Image by Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay
Last week, an independent business owner, Cassie LaBelle, posted a Twitter thread about the delay of her packages. Like many small business owners, LaBelle relies on the United States Postal Service to deliver mail, including packages, in a timely and affordable manner. The thread, which as of this writing has more than 36,000 retweets, said the typically trustworthy USPS has been faltering in recent weeks.
“I can’t even count the number of packages I sent through USPS that experienced significant delays in recent years because the quantity was so small,” he wrote, but “since DeJoy took over from USPS? 5-10% of My mail takes WEEKS to deliver. Some have been stuck in the system for MORE THAN A MONTH. “
LaBelle is referring to USPS Director General of Posts Louis DeJoy, who took office on June 15 and is also one of Trump’s top donors. A month after his job, DeJoy issued a note first reported by the Washington Post mentioning the Post Office’s dire financial situation and announced a list of new policies. The most reported item was that the Post Office would now accept late mail to save costs.
There has been a lot of confusion, and sometimes misinformation, about what DeJoy’s policies are really doing. Some, like LaBelle, blame him for the current USPS struggles.
But the reality is more complicated. In interviews with seven postal workers across the country, all of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking to the press, Motherboard heard many of the same concerns that LaBelle expressed: that DeJoy may intentionally try to disrupt USPS services to sabotage the vote-by-mail system before the November election, which is hell-bent on privatizing the USPS and is in league with Trump. But at the same time, they ruled out the possibility that he is responsible for the package’s current or past delays. When asked how they knew this, postal workers told Motherboard that they had had delivery problems for months, long before DeJoy took over. The much simpler explanation, they said, is that there are too many packages right now for them to handle.
That said, postal workers are wary of DeJoy’s actions, in part because, given the current state of the USPS and past actions of Congress, it’s difficult to distinguish between cost cutting in the name of efficiency and intentionally sabotaging the USPS. As a Ohio mail carrier said, a loyal politician who runs the post office “is the Trojan horse that Republicans have wanted for more than 20 years.”
Do you work for the USPS? Do you know something we should know? Email Aaron Gordon at [email protected].
DeJoy’s July 10 memo, titled “Pivoting For Our Future,” caught the media’s attention because of a particularly inflammatory line. “One aspect of these changes that can be difficult for employees is that, temporarily, we can see the mail left or the mail on the floor or in the workshop docks (in P & DCs [Processing and Distribution Centers]), which is not typical, “said the note.
But the rest of the memo represents an image of a new boss trying to attack a particular source of rising costs: overtime pay due to “late and extra travel.”
This problem is not the product of DeJoy’s imagination. The USPS system barely worked at peak efficiency even before COVID arrived. In January, the USPS Office of the Investigator General made visits to 16 processing and distribution facilities across the country. Found that, for fiscal year 2019, 17 percent of mail volume “was not processed in time to meet its target delivery date,” approximately 20 percent of transportation trips left the processing facility late. , and carriers returned late from their delivery rounds 18 percent of the time. All of this resulted in an estimated $ 1.1 billion in overtime payments related to inefficiency and delays, continuing a continuing trend in USPS dependency on hours extras to meet delivery targets.
Why the dependency on overtime? Because the USPS has reduced its workforce in the past decade due to fiscal problems stemming from the passage of the Postal Improvement and Liability Act in 2006. This law required the USPS to previously pay billions of dollars a year in a fund. For health benefits, your future workforce will need a requirement that no other federal entity —or, for that matter, a private company— has. In recent years, USPS stopped paying this fund because it could no longer afford it.
As a result of this fiscal collapse, along with the simultaneous decline in first-class mail that forced USPS finances as it was, the USPS undertook a decade-long cost reduction effort to hire fewer workers and pay them less. Between 2009 and 2018, the USPS reduced its workforce by 77,000 people, pays less for new employees, and is increasingly dependent on “nonprofessional employees” who are paid hourly, have no set hours, and have fewer benefits, according to Government Accountability Office. These measures collectively saved the USPS about $ 2.5 billion a year between 2016 and 2018, less than half of what its annual prepaid health requirements are under the 2006 law.
However, employee compensation is still a higher percentage of USPS costs compared to FedEx and UPS (72 percent according to a report from the Office of Government Accountability). Surely, the massive workforce of 634,000 USPS members has real inefficiencies that, if addressed, would lead to savings. But the USPS also has to do something that FedEx and UPS don’t do. You are legally obligated to deliver mail to every person in the country, a fundamentally laborious task.
That is why it is not fair to compare FedEx and UPS clearing numbers with USPS in such a simple way. In fact, it is a complete fallacy to speak of all these shipping companies regarding USPS as if they were totally separate, because they are highly dependent on each other. UPS, FedEx, and Amazon use USPS to some extent to handle package delivery, and in turn, USPS uses contractors, including FedEx, to obtain packages between distribution points. To the extent that FedEx and UPS could pay a smaller portion of their earnings to workers, it’s largely because they use the post office for the most laborious and least profitable part of the shipping process.
Partly as a result of this interconnection, USPS is not the only one that has had delivery problems in recent months. UPS has had serious delays in the Bay Area and FedEx has struggled to adjust to a primarily commercial delivery business for more residential service. Even Amazon Prime went through a few months in which many deliveries took much more than two days and the company had to impose strict limits on who could order what.
Shared networks make it difficult to identify where delays are coming from. Even the USPS mail carriers I spoke with often had no idea why packages were delayed. They assumed that there were delays at the distribution facilities, especially in the cities affected by COVID, but they were not sure. A report from the Portland Press Herald In Maine, the local postmaster tells postmen to delay mail and first-class packages to ensure Amazon deliveries are made on time. None of the operators Motherboard spoke to said they had been told to do the same, but added that it would hardly be the first time that different regions were doing things differently. In that regard, a key finding from the June OIG report was the lack of standard operating procedures or “best practices” at all facilities.
What is clear is that USPS is trying to do more with less. It is delivering 60 to 80 percent more packages than it normally does this time of year and for a longer sustained period, in many cases without the staff increases that generally accompany the equally busy Christmas fever. The only way the USPS has been able to manage is to make the existing workforce work longer and pay the accompanying overtime to do so.
According to the USPS employees Motherboard spoke to, it’s too early to say what impact DeJoy’s policies will have. For example, it takes time for distribution facilities to be so backed up that packages are delayed for weeks. Regardless of whether DeJoy’s plan works or not, it won’t fix what affects the post office. Only Congress can do that, and few are optimistic about it.
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