Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Not all of the postal family’s explanations of Chicago’s woes implicate the public. There’s a great deal of talk about the harsh winter of 1994 (Explanation No. 13). There’s also talk about management. Debra Hawkins notes that Chicago has had seven postmasters in the last seven years, each with a different plan, and that postal executives transferred from warmer, more suburban parts of the country often lack the heart to deal with the system’s problems and take early retirement instead. Chicago real estate is a particular headache: modernization of the city’s processing facilities was delayed for years when the post office set its heart on a piece of land for which the city planning commission had other ideas.

Finally, and most plausibly, the postal family blames Marvin Runyon’s reorganization of the Postal Service. A longtime auto-company executive and a former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Runyon became Postmaster General in July 1992, and immediately launched an attack on the postal bureaucracy. He announced his intention to eliminate thirty thousand “overhead” personnel, and he offered a bonus of six months’ pay to any eligible employee who took retirement by October 3, 1992. The buyout offer — part of the most radical reorganization of a federal agency since Eisenhower overhauled the Pentagon — proved immensely popular. By the time all the forms were in, forty-eight thousand postal employees had taken the early out. The trouble was that only fourteen thousand of them occupied “overhead” positions. The rest were senior carriers, clerks, mail handlers, and postmasters.

The buyout hit Chicago particularly hard. A system as antiquated as Chicago’s runs on expertise, and in late 1992 it lost fifteen hundred of its most senior employees, or nearly ten percent of its workforce. Former processing and administrative personnel were sent to work in stations with few skilled people available to train them. Throughout 1993, there simply weren’t enough bodies to do the job. Because management could not afford to suspend anyone, it instituted a program of “paper suspensions,” under which workers could receive as many as three suspensions for misconduct and still not miss a day of pay.

All this had a predictable effect on discipline. More subtle was the damage to morale. Without good supervision, the only reward for letter carriers who work hard and complete their routes by early afternoon — and such carriers, it should be stressed, form the majority at most stations — is to be given the leftover work of lazy coworkers. The reward for bad carriers, however, the ones who drink away the afternoon and finish their routes at nightfall, is overtime pay. Poor supervision produces a system of inverted incentives, a system that executives in Washington like to call “the Culture.” Those postal workers who are under the sway of the Culture do as little work as they can get away with, except on alternate Thursdays. Two Thursdays a month, carriers can pick up their paychecks as soon as they complete their route, and the entire city of Chicago has its mail by early afternoon.

Erich Walch, a lifelong Chicagoan who works in Evanston, is one of the many carriers for whom service is its own reward. Walch believes that Postal Service management fails to appreciate the intelligence and hard work of dedicated carriers. He says that’s why the frustration level among them is so high. “A lot of people get to the point where they say, ‘I have done everything I can, so I’m going to do less. I will take out only first-and second-class mail. I will take out maybe an extra one or two bulk-rate letters. And I’ll walk real slow. And there’s always tomorrow.’”

Station managers, for their part, complain that cumbersome labor agreements and obstructionist unions prevent them from enforcing discipline. This view is contested by union officials, including Walch (he’s an assistant steward), who insist that managers are simply too lazy or uninformed or snowed under with paperwork to follow the rules. Indeed, the supposed adversarial relationship between supervisors and unions has the aspect of a convenient myth. The unions provide managers with an excuse for their failure to manage, which, in turn, enhances union power at a station; productivity falls through the cracks.

The Culture pervades the bureaucracy as well. Administrators in Chicago, an amazingly demoralized lot, still lament the incompetence of the managers who came to power under the 1992 reorganization. Most Postal Service employees believe career advancement to be tainted by favoritism; and although nepotism is seldom flagrant, the Chicago post office is quite literally a family, an extended family of aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law, and girlfriends. One upper-level administrator tells me, “The people who’ve been promoted above us, we’ve been asked by management to train.”

This particular administrator, in despair over her boss’s stupidity, recently bought a straw voodoo doll from a vendor in the Haitian community in Rogers Park. She paid ten dollars extra to have the doll cursed in her boss’s name. The doll came with three pearl-headed hatpins, with which she pierced its head, heart, and stomach. The following morning, her office was abuzz with the news that her boss was being transferred out of Chicago. Not long after the transfer, he was struck by a serious illness of an undisclosed nature.

EARLY IN THE MORNING of February 4, 1994, in the parking lot of the Lakeview station on Irving Park Road, the postal family’s dysfunction bore spectacular fruit. A letter carrier who couldn’t start his truck opened the truck of a coworker, Carrier 1345, for a jump start. In the rear cargo area he found a hundred sacks of undelivered mail — what turned out to be 40,100 pieces in all, with 484 different addresses. The oldest envelopes bore postmarks from December.

Word of the discovery reached Gayle Campbell when the postal inspectors asked the Service Improvement Team to count the contents of the hundred sacks. (They did it mechanically, with optical character readers.) She was bitterly unsurprised by Carrier 1345’s malfeasance. In a November report she had cited him as an ineffective worker who habitually curtailed his mail, and it was obvious that nothing had been done in the meantime to improve his performance. Now she decided to pass the information to a person who might actually use it.

The person she chose was Charles Nicodemus. Since his December Sun-Times article appeared, Chicagoans had been bombarding the newspaper’s offices with postal anecdotes, but the newspaper didn’t have enough hard news to pursue a follow-up. Then, on January 21, Nicodemus got a call from Alderman Patrick O’Connor. O’Connor said that one of his constituents — Debra Doyle — had been speaking to a postal worker who was willing to tell stories and name names. Nicodemus leaped at the chance to cultivate Gayle Campbell.

When Nicodemus tried to confirm the story of Carrier 1345, the post office lied to him repeatedly. Even after the Sun-Times ran the first of three stories on the incident, postal spokesmen continued to deny, for nearly a full day, that the sacks of mail had been discovered accidentally. These lies, along with the news that Chicago’s postal-customer-satisfaction index had dropped to an all-time low of sixty-four percent, led the Sun-Times , on February 20, to run an editorial calling for the removal of Jimmie Mason.

By the time the editorial appeared, Campbell had returned to Hyde Park. But even as she began to work with Nicodemus, she’d kept hoping that Ormer Rogers, the regional manager, would be as appalled as she was by his staffs reports. Her final disillusionment occurred at the Ashbum station, in southwest Chicago, where she attended an all-city delivery-management meeting in late February. The main floor of the station was a chin-high sea of mail. “I opened the door and I said, ‘God, this is not a post office, it’s a warehouse ,’” she says. On their way to the second floor, Ormer Rogers and fifty station managers and more than two hundred supervisors waded through the mail without remark, as if it didn’t exist. “I knew then that I was working for the wrong ones,” Campbell says. “I knew then that they were not serious about improving anything.” Despairing, she gave Nicodemus the final reports on the audits that Rogers had commissioned in December. The reports produced a Sun-Times cover on March 2 (“POSTAL PROBES FIND A MESS”) and a string of rich follow-ups: eight hundred linear feet of mail going nowhere at the Lincoln Park station; supervisors tolerating drug and alcohol use by workers during working hours; the Service Improvement Team silenced and disbanded.