During the postal organizers zoom meeting yesterday, their was a discussion of scanners used to track rural carriers and city letter carriers. Rural carriers are not paid by the hour but are paid based on a route evaluation. As I understand it, a rural carrier will be paid the same no matter how long the route takes on any given day, no matter how much mail, no matter the weather on any given day. Rural carriers have periodic route evaluations that determine what their standard paycheck will be. In the past, these evaluations have always been done in person by a route inspector. But now the route evaluations will be done almost completely based on data from the scanners that rural carriers use. But workers have no way of knowing what metrics are used by the scanners or if the scanners are accurate. The new evaluations will take effect this month. Most rural carriers will receive a pay cut, some as much as $10,000 to $25,000 per year. This will result in some rural carriers quitting.

Scanners are used in the city carrier craft to monitor and surveil carriers. The result is pressure to work faster.

During our discussion, a carrier told us about a podcast called Tech Won't Save Us. There have been 167 episodes so far and many of the episodes are about how tech is being used against workers.

Attached to this email is a list of all Tech Won't Save Us episodes and how to hear any of them.

Tech Won’t Save Us podcast-- list of episodes 

Their primitive website is https://techwontsave.us/

Control-Click on one of these podcast services for all episodes: