Summary

Since 1990, mail service in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has been among the worst in the nation, and customer satisfaction has generally been below the national average. Both mail service and customer satisfaction in the D.C. area declined dramatically in 1994. Postal Service officials attribute the deterioration in service to an unexpected growth in mail volume in early 1994. Local units were unable to handle this growth due to employee shortages, recent organizational change, mail-handling process problems, and poor labor-management relations. The Postal Service has made progress toward restoring service to 1993 levels, but breakthrough improvement will require postal management and labor unions to work together to resolve long-standing employee relations problems that are reported to be more severe in the D.C. area than in most other locations. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Postal Service: Mail Delivery Service in the Washington Metropolitan Area, by J. William Gadsby, Director of Government Business Operations Issues, before the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government, House Committee on Appropriations. GAO/T-GGD-95-94, Feb. 28, 1995 (15 pages).

GAO found that: (1) mail service in the Washington, D.C. area has declined in part due to an unexpected increase in mail volume; (2) labor-management relations in the Washington, D.C. area are among the worst in the country; (3) customer satisfaction in the area declined dramatically in 1994 because local units were unable to maintain mail service at previous levels due to employee shortages, poor labor-management relations, and the recent organizational change; (4) USPS has taken action to address unnecessary duplicate mail handling; (5) postal managers believe that metropolitan overnight delivery areas are too large for the current delivery network; and (6) USPS agreed with the conclusion that the key element in improving mail service is to improve labor-management relations.