And that\'s what Hansen found in June when she and a hidden camera crew followed a Beaverton postal service "contractor" for several days.

Under pressure from the government, the Postal Service Board of Governors, named by President Bush, has pushed USPS managers to privatize new delivery routes in urban areas, as well as continuing them in rural areas.

Use of the "contractors" to deliver the mail became a key issue in bargaining between the agency and the unions. There were widespread union protests, including one NALC demonstration in high winds and rain in front of USPS headquarters in D.C..

The unions also make the point that the "contractors" couldn\'t be trusted with the mail the way regular Letter Carriers are trusted.

To prove the case, NALC\'s national office decided to hire a film crew to document the struggle against postal privatization. Their work will be shown at NALC\'s July 21-25 convention in Boston. Last year, as part of a union contract settlement, USPS declared a moratorium on further subcontracting, but that expires July 31.

The camera crew first traveled to Miami in late May, where they filmed one side of postal privatization -- worker exploitation. They followed a poorly paid Haitian-born legal immigrant as he drove his postal route, all over town. Hansen said the Beaverton case shows another side of privatization: Waste, inefficiency, and possibly nepotism.

When she got her four-year contract last year, the Beaverton contractor was the girlfriend of a postal supervisor\'s son. She is paid $24,380 a year for what Hansen estimates is just over an hour a day of work.

In preparation for the film crew\'s arrival, Hansen read the contract\'s requirements and drove out to look at the contractor\'s sorting area in the Beaverton post office, and the route itself. The contract requires delivery to 89 addresses in four "cluster boxes" at Arbor Parc -- a half-built condo development on which construction had halted after the real estate downturn hit. Arbor Parc is surrounded on all sides by routes delivered by union letter carriers, and Hansen has argued for over a year that it would make a lot more sense just to add Arbor Parc to those routes.

Hansen spent several days looking in on the contractor -- whose name is being withheld for privacy reasons -- and asking other USPS employees about her work. Hansen discovered some irregularities: A scanner that\'s supposed to be taken along the route to time-certify package deliveries was instead left in the office; A shop steward told Hansen the contractor scans deliveries before leaving the office, violating USPS\' commitment to accurately record time of delivery.

The contractor was supposed to pick up the mail at 10 a.m., but instead arrived at 10:45 a.m.-11:45 a.m. on the days Hansen was waiting. A male companion rode with her while she did her deliveries, and she would stay out what seemed to Hansen like a long time for such a short route. On May 31, Hansen watched her pull up at the post office, and then drove to Arbor Parc, expecting to watch how she did her work. Hansen
says she waited two-and-a-half hours, and the contractor didn\'t show up.

Letter carriers, including contractors, are supposed return to the post office at the end of their routes to turn in the key that opens their secure mailboxes, but the Beaverton contractor only infrequently returned the key, Hansen learned. That\'s a serious violation of postal security.

On June 4, the camera crew waited outside Beaverton\'s Evergreen post office for the contractor to arrive. Unaware she was being filmed, she picked up the mail and drove with her male companion to a Shari\'s restaurant in Tanasbourne Mall. They ate pancakes while the mail sat undelivered in her Jeep outside.

Hansen and the camera crew followed her to Arbor Parc. Hansen, wearing a wire, approached her as she placed mail in a cluster box. "My idea was to simply engage her about when the mail came, as if I was a resident," Hansen said. The contractor told Hansen she picks up the mail between 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. and gets to Arbor Parc between 11 a.m. and 12 noon. The development is a five-minute drive from the post office, and it\'s her only delivery.

Then Hansen identified herself as a union officer. "How\'s the contract going?" Hansen asked her. "I think this is a solid deal for me, and for the post office," the contractor replied. Hansen asked her if she\'d be willing to be interviewed on film about her job. When she said OK, Hansen waved her arm, and a van-load of people with cameras hopped out.

"At that point, there was like that moment where you know you\'ve been filmed," Hansen recalls. "She wasn\'t happy about it." The contractor left, saying she was going to tell her supervisor about what had happened.

Cameras in tow, Hansen knocked on doors and spoke to Arbor Parc residents. Several told her they thought they weren\'t getting their mail every day, and that it didn\'t come at the same time. They hadn\'t been notified they\'d have contracted-out mail delivery service when they bought the condos.

The Postal Service retaliated--against Hansen, the union president.

The next day, when she arrived at the main Portland post office to meet the postmaster, Hansen discovered her electronic access had been cancelled without notice. She waved her postal ID through the card scanner, but the door wouldn\'t unlock. For 45 minutes, she tried without success to get a USPS manager to re-activate it.

On mid-morning June 6 -- two days after the on-camera interview of the "contractor," two armed postal inspectors showed up unannounced at the union hall, instructed to seize Hansen\'s postal identification. As a union officer, Hansen has a contractual right to access post offices for representational activity. She was floored, and demanded an explanation from management.

Postal Service human resources manager Corrinne Loprinzi told Hansen the badge was taken because Hansen is no longer a USPS employee. Hansen, who\'d been on leave the previous six years to work full-time at the union, had decided to formally retire at the beginning of May after 34 years at USPS, though she plans to serve out the remainder of her term as union president.

But she knows of three other union officials who had done the same thing and USPS extended them the professional courtesy of keeping their postal ID to allow them to access post offices on union business.

It looked like retaliation and the NALC stepped in and threatened to fight the case. Management relented. Hansen got her ID back. Meanwhile, she composed a letter to management detailing her findings about the contractor. And the union\'s larger battle against privatization continues.

Don McIntosh of the The Northwest Labor Press wrote this article. It was distributed by Press Associates, Inc., news service.