Much like quiet quitting (AKA "slacking off"), quiet firing has been around for some time and heretofore was simply known as "de-hiring." This approach to encouraged unemployment is to make certain conditions of working undesirable or unpleasant to the point that the targeted employee, or employees, up and quit. Post pandemic this has become much easier, especially in high tech, as employees had become quite well adjusted to [not] working from home. Back to office, or office repopulation, has been met with employee resistance with many threatening to quit. Just as an aside, when any employee threatens to quit the proper response has always been to accept that offer. Your team and your company are better off without them. What has changed is a bit of a role reversal with companies enforcing policies that some say have the intent of driving employees out, much like a layoff but with considerably better severance from the company's point of view. As with any right-sizing, the impact on employee morale is somewhat negative.
It is interesting to view the current USPS fuster cluck through this lens.
But first, some context. The USPS has two types of employees: career; and non-career. Career employees are permanent and receive federal benefits even though some work part-time. Non-career employees are temporary, perform the same work as career employees but at a lower pay. As you might imagine, career employees are virtually impossible to get rid of, while non-career are inherently temporary. Despite ongoing, long term efforts to shift operations towards the more cost-effective non-career workers, they remain less than 30% of the USPS workforce.
Now we get to de-hiring.
A common approach is to move the job location. You still have your job, with pay and benefits, but you work out of a different location. In the tech world, this is moving your office from your basement back to the corporate facility just a painful commute away. One might view the USPS restructuring, consolidating dispersed sorting operations into a more centralized and efficient facility as a way to shed staff, particularly of the career variety. It is highly unlikely this is a primary motivation, but is likely a beneficial consequence.
Now we get to politics.
While this change was clearly intended to have consequences (e.g., improved efficiency) there have been some less desirable impacts, notably delivery delays and failures. The finger was immediately pointed at these new facilities, but is that a knee-jerk reaction? Data are thin on the ground, but recent examples, numbering in the single digits but relevant to our area, indicate that the Palmetto facility is not to blame and the fault lies with the incumbent local offices. Seems that one individual needing to correspond with the DeKalb courthouse on a routine basis sent a certified, return-receipt mail to the courthouse, resulting in a tracking showing a 2-day delay to get into the system, but an 18 hour turnaround from Brookhaven to Decatur, where the mail went missing for a month, beyond the system's tracking window. Even when finally delivered the return-receipt never was. Efforts to contact the Decatur post office to resolve the issue were fruitless, but this is in fact where the mail was embargoed. Not Palmetto.
Now let's fire up the conspiracy train. Why would this happen? Perhaps morale is low, particularly with career employees who see jobs moving away from their little part of heaven. After all, a career job with USPS is a sweet gig, but do you really want to move to Palmetto to keep it? And here's the great thing: you can hardly blame it on demographics as Palmetto and DeKalb are quite similar. How often does that happen around here?
The things the USPS are doing are the same things that any company in a competitive situation would do, but it seems leadership are a bit out of touch with how entrenched employees might "resist" the changes. But this is not a competitive situation as the USPS is an "independent" agency of the executive branch and is the only such agency explicitly authorized by the US constitution. Therefore, very, very political. It should come as no surprise this issue is being misrepresented for individual political gain, even by politicians who claim they will fix things. Nothing will get fixed until they shut up and move on.
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