Standby time

Paid to do nothing - Federal news, government operations, agency management, pay & benefits - FederalTimes.com

The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.

It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.

This is my favorite part...

Nor can supervisors require employees to brush up on their training. One mail handler in Pennsylvania said a supervisor used to force employees on standby time to read postal manuals.

“The local union shop filed a grievance against the Postal Service,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about retaliation. “We’re on standby time, not training time. Standby time is different. ... You can’t make people read training materials on standby time.”