The post-office appropriation bill for the year beginning July, 1913,
which was passed in the last days of the Sixty-second Congress,
provided for 2,400 additional clerks as well as an increased number
of carriers. It raised the minimum pay for clerks and carriers from
$600 to $800 a year and set the minimum for substitutes at forty
instead of thirty cents an hour. Large appropriations were made for
auxiliary clerk and carrier hire, a special sum being set aside to
prevent overwork of the regular employes during the summer vacation
period. The minimum pay for laborers and watchmen in the department
was raised from $650 to $720.
The raising of minimum salaries and the provision of extra service
to prevent overwork and insure the effectiveness of the eight-hour
day worked within ten consecutive hours, which was passed last year,
rounds out the legislation of the Sixty-second Congress affecting the
postal employes. This Congress, in the words of the _Union Postal
Clerk_, in the two years of its existence, “enacted more legislation
providing for the betterment of the condition of the postal employes
and the improvement of the service than has ever been enacted since
the establishment of the civil service among postal employes.”
The conditions which prevailed at the opening of this Congress were
described in THE SURVEY of August 6, 1911. Last year’s improvements,
which were summarized in THE SURVEY of July 13 and September 14,
include the abolition of the gag rule; the enactment of an eight-hour
day for clerks: and a Sunday-closing provision, with compensatory
time off for the group of employes who are not affected by this
provision; the raising of pay in the mail service; the providing of
safer construction for mail cars, and the provision that 75 per cent
of clerks and carriers in the second highest grades of pay should be
automatically raised each year to the highest grade.
The post-office is not as yet, however, in the opinion of those who
have studied its labor problem, a model employer. The substitutes
are not on an entirely satisfactory basis, as no provision is made
guaranteeing them a minimum number of hours a week, or setting a
limit to the number of years they serve before they are received into
the regular service. By the terms of the bill, whatever may have been
done by administrative readjustments, no provision is made to relieve
the overstrain on certain sections of the railway mail service. In
spite of many years of vigorous agitation no retirement or pension
bill for the service has as yet been passed.