Greetings sisters, brothers, cousins, and others! Lisa Q, one of our letter carrier executive stewards, noticed that the establishment from her depot showed some coworkers on assignments that weren’t what they were actually doing. After our talk, on Monday January 13 2025, I did a complete audit of the establishment lists for the letter carrier depots in our local. For anyone that isn’t familiar with them, they’re a detailed report of who is doing what route, where our relief are working, etc. I was VERY surprised to learn that there were 105 OR & 24 VR positions that were not being covered that week! Now when depots are failing to get overtime delivered and handing all the mail back to the routes that it came from, I think we may have found the reason why!
I immediately contacted our zone managers with the details of what was wrong in each of their areas, and requested a consultation with PC&R because we need to have a formal discussion on the record. On Wednesday January 22nd, we had our meeting. To my surprise, PC&R said that they were not aware of this deficit & they were very concerned. They completely agreed that being short 129 relief positions is not acceptable, and they had already started a hiring campaign for the Vancouver local after reading my initial notice! They acknowledged that this was obviously the reason for the 17.04 overtime issues that our local is having, especially in our SSD depots where it’s much more difficult for a carrier to know when their mail is being handed back to them from a previous day.
Unfortunately, the relief coverage is still nowhere near good enough. As of the coming week of Feb 23, the uncovered routes are 98 OR & 21 VR. 119 uncovered relief is better than 129, but this is still terrible. As a reminder, please make sure you’re filing a grievance every time the corporation tells you that they weren’t able to cover any part of your route when you needed help. Staffing is their responsibility, and it’s their own decisions that caused this problem on our work floors.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Joseph Henderson McCance
1st Vice President CUPW Vancouver Local 846