Edited by author 11-06-2009 07:57 AM
Fair assessment. No mention was made of any comparison to fraud but have you ever seen anywhere at the post office exactly how much money the post office ever spends in any time period relating to the arrest and conviction of fraudualent worker's comp claimants?
The accidents came long after I was a steward , safety captain, or anything else. I was 30 years old when I went to work for the post office and it took 15 years of 10 and 12 hour days to wear me completely out and I worked roughnecking in the oil field, offshore and on shore and a dozen frieght hauling a dock related forms of employment and have even worked 5 different jobs at the same time, while going to college.
This "off the floor" stuff you allude to doesn't apply to me in any form. I never bid a job which was any easier than continually unloading 45 and 53 foot trailers until my back said goodbye.
I unconcerned what your status is because I was only offering a hint at what kind of anonymous, invisible, "poster on the internet, former postal employee" I was and person I still am, in spite of my unplanned, life changing and future compromising, workplace injuries have managed to assert.
I too, would love to see both, a statistical and demographic, service-wide, general accounting, which would very clearly and accurately expose the true safety conditions withgin the postal service and the whole fedral government.
FEHB Plan Participants pay for insurance which more often than anyone I knowof realizes, is directly impacted by FECA Claim entitled medical treatments.
Safety in the federal government and the post office is INCOMPLETE. Employees are hurt every single day yet do not file FECA claims. They are mistakenly afraid. These people go to their FEHB doctors for treatments and many continue to work the same damn jobs which will eventually cripple them and they attempt to do this unnoticed. I noticed.

The fedral government and the post office need to pay their bills. Not working and retired former fedral employees living on fixed incomes.

This matter is entirely larger than a few words on the internet to a forum of people who mostly want to "vent" or stroke themselves, while of course, respecting those genuinely concerned and unselfish contributors to the betterment of fellow postal workers and the postal worklife.

Think about it real big.

Compare FEHB Plan Treatments with FECA claimed injuries. Similar rather than different and this is hardly rocket science.

Dave Kirtley