place while in uniform”.

Gose, who was on a Last Chance Agreement (he was to have been removed for ”failure to use a satchel in the delivery of mail”), appealed his dismissal to the MSPB, which backed the Postal Service. He then took his case to the Federal Appeals Court. The Court found that the Postal Service interpreted the term “public place” to mean “every place where there is a Postal Service customer and, further, that it considered every citizen to be a Postal Service customer”. Since that would mean that even the employee’s own home was a “public place” if just one other family member was there, the Court refused to accept the USPS interpretation:

… the problem with this interpretation is that it effectively reads language out of the regulation.  If the agency had wished to promulgate a regulation that prohibited drinking in uniform while “in the presence of others,” it might have done so.  However, it did not.  Instead, it promulgated a regulation that specifically forbade such activity only “in a public place.” (emphasis added).  An agency interpretation that effectively eviscerates regulatory language is per se inconsistent with the regulation and may be accorded no deference.

The Court ordered Gose reinstated, with full back pay and benefits.

From FedBizOpps.com: 

The U.S. Postal Service is conducting market research to identify companies with an interest and capability to provide a mail stowage and retrieval system for its delivery fleet of Long-Life Vehicles (LLV). This will be done in conjunction with implementation of a new Flats Sequencing System (FSS) program whereby large envelopes, magazines, catalogs and circulars will be sorted for letter carriers who must now manually sequence the mail before leaving the office for their routes. As the FSS program is implemented, the plan is to purchase mail stowage and retrieval systems for up to 18,000 LLVs. Deployment would start July 2008 with delivery completed by July 2010.

The LLV mail stowage and retrieval system will be used to assist in loading and unloading mail in the delivery sequence of the route. The system should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate all mail trays (letter/flats) and parcels, and light enough to have only minimal impact on the load carrying capacity of the vehicle. An average daily volume of mail handled by a letter carrier will consist of approximately 18 trays of mail (Letter/FSS flat trays) and 12 parcels. During peak volume periods, the daily volume of mail could be 25% to 50% higher on an infrequent basis.

The man who first allowed letter carriers to wear shorts passed away December 7. Anthony Louis Mondello was general counsel of the U.S. Civil Service Commission from 1968 to 1975, and according to his obituary in the Washington Post, he “helped to make federal workplace rules more compatible with a changing society”.

It was Mr. Mondello who made the decision to permit Postal Service employees to wear short pants in hot weather. He also eliminated McCarthy-era loyalty oaths as a condition of employment and worked to discourage discrimination based on sexual orientation.

And there’s a lot more- Mondello was one of those unsung bureaucrats who in fact made a difference- the Post quotes a colleague who described him as “one of the most honorable guys I’ve met in my life”.

Anthony Mondello; Worked for Rights of Federal Employees