
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 29, 1993                   TAG: 9305290056
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

RULING SAYS POSTAL SERVICE CAN'T CONTRACT BAR-CODING

An arbitrator has ruled that the Postal Service must offer mail-sorting jobs to postal workers instead of hiring private contractors at lower cost. Postmaster General Marvin T. Runyon's efforts to cut expenses could suffer as a result.

The decision, in response to a union protest, affects Postal Service work created when mail cannot be sorted electronically.

Last year, the agency began using computerized video technology to transmit to private contractors - such as the Orkand Corp. in Salem - addresses its machines could not decipher. Those contract workers, typically hired at wages lower than those paid to postal workers, code the pieces of mail for electronic sorting at distant post offices.

By 1995, 20 percent of all letters were to have been routed by this "remote bar-coding" system, saving $5 billion a year in costs.

The Postal Service has signed 22 contracts with companies that route the mails via computer linkups with large mail-processing facilities.

Several attendees at a Brookings Institution conference on the mail service said the ruling's significance is that it is the first one on the Postal Service's effort to "contract out" work its employees traditionally have performed. - Washington Post

by CNB