Charlie Riedel/AP Photo
A letter carrier delivers the mail, April 19, 2023, in Kansas City, Missouri.
On September 30, rural letter carriers were notified of the latest changes to their weekly routes under the controversial new Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS), which will go into effect October 7.
Unlike the first round of evaluations under RRECS, the route hour cuts and lost wages were not as drastic, signaling a correction from the RRECS algorithm. While some rural carriers saw continued losses, others recovered hours lost in previous evaluations. Jamie King, a 13-year rural letter carrier from Florida, told the Prospect, “I recovered about $6,000,” after initially losing $15,000 when RRECS began.
Shane Sarosy, a five-year rural letter carrier from Delaware, told the Prospect that he lost two hours from his route. Others in his office saw similar cuts. Rather than sharp hour cuts, Sarosy’s schedule has been spread across a six-day workweek, instead of five days per week before RRECS. While his wages have fluctuated little, because of the six-day week, he’s barred from collecting additional pay.
“Most people are relieved,” King said. “But there are still a lot of issues that need to be addressed.”
Those concerns include transparency over the data being fed into RRECS, which the union’s rank and file and lawmakers have demanded answers for since long before RRECS’s implementation.
The Prospect obtained a memorandum of understanding (MOU) from mid-August between the post office and the rural carriers’ union, the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association (NRLCA). The memo explains that, after two series of three-month route evaluations, timelines would extend to six-month reviews.
Importantly, the memo leaves the door open for additional changes: “The provisions set forth in the MOU do not restrict the parties from negotiating changes to RRECS should opportunities arise based on future advancements in technology.”
Currently, rural carriers are tracking every component of their job through a device that collects Rural Activity Scans. Beyond the typical data points of clocking in and out for a shift, taking lunch breaks, and delivering packages, RRECS demands more. The scanner requires rural carriers to document actions like the time it takes to move a package from their vehicle to a doorstep, the number of trips taken to drop off mail at a cluster box, time spent on a detour, packages retrieved for delivery, extra time spent at the end of a route sorting mail, and so forth.
Every individual data point goes into calculating a rural carrier’s compensation. Theoretically, the data taken together should reflect what the job entails, adjusting wages accordingly. But in practice, because rural carriers are running routes in areas with spotty connectivity and at times of extreme weather, their devices can fail to collect the information they provide. The consequences of this situation put rural carriers in a catch-22: They can’t dispute inaccuracies with route changes, because the data supported wasn’t technically recorded.
Every individual data point goes into calculating a rural carrier’s compensation.
Even when a rural carrier’s scan is operational, King expressed concerns over accuracy. He gave the example of a trailer park with centralized cluster boxes for mail. At a typical home, a rural carrier can easily track the distance between a mailbox and someone’s front door for a package delivery. “That’s the distance you’re getting paid,” he said. But in a setting like a trailer park, the measurable distance can fluctuate, and it’s not clear if RRECS is tracking those differences.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot, but all of those [scans] add up for the day, and all averages into your time,” King said. “It just gets very complicated on how the system is capturing this data.” He added that when other rural carriers have brought up the issue to their managers, they didn’t have answers either.
There’s recognition of the problem with the scanning devices. A 2020 report from the USPS inspector general flagged these concerns, to which the post office responded that it was implementing corrective actions. The report notes that user errors accounted for almost 40 percent of improper concerns, but again, without access to the data captured by RRECS, it’s difficult for carriers to readjust.
On online forums such as Rural Mail Talk, other rural carriers have described similar frustrations with the data collection. The result is that rural carriers are playing a cat-and-mouse game against the scanner, inputting data with the hopes it retains their route, but in several cases seeing no results.
Aside from concerns over data, rural carriers on the subreddit r/USPS have described how their routes have been overburdened. In other words, the rate they’re paid for exceeds the actual time it takes to complete their route. “I worked 17 to 20 more [hours] over my [evaluation] every week,” one of them wrote. King said: “There’s no system in place to actually pay them for anything beyond [their allotted route].”
“They’re doing all this extra work basically for free,” he added, instead of using those extra hours to create a new position.
The latest changes to RRECS have provided rural carriers with an updated “alternate” dispute resolution process. Detailed in a late-September MOU between USPS and the NRLCA, using the “Rural Route Evaluation Dispute Process,” rural carriers can contest the latest changes as long as they file by October 20, 2023.
King told the Prospect he supports the new process, but that it still fell short for the most critical concerns. On the one hand, simple disputes over RRECS omitting a daily stop or an incorrect distance measured between a home and a mailbox are easily fixable. But because rural carriers are not provided with data over user error and the nature of disconnectivity on the job, there’s a suite of issues not covered by the changes.
While the transition from three-month to six-month evaluations is welcomed because it provides longer-term financial planning, rural carriers are simultaneously put in a position where the timeline to rectify RRECS’s error takes longer to resolve. As one person on Rural Mail Talk put it, “We are busy picking up pennies by trying to scan here, there, and everywhere.”
