Seth Perlman/AP Photo
The controversial Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System will change the pay rates for rural postal workers.
Six Democratic senators are appealing to the U.S. Postal Service to delay a controversial new payment system for rural letter carriers, which could reduce pay by thousands of dollars a year.
The letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy also asks for additional information about how the new pay determination, known as the Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS), was determined, how flaws in the system will be remedied, and how rural letter carriers will be reimbursed for any loss of pay arising from those flaws.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) led the letter, joined by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ed Markey (D-MA), John Fetterman (D-PA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). “Implementing RRECS in its current form will arbitrarily enact a pay cut for tens of thousands rural postal workers who still lack a formal dispute process and have a history of delayed back pay from the postal service,” the senators wrote.
Two weeks ago, the Prospect reported on the RRECS system, which according to rural letter carriers could translate into an $8,000 salary decrease. Other rural letter carriers on Reddit described their salaries dropping by 25 percent.
Two-thirds of all letter carriers under the system will lose hours according to the preliminary results, and nearly half would lose more than four hours, translating into a significant pay decrease. Letter carriers have warned of a rash of retirements and resignations as a result, amid real concern about whether the mail could be delivered if those occurred.
RRECS’s start date, which was at one point supposed to be April 22, was pushed to May 6. The delay came a day before, on April 21, in a memo Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino sent to the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. Federal News Network reported Tulino telling the union, “The parties are agreeing to this delay to allow further review of the data underlying these new rural route evaluations … The parties will also use this time to finalize an alternate dispute resolution process specific to the rural evaluation data.”
Now, with the deadline around the corner again, the senators are asking for another delay in implementation. On Friday, workers were told by their union, the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRLCA), that RRECS would begin over the weekend.
As of the time of writing, the Postal Service did not respond to the Prospect’s inquiry about whether the agency would delay the RRECS implementation or share the data that went into RRECS’s creation. Previously, USPS has sent the same answer to multiple outlets who asked about RRECS, stating that the changes to the compensation system were codified by a labor-management agreement and an arbitration proceeding. “The parties worked jointly for years to implement these new provisions and will continue to share data and information throughout the implementation process,” the statement said.
It is true that RRECS came out of a mandated agreement to change how the compensation system was calculated. But the core complaint among rural letter carriers, their union, and the senators is that transparency and data-sharing has not been forthcoming.
Two-thirds of all letter carriers under the system will lose hours according to the preliminary results.
The six senators conclude the letter with a set of questions pertaining to the implementation of RRECS. The topline concerns include questions over data transparency practices between USPS and the union. From the union’s perspective, without being able to see the data fed into RRECS, there is no recourse for rural letter carriers to dispute issues concerning pay, hours cut, route changes, disability accommodations, and the delivery of critical goods like medicine. Other anxieties include whether “monitoring technologies”—surveillance practices for accumulating data—could potentially be used for initiatives outside of what is outlined by RRECS.
The boundaries of how that data can be used remain paramount. As of late 2021, USPS began implementing machine learning technology, more popularly known as artificial intelligence, into its operations at nearly 200 processing centers. At the time, Anthony Robbins, a federal contractor for Nvidia, told a data center trade publication that while the USPS Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP) would be focused on package processing, there was a “framework” for expanding the program’s scope. He further said: “There are not many enterprise-wide AI/ML [artificial intelligence/machine learning] computer vision projects that have been deployed at this scale, across the whole enterprise, especially not in the case of government,” noting that USPS was an outlier.
For the rural letter carriers’ union, without an explicit promise from USPS regarding data fed into RRECS, there is nothing stopping the agency from using its rural letter carrier data surveillance to bolster its existing artificial-intelligence infrastructure.
