Deviations from Assignment
Safety and Health Representative
By Steve Burt
This article first appeared in the December 1996 issue of the Voice of Branch One.
Deviations from one’s assignment are an almost daily reality for letter carriers. Slight deviations may have seemed innocent in the past, but this is no longer the case. You may prefer to have an ice cream cone on a hot day, rather than eat at the Coney Island restaurant designated in your route book. Even though this seems reasonable and will involve no more cost to the employer, the greater the deviation from your Form 1564-A, the larger the risk that you will expose yourself to drastic discipline and lose coverage under workers’ compensation law in the likely event of a Postal Service challenge to your injury claim.
Although some permission exists to pursue personal activities during lunch periods, the permission is still very restrictive (requiring a secured vehicle at a proper park point and no additional cost to the employer). Such personal activities serve to rapidly take you out of coverage under workers’ compensation.
Management will usually ignore minor deviations as long as you are moving an acceptable amount of mail, until the day you are involved in an accident off the route or assigned travel line. Then the roof comes crashing in, both in terms of discipline and compensation.
The Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs uses its Kirtos precedent to adjudicate claims where an injury has taken place while an employee has stopped performing work-related behavior to engage in a so-called personal mission. This precedent is interpreted by OWCP Claims Examiners in a manner to minimize almost all employer liability if an off-site employee is not performing approved behaviors.
An employee who is on a trip for his employer is under the protection of the FECA while engaging in activities essential to or reasonably incidental to these special activities. However, when the employee deviates from the activities incidental to his employment, he ceases to be within the protection of the Act and an injury occurring during such deviation is not compensable. An identifiable deviation from a business trip for personal reasons takes the employee out of the course of his employment until he returns to the route of the business trip unless the deviation is so insubstantial that it may be disregarded. (Katherine A. Kirtos, 42 ECAB Docket No. 90-0946, issued October 31, 1990)
The essential message of Kirtos and a number of similar OWCP decisions is this: It is foolish, as well as highly unprofessional, for a letter carrier to hurry through the route and drive off in a government or contract vehicle to conduct any sort of personal business.
If you know that you must leave the route for a brief period, at least get permission or an extended lunch understanding. Permission or an extended lunch will only cure the deviation from a discipline standpoint. You will still abandon most or all of your vital coverage under workers’ compensation.
In the Detroit area, we are seeing extremely drastic discipline for vehicle accidents involving carriers who are off their assignments. Given management’s infuriation with its awful safety performance, lashing out at injured letter carriers is a sad but not altogether surprising occurrence. We would not agree that losing your job for such an occurrence is a fair punishment for deviating from one's assignment, but an Arbitrator might concur with management.
Postal management and the Postal Inspection Service have been increasing their street surveillance of letter carriers out of frustration that DPS goals have not been met. The first thing these visitors will try to determine is if you are on your routes, gainfully employed. Make it easy for them. Be right where you belong, doing the right thing. Then they will have to type someone else’s name on their next letter of charges.
For these reasons, if you have not been adhering to the schedule and travel lines in your route book, please make today the first day of the rest of your career.
Disclaimer: The material in these articles is not presumed or intended to reflect an official position of the
National Association of Letter Carriers, of Branch #1, NALC, or the Michigan State Association of Letter Carriers. These articles contain opinion statements of the writer offered for basic informational purposes only. There is no substitute for consultation with or representation by a trained advocate. The writer cannot assume responsibility of any type for the use of this material by others.
