Indiana Conflict Resolution Institute
News Article

Companies Adopting Postal Service Grievance Process

New York Times
Management
September 6, 2000
By Mickey Meece

In the early 1990's, the United States Postal Service had an employee
crisis on its hands. Not the workplace shootings that made
headlines and added the phrase "going postal" to the American
vocabulary of violence. Those incidents, while often deadly, were
isolated.

What really threatened the agency's productivity and morale was an
avalanche of complaints by angry, frustrated employees to the
federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. For years, charges
of racial discrimination, sexual harassment and other management
abuses poured into the watchdog agency from the Postal Service, and
the volume of informal complaints had built up to an incredible
30,000 filings a year, more than from any other single employer.
Some of the complaints escalated into costly litigation, while
others festered.

But in 1994 as part of a settlement of a class-action lawsuit,
lawyers at the Postal Service, one of the nation's largest
employers, started one of the most ambitious experiments in dispute
resolution in American corporate history. They created a program
called REDRESS™ to settle disputes using neutral outside mediators,
and tested it in a few cities before rolling it out nationally in
1997.

The results were spectacular: in the first 22 months of full
operation, from September 1998 through June of this year, 17,645
informal disputes were mediated under REDRESS™ and of those, 80
percent were resolved.

During the same period, formal complaints, which peaked at 14,000
by 1997, dropped 30 percent. The lawyers estimate that the program
has saved the agency millions of dollars in legal costs and
improved productivity, to say nothing of the gains in intangibles
like job satisfaction.

Now, two of the Postal Service's lawyers, Cynthia J. Hallberlin,
former chief counsel, and Mary S. Elcano, former general counsel,
have left for private practice at the Brown & Wood law firm in
Washington, and are taking a similar program, which they have named
Wins, on a road show. They are convinced that if mediation worked
wonders for the Postal Service, it could do so at any company or
organization.

Already, the World Bank has signed on for a review of its
mediation program, and others, including investment banks, dot-coms
and recognized brand-name manufacturers, are interested, the
lawyers say. What is selling them, they say, is REDRESS™'s record.

Corporate America certainly needs the help. High-profile racial
discrimination and sexual-harassment class-action lawsuits filed in
recent years against industry giants like Texaco and Coca-Cola are
only the tip of the litigation iceberg. Employment discrimination
cases nearly tripled between 1990 and 1998, to 23,735 filings in
federal district courts, according to the Justice Department.

To be sure, companies are not sitting on their hands. A survey of
Fortune 1,000 companies in 1997 by the Cornell Institute on
Conflict Resolution found that the majority were doing some form of
what is known as alternative dispute resolution to avoid
litigation.

But Ms. Elcano and Ms. Hallberlin say they possess one thing that
no one else can offer, a huge database of statistics and exit
surveys, which they say proves how valuable their form of
mediation, called transformative mediation, was to postal workers.

In it, the parties involved control the process and the outcome.


"We have found that companies are very interested in transformative
mediation," Ms. Hallberlin said, "because of its promise to not
just solve the problem at hand, but to help the parties communicate
more effectively in the future."

Before REDRESS™ was created, Postal Service employees embroiled in
disputes with their bosses followed procedures that could drag on
for years. Generally, they would begin by filing an informal
E.E.O.C. complaint. They then had the choice of dropping the matter
or going down the bureaucratic path of filing a formal grievance,
starting an official investigation with all its affidavits and
hearings. Ultimately, they might file a lawsuit.

The REDRESS™ program aimed to short-circuit that process by
offering disgruntled workers mediation. If a person who filed an
informal complaint agreed, a meeting would be set up, a mediator
would hear both sides of the dispute and, in most instances, help
propose a solution within a day.

Sometimes, all the worker wanted was for his boss to say he was
sorry. "The power of an apology became very significant," Ms.
Elcano said. "People would walk away from litigation with that
because they felt it was an honest give and take."

For example, one supervisor called all of his mail carriers by a
number, Ms. Hallberlin said. One carrier thought it was demeaning
and filed a complaint. When confronted about it in mediation, the
supervisor said he had had no idea that some people found the
practice offensive and said he would stop it immediately. Case
closed.

"You're never going to get rid of conflict," Ms. Hallberlin said,
"you just want to handle it better."

