The U.S. Postal Service is paying employees to do nothing.

Employees clock in and are paid their regular hourly wage of between $17 and $23 an hour, even when their supervisor instructs them to sit in a "standby room," where they can do nothing but read Postal Service instructional materials -- they cannot eat, drink, smoke, read books or talk on the phone.

"The post office is trying to prove they can lay off workers" in the three Key West stations, said Kathryn dePoo, vice president of the Florida Keys Area American Postal Workers union, which opposes the practice.

The Postal Service is lobbying Congress to change a law that prohibits it from laying off union employees who have at least six years' tenure, saying it needs to reduce its work force in light of the plummeting volume of mail.

Its argument would be fueled by showing that fewer workers can handle the workload at Key West's post offices on Whitehead Street, in the Overseas Market and at the Navy base, union President Jack Baldwin said.

"It's demeaning," he said. "These people take pride in their work and they come in every day to work."

Supervisors adjust to necessary staffing levels throughout the day, ordering as many as one to three employees in the standby room for as little as 15 minutes to as much as two hours, Baldwin said. Clerks can press a buzzer to call standby employees back to the floor if more than three people are in line, he said. On Tuesday, however, the buzzer was not working and clerks had to use the telephone to page the standby employees.

A Postal Service spokeswoman acknowledged the practice of standby operations, which media reports show has occurred in other places, such as Dallas, where postal facilities were consolidated.

"When work is not available, the Postal Service has a contractual obligation to carry [union] employees in a pay status," Debbie Fetterly wrote in an e-mail to The Citizen. "In these situations we initiate standby operations. Affected employees are placed in standby operations while we take action as quickly as contractually possible to realign complement to meet workload needs."

The Postal Service handled 9 billion fewer pieces of mail in 2008 than in 2007, and projections for 2009 estimate further losses of between 12 million and 15 billion pieces of mail, Fetterly said.

"This has resulted in a mismatch of workload to work force," she said.

The Postal Service this week announced cost-cutting measures that could save about $6 billion this year. One such measure is a recent agreement with two postal unions that would offer financial incentives for some workers to resign or retire early. The option will be offered to 30,000 workers and could save $500 million, Fetterly said.

Letter carriers are not affected by the negotiations because the Postal Service constantly is adding new addresses to its roster of mail recipients.

Most affected employees work in mail-processing centers, but Key West is one of the only locations in Florida where standby operations are being instituted for clerks rather than behind-the-scenes employees, Baldwin said.

Other money-saving measures include a nationwide hiring freeze, a construction halt on new postal facilities, the closure of six district offices, the sale of unused postal facilities and a salary freeze for all officers and executives.

The changes are not likely to affect the situation in Key West, where employees are being told not to work when there is, in fact, work to be done, Baldwin said. Some Key West clerks have protested their time in the standby room, telling supervisors there were other things they could be doing, dePoo agreed.

"There is work to be done," she said. "There is work that is not getting done, and the lines [on Monday] at the Whitehead Street office were out the door, so people were leaving. We lost customers, and the American public lost service."

No employees were in the standby room during that busy period, dePoo said.

The union repeatedly has complained that staffing-level studies are conducted in Key West's off-season, and the standby operations are being imposed during the post office's slowest time, when the city sees the fewest tourists and part-time residents.

It is unknown how long the standby operations will be in place, and when decisions about local staffing levels will be made.

mbolen@keysnews.com