Postal Service Opens Employee Center

Postal officials have opened a center they said was designed to provide 10,000 Santa Clarita area postal workers with tools for professional and personal advancement.

Stocked with five new Internet-ready computers and a trove of reference materials ranging from encyclopedias and self-help books to instructional videos and trade magazines, the Life Work Planning Center is at the Santa Clarita Postal Processing Center.

The first of its kind in the area, it is modeled after similar centers around the country, postal officials said.

The $40,000, 24-hour-a-day center will serve 3,000 employees at the Santa Clarita facility and thousands of others from the San Fernando and Antelope valleys.

Postal Service spokeswoman Terri Bouffiou said the center was not a direct response to the string of violent workplace incidents involving postal workers in recent years, which gave rise to the slang term “going postal” for homicidal madness. However, Bouffiou did say that the resource center reflects a desire by postal officials to address issues of employee satisfaction.

“We are aware that there are problems in our work environment and they don’t go away by wishing them away,” Bouffiou said. “The resource center is a way of allowing people to meet their needs, whatever those needs happen to be.”