{"id":4875,"date":"2012-08-02T17:22:18","date_gmt":"2012-08-02T22:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/?p=4875"},"modified":"2012-08-02T17:22:18","modified_gmt":"2012-08-02T22:22:18","slug":"burrus-says-apwu-has-decided-that-you-will-not-receive-a-retirement-incentive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/2012\/08\/02\/burrus-says-apwu-has-decided-that-you-will-not-receive-a-retirement-incentive\/","title":{"rendered":"Burrus Says APWU Has Decided That YOU Will Not Receive a Retirement Incentive"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An Awkward Place<\/p>\n

The APWU National Executive Board has endorsed the decision to withhold agreement on a monetary incentive for retiree eligibles in response to management\u2019s refusal to implement newly negotiated contractual provisions. It is apparent that the union\u2019s interpretation differs from that of management on key provisions and the traditional negotiated means of resolving such disputes, the initiation of grievances, has been rejected. This decision is highly unusual in that the retirement incentive would be used as a benefit for the represented employees and to deny it as a means of punishing management is a clumsy means of contract enforcement.<\/p>\n

The target of the union\u2019s response is awkward at best because incentivizing retirement eligibles is a management tool used to accelerate attrition with the objective of reducing the total number of employees more rapidly than the normal flow of voluntary retirement. This tool is used most often when there is a surplus of employees or there is a monetary benefit to the employer when replacing a highly paid employee with a new hire with significantly lower entrance wages. The employer has a host of options to reduce costs beyond the separation of retiring employees, but the target is to reduce costs and this is only one of the tools available to employers to reduce payroll. If a particular means is not available, such as lay off or reduced hours, management often turns to consolidations or other ways of reducing expenses. So if the option of voluntary retirement is unavailable the principle objective of reducing costs will continue to be aggressively pursued. Management has the tools to reduce labor costs without accelerating attrition<\/p>\n

Early in the APWU bargaining process the union adopted an objective of reducing postal costs and agreed to a number of contractual provisions geared towards this objective. In fact, one of the selling points for the contract was that it \u201csaved the USPS money.” I have long held that management no matter how ineffective have the resources and the knowledge to better determine the basics of employment without the help of the union. In those circumstances when one specific remedy is made unavailable, like accelerating attrition, management will turn to plan B to achieve its objective. When denying a retirement incentive, the ultimate loser is the employee who is denied X dollars to bridge the adjustment from a regular pay check to an annuity, not the employer So the action of the APWU executive board serves only to shift the means of postal management to achieve its primary objective of reducing payroll. For each dollar of savings not generated through the replacement of retiring employee with a new hire under the reduced wage scale it will be recovered through additional consolidations, subcontracting or other means of management induced efficiencies. Retirement incentives are a tool, not an objective.<\/p>\n

Included in the considerations of union responses to management intransigencies is the denial of management initiatives reflecting union solidarity, but it is the individual employee who will bear the brunt of a loss of income. Every employee leaves employment with the only question being the timing of his\/her separation so the denial of a substantial incentive is a high individual price to pay for a mano to mano sense of collective activity. In the end, it is “we” who have decided that “you” will not receive a benefit. That is an odd place for a union to find itself.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Bill Burrus<\/p>\n

Burrus Journal<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Awkward Place The APWU National Executive Board has endorsed the decision to withhold agreement on a monetary incentive for retiree eligibles in response to management\u2019s refusal to implement newly negotiated contractual provisions. It is apparent that the union\u2019s interpretation differs from that of management on key provisions and the traditional negotiated means of resolving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apwu-news","last_archivepost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4875"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4878,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875\/revisions\/4878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}