What Postal Service can’t win from labor unions it hopes to get from Congress
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on August 26th, 2011 4:35 am by HL
What Postal Service can’t win from labor unions it hopes to get from Congress
What the U.S. Postal Service can’t win at the bargaining table, it hopes to get in the halls of Congress. If it is successful, it would set a new stage in labor relations that would send shivers through labor organizations far removed from the post office.
Even as the USPS is negotiating with its unions, it has unveiled a proposal to have Congress eliminate no-layoff provisions in postal union contracts. Postal negotiators raised that provision during talks that concluded this spring with the American Postal Workers Union, but APWU President Cliff Guffey said the union compromised in other areas to keep the no-layoff provision intact.
Some travel reimbursement rates to rise
Federal employees will be reimbursed at higher rates for lodging in some large cities while on official travel during the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
The General Services Administration announced Thursday that fiscal 2012 lodging rates for those traveling to the Washington area, for example, will increase from $211 to $226 a day in the peak months of September and October and from $211 to $224 a day in March through June.
Federal travelers also receive separate reimbursement for “meals and incidental expenses” that will continue to range from $46 to $71 a day.
GOP presidential candidates listen more to employers than employees
CLAREMONT, N.H. — Mitt Romney is campaigning to be the jobs president, and for now, that means a lot of listening.
Listening at board table after board table to his invited attendees bemoan what’s wrong with the federal government.
Invariably, they tell Romney to cut taxes and do away with Dodd-Frank financial regulations, environmental restrictions and President Obama’s health-care law. As the conversation moved around a stately room here Wednesday, Romney first heard from a community bank chief executive. Then an optometrist. Then another community bank chief executive, a fly-fishing company owner, an auto-repair shop owner, a gun-manufacturing executive, a restaurant owner and a cabinet company owner.
