USPS supervisors fear ‘exodus’ among their ranks, but data shows high retention

An organization representing Postal Service supervisors is warning about an “exodus” of management-level employees — although data from USPS and its inspector general office don’t corroborate these claims.

The National Association of Postal Supervisors, in a recent post on its website, raised the alarm about a “crisis in leadership retention.”

NAPS National President Ivan Butts wrote earlier this month that a “significant number of EAS employees are leaving the USPS for other federal agencies, enticed by better pay and less-demanding working conditions.”

“That’s work objectives they’re trying to achieve,” Butts said in a recent interview. “And then they’re being viewed by the leadership in these other agencies as superstars, just because of how they were so overburdened. Working at this agency, I guess, made them tend to go at it harder at what they do.”

Butts, speaking last year at a summit on labor issues hosted by the USPS Office of Inspector General, said USPS is losing candidates to private-sector businesses that can offer better starting pay and better hours, at a time when unemployment rates are historically low.

The Postal Service disputes NAPS’ claims. USPS spokesman David Walton told Federal News Network that the agency has a retention rate of more than 96% for management employees.

“Historically, we develop and promote from within the organization and have an excellent retention rate when it comes to our management employees, particularly our front-line supervisors and managers,” Walton said.

Edmund Carley, national president of United Postmasters and Managers of America (UPMA), said he’s seen some colleagues leave USPS to take jobs at other agencies, such as the Social Security Administration. However, he said USPS isn’t seeing problems retaining management-level employees.

“They take a little bit less money, but it’s steady hours, no weekend work, a lot less stress,” he said about managers at other federal agencies. “It’s not easy being an entry-level manager in the [Postal] Service. It never has been. The difference now, especially if you’re in D.C., there’s other opportunities to go into federal employment.”

Among its concerns, NAPS said USPS is promoting newly hired employees to EAS roles with little to no knowledge of USPS operations, and that supervisors are rapidly promoted into mid-level and senior leadership positions with little-to-no knowledge of agency operations.

Butts said new supervisors may get an initial two or three weeks of training before running operations.

“After that, they’re on their own. They need them on the floor to run their operations. They’re short-handed already,” Butts said. “As some of these people are coming in, they’re getting no training at all, and the first time they make a mistake, they’re being fired with no recourse.”

Carley, however, said nearly all USPS managers started off as craft employees — letter carriers, mail handlers and postal clerks — and understand the agency’s frontline work.

“Nobody walked in off the street,” Carley said, adding that supervisor skills are “something you have to learn on the job.”

“You can’t teach somebody. I don’t know how long a training course would have to be to qualify somebody to be a delivery supervisor. You’ve got to learn on the job. You’ve got to have some rudimentary knowledge of how carriers operate and how the routes are set up. And then you’ve just got to do it, and you have to learn by doing,” he added.

USPS supervisor vacancies shrinking

The USPS inspector general’s office, in a report released Friday, said the Postal Service saw a 7% vacancy rate nationwide in fiscal 2023, its lowest point in recent years.

The watchdog report states USPS is close to meeting its goal of hitting a 5% nationwide vacancy rate for frontline supervisors, but said vacancies can vary widely by region.

“Although the nationwide vacancy rate is relatively low, some locations are experiencing vacancy rates three times as high as the goal,” the report states.

USPS, for example, is seeing a 17 to 18% vacancy rate for supervisors who oversee processing operations in the Great Lakes, and a 15% vacancy for retail and delivery supervisors in northern Illinois.

USPS ended fiscal 2023 with more than 22,000 supervisors. About 88% of them oversaw customer services, distribution operations, maintenance operations and logistics.

The agency also hosted four virtual frontline supervisor job fairs and 55 career conferences for current employees to learn about frontline supervisor positions last year.

USPS added about 2,300 new relief supervisor positions in June 2023. Eligible facilities can receive a relief supervisor for every full-time supervisor authorized.

Relief supervisors are meant to cover for regular supervisors during their scheduled days off and annual leave and are meant to reduce USPS reliance on acting supervisors.

“Relief supervisors work a non-standard, flexible schedule to cover tours and facilities within a designated commuting distance, all with potential minimal advance notice,” USPS OIG wrote.

Carley said new supervisors often feel pressure to perform early in their positions, and that higher-ups now have more real-time data on how any USPS facility is performing.

“What technology has wrought is the ability for my boss, my boss’s boss, my boss’s boss’s boss and his boss too up in headquarters to get on a spreadsheet, click twice, and now they’re looking to my office and want to know why that carrier was sitting at that gas station for 22 minutes, when they should only have been 20 — and I need to know an answer right now, he said.

“The pressure is heightened. Now that’s a good thing, too, because now you can create efficiencies with your workforce, because they know they’re being supervised at all times,” he added. “The art is, how do you disseminate that information, without threatening people’s jobs — which they do way more often than they should, or making somebody feel less than.”

NAPS is requesting access to “exit forms” EAS employees are required to submit before they leave USPS — to see how many supervisors the agency is losing to retirement, terminations or leaving for another federal agency — but Butts wrote that the group has been “thwarted in our attempts to validate this trend.”

“Those two kinds of narratives really point to a bigger problem,” Butts said. “One that leadership has the staff to do the job, and one that EAS leaders have in being felt like they’re valued in all aspects of their job.”

USPS management faces Reduction in Force

Butts said postal supervisors are also dealing with a Reduction in Force (RIF) that’s eliminating some positions.

Federal News Network first reported in May 2021 that USPS started sending layoff notices to non-bargaining unit employees after sending voluntary early retirement offers to its eligible management employees.

Management-level employees who receive a RIF notice, however, are able to apply for similar positions to avoid leaving the agency altogether.

“There are so many vacancies in the ranks of EAS and managers that there should be landing spots as we move forward,” Butts said.

The RIFs, he added, may affect about 70 to 80 supervisor positions. However, Butts said the association isn’t clear on the full extent of the RIFs, especially after USPS announced it would pause some network modernization changes until at least January 2025.

“They issued these RIF letters to these employees and disrupted their whole life. Then a week later, they issued rescinding letters to some of them, because their methodology was wrong. Now they say their methodology was right,” Butts said.

Walton said USPS “has a strong track record of finding job opportunities for RIF-impacted employees through RIF avoidance processes and we believe that will be the case with the current RIF process.

“As infrastructure and operating plans are made there is a need for staffing changes. We implement the changes in accordance with the federal Reduction-in-Force (RIF) regulations,” he added. “With the latest operational changes, there have been adjustments to the allocation of management employees in certain designated postal operations.”

Butts linked supervisor retention challenges to recent problems with on-time mail delivery in areas where USPS is modernizing its network modernization plans.

However, lawmakers representing regions that saw the worst of these delays — such as Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia — say on-time performance is improving.

“We’re not hearing much of anything like we were in the past, because we’re at the lowest volume period of the year,” Butts said.  “But my prediction is that when the fall mailing season comes in, all those issues that we had will rear their heads again, because the leadership of this agency has still continuously failed to address its staffing problem.”

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