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Injured Postal Employees Taken Off The Job

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Feb 27, 2010 5:37 pm US/Mountain

Injured Postal Employees Taken Off The Job

Reporting
Jodi Brooks
DENVER (CBS4) ― People are sending less mail and that's left the U.S Postal Service with a huge deficit. Now employees are losing their jobs.

Some workers injured on the job say they've become targets in the first-ever layoff at the Postal Service. Although they are technically not calling it a layoff, it's a "workforce reduction" that specifically targets workers with work-related injuries.

Postal workers say the layoffs will result in longer lines and reduced services.

Bonnie Holloman started as an automation clerk, but after four years of repetitive motion, she got hurt.

"I got tendonitis, I got a sprained back and sprained knee, and this put me into limited duty," Holloman asid.

So Holloman moved to the manual unit.

"You take the tray of mail, and each tray holds about 600 pieces of mail, you take each letter and you manually throw it," she said.

She's done the job nearly seven years and the repetitive motion caused four ruptured disks in her neck. But she still worked -- up until Feb. 3.

"They called me into the office and they said, 'Due to your restrictions we have no work available, so get off the clock and go home.'"

Holloman is one of nearly a 100 postal workers in metro Denver being sent home.

"The Postal Service contends they are running out of money, and in 2006 they rolled out this national reassessment program designed to attack permanently injured employees," said Gary Scott, Denver metro area local American Postal Workers Union President.

The national reassessment program involves limited duty and permanently injured Postal Service workers hurt on the job. Phase 1 of the program started in 2008. It consisted of reviewing medical records of those employees. Phase 2 rolled out this year. The Postal Service identified what jobs were available at each facility. It then attempted to match the employee with the necessary work, and if there was none the employee was notified that no work was available.

"It's not a dismissal, you're basically sent home until your medical restrictions improve," Scott said. "The Postal Service hopes you go into disability, retirement, or are permanently assigned to the Department of Labor's workman's comp program."

"I was healthy when I got the job. You can't break me and then show me the door," said Holloman, who wants her job back.

"The work is there, even though it's not an actual job they say, the work is available because they had to pull me out of a job to tell me there's no work," she said.

The postal workers union hopes to get the case in front of an arbitrator within the next year or two. Meanwhile an attorney in Texas is working on putting together a class action lawsuit against the post office.

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