Contract With The USPS
The NRLCA negotiates all labor agreements for the rural carrier craft with the Postal Service, including salaries. Rural carriers are considered bargaining unit employees in the USPS. This means that there is a contract between the Postal Service and the NRLCA. Only the NRLCA can represent members of the rural carrier craft in the grievance procedure, including providing protection in disciplinary actions.
Following the establishment of executive order 10988 in 1962, the NRLCA and USPS established their first national agreement on a contract for rural carriers. As a result of this contract, the Heavy Duty Agreement, or Evaluated Pay System was established (Rural Carriers are paid a salary based upon an evaluation of their particular route. Credit is given to all carriers' duties and compensated accordingly). On August 12, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act (PRA). The Post Office Department became the United States Postal Service, and the NRLCA became a union, with collective bargaining rights for wages and fringe benefits.
Since the expiration of the most recent contract between the NRLCA and USPS, entered into on December 3, 2007 and running through December 2010, rural carriers were operating without a contract. At midnight, November 20, 2010, negotiations between the NRLCA and USPS on a new contract ended in an impasse, and went into third party arbitrator.
On Jult 3, 2012, arbitrator Jack Clarke imposed a new contract upon the NRLCA and USPS that runs through 2015. Concessions by the NRLCA in the new contract mirrored concessions made by the APWU a year earlier. NRLCA Direct of Labor Relations Joey Johnson voted with the USPS arbitrator to accept the contract despite a two-year wage freeze, a two-tiered wage structure and increased health care costs (from 19% to 24%). Substitute rural carriers and RCAs hired under the new contract will face a twenty percent cut in pay and will not receive any cost-of-living increase. New hires will now be paid $15.56 per hour instead of $19.45.
Read more about this topic: National Rural Letter Carriers' Association
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