The Postal Service has announced that the Reduction in Force (RIF) separation date for all remaining impacted POStPian Postmasters has been extended from January 9 to February 7, 2015.

According to a letter sent to these postmasters (dated Jan. 5), there are also new options for some of these impacted employees.  At offices going to two or four hours per day, the postmaster can accept an assignment offer if available effective February 7, 2015, to a career part-time flexible clerk position. 

You can see the letter here, and the presentation slides here.  There's also an addendum to the September 2014 Memorandum of Understanding between the Postal Service and APWU here.

The Postal Service and postmasters associations have not provided a list or number of how many postmasters are looking at a RIF, but we’ve heard that there are about 250 of them. 

There may be many more than that, however.  For the past couple of years, the Postal Service has been publishing “status reports” on where POStPlan is being implemented.  The reports for November and December 2014 (which also includes January 2015) show 1,350 post offices.  You can see a list merging these three reports as a spreadsheet or a table.  (You can find the original USPS reports here.)

POStPlan was implemented at about 280 of these 1,350 offices in November and December.  The remaining 1,068 offices show an implement date of Jan. 10, 2015. 

Many of the postmasters at these remaining offices are retiring, so they’re not all going to get a RIF notice, but the final number could be significantly more than 250. 

The one-month extension on the RIF notices suggests that the Postal Service would like to find a “soft landing” for as many POStPlan postmasters as possible.  Hopefully the extension will give the Postal Service and the last of the impacted postmasters a little more time to avoid at least some of the RIFs. 

(Photo credit: Abbeville, MS post office, implement date of 1/10/15.  Photo by Evan Kalish.)