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Young was accompanied in his presentation by James Worsham,
president of NALC Branch 11 in Chicago.
"The Commission should recognize
the success of postal collective bargaining over the past
30 years and acknowledge the progress that is being made
in the area of postal labor relations by treading lightly
in these areas," Young said.
Young discounted suggestions by some in the postal community
that provisions of the Railway Labor Act should be made
applicable to postal employees and cited the law's history
in the airline and rail industries as reason to be wary.
He said major airline employers now want to substitute binding
arbitration for the Act because it led to "lengthy,
bitter, open-ended, acrimonious negotiations that end up
weakening the financial underpinnings of airlines."
"References abound to the
current plight of the airlines, with emphasis on labor
costs," Young said, noting the bankruptcies of United
Airlines, USAir, and Hawaiian Airlines, and the economic
difficulties of American Airlines.
Under current law, postal unions and Postal Service management
revert to mediation and/or binding interest arbitration
in the event of an impasse in contract negotiations.
"We in the postal community
know that our system, while it may not be perfect, works,"
Young said. "Proponents of radical changes have a
very heavy burden of persuasion and the Railway Labor
Act fails that test miserably."
Young said the current system has also worked economically,
furthering the Postal Service's goal of controlling costs.
He noted that it has permitted all the key players in the
postal community to share in the efficiency gains resulting
from postal automation and other investments: postage rates,
adjusted for inflation have declined; taxpayers have saved
tens of billions through the elimination of subsidies; and
postal employees enjoyed stable real wages.
He cited the progress in labor-management relations at
the Postal Service in recent years that includes a five-year
negotiated labor agreement, implementation of an alternate
dispute resolution system that emphasizes early intervention
to resolve problems before they become formal grievances,
a joint task force examining the way letter carrier work
is organized, a task force exploring new ways to use letter
carriers to strengthen the Postal Service such as the Customer
Connect pilot program where carriers market the full range
of postal services to small- and medium-sized businesses,
a task force on safety and health that grew out of collaboration
between unions and management during the bioterrorism attacks
of 2001, and a developing program to identify work sites
with serious labor-management problems in order to intervene
and fix them quickly.
Young said the Commission also cannot ignore the impact
of labor relations in a broader context that includes letter
carriers conducting the nation's largest food drive, performing
many heroic deeds such as pulling children from burning
homes, and saving the lives of elderly customers through
the Carrier Alert program.
"Letter carriers really
do deliver notwithstanding rain or snow or gloom of night
– or threats of anthrax or mail bombs," he said.
"They really do go well beyond the call of duty."
"The challenge this
Commission faces, and the challenge that will confront
Congress once it takes up the issue of postal reform,
is to sort out what works and what doesn't work in our
postal system," Young said. "Postal collective
bargaining is one of the things that works well."
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