Robert A. Baruch Bush, a law professor at Hofstra University who
helped design a training program for the 3,000 outside mediators in
REDRESS™, said the goal was to shift conversations between employees
and their supervisors from destructive to constructive. "If that
happens," he said, "it becomes a more open corporation, and then
the parties themselves in most cases will be able to define what's
bothering them and how to fix it." Resolution is a byproduct, he
added.

REDRESS™ is intended to make mediation available at any stage of
the grievance process, not just at the beginning. In one
class-action racial- discrimination lawsuit that had originated in
an E.E.O.C. complaint, black postal workers in Florida accused a
white postmaster of making racist remarks about their work habits.
They sought his dismissal, Ms. Hallberlin said.

It never came to that or to a dollar settlement, she said, because
both parties agreed to bring in an outside mediator. In the end,
the postmaster apologized, wrote a check to the N.A.A.C.P. and
joined the Postal Service's diversity committee. "In future
dealings, he had a more harmonious post office," Ms. Hallberlin
said.

Elaine Kirsch, an outside mediator working in New York, recalled a
case involving a postal supervisor and an employee, both women, one
white and one black, neither willing to back down. The dispute was
over the employee's repeated lateness, Ms. Kirsch said, but really
it was about a lack of communication. After yelling at each other
for one and a half hours, she said, the two became quiet.

Ms. Kirsch said she took the opportunity to point out that the two
had more in common than they had thought. Sometime after that, she
said, the supervisor and employee returned to hammering out
particular issues and rehashing events. Finally, one said words to
this effect: "You never lied. You always say what you mean."

The ice was broken, Ms. Kirsch said, "and from then on it was easy
as pie." It turned out that the employee was often late because she
had trouble finding care for her asthmatic child. She agreed to
call her supervisor when this happened and her supervisor agreed to
be more understanding.

To keep tabs on REDRESS™'s progress, the Postal Service hired Lisa
Bingham, director of the Conflict Resolution Center at Indiana
University. "Quantifying has been one of the problems with the
field of dispute resolution for some time," Ms. Bingham said.

Her exit-survey research showed that postal employees and their
union representatives and supervisors were highly satisfied with
the process and the mediators. And, to a lesser degree, the parties
were satisfied with the outcome.

Mary P. Rowe, an adjunct professor at the Sloan School of
Management at M.I.T., said REDRESS™ "was large, elaborate and better
evaluated than virtually any other component or system like it."

And, said Professor Rowe, a longtime ombudsperson at M.I.T., there
was no reason that programs like REDRESS™ should not thrive in the
private sector. "Conflict management programs should function in
every milieu," she said.

Not everyone is a big fan of mediation, of course, least of all
the plaintiffs' bar. "Damages are often the best way to make up for
how someone has been harmed," said Pamela Coukos, a lawyer for
Mehri, Malkin & Ross, the Washington firm handling the class-action
lawsuit against Coca-Cola. "Money can be a measure of how much
respect you are given by a company." At the very least, Ms. Coukos
said, workers with grievances should have a choice between
litigation or some type of nonjudicial dispute resolution.

And in fact, such dispute resolution is widespread. Of the 606
companies surveyed by Cornell, for example, 88 percent reported
using mediation at least once in the preceding three years and 79
percent reported using arbitration, which like mediation employs
outside neutral parties, but unlike mediation, reaches a binding
solution.

Today, said David B. Lipsky, the Cornell professor who conducted
the 1997 survey with Ronald L. Seeber, companies are moving from a
piecemeal approach to unified programs.

A little more than a year ago, for example, the Prudential
Insurance Company of America in Newark, started its own program
called Roads to Resolution. Oliver B. Quinn, the program director,
said Prudential took the step to develop a system that offered
mediation and arbitration in light of the litigation erupting
elsewhere.

And as part of its settlement of a multimillion-dollar racial
discrimination case, Texaco created an Ombuds Program in February
1998. Later that year, the company folded it and other programs
like mediation and arbitration into a problem-resolution system.

As a result, Carole A. Young, director of the Ombuds program, said
a court-appointed task force had determined that litigation had
been reduced by nearly half in the first year.

In the meantime, the good news continues for the Postal Service.
Karen Intrater, one of the lawyers who came up with the idea of
REDRESS™, said the program had been so successful it was catching on
among government agencies.

"It's not a magic pill, but you can see the difference," Ms.
Intrater said. "I've never seen anything that has such a potential
for change as this."

The New York Times on the Web
http://www.nytimes.com

Indiana Conflict Resolution Institute
Last updated: July 30, 2004
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