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LA Times has been looking into the changes at the USPS. Also worth clicking the link below on their experiment to mail 100 letters and track their delivery.
Empty trucks, falsified records, late mail: How Louis DeJoy’s changes at the Postal Service brought chaos
For new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who wanted the U.S. Postal Service to operate more efficiently, it seemed like an obvious fix: Just run the trucks on time.
So in July he ordered drivers to start leaving post offices and distribution centers exactly on schedule and curtailed extra trips to pick up any mail that missed earlier cutoffs.
Workers who spoke to The Times described troubling details about how the rigid schedules have played out: Some trucks have traveled empty, and mail left behind has accumulated at massive processing centers, creating backlogs in a system that is not designed to store mail. Loading dock managers have falsified records so it appears that trucks are departing earlier, some mail has been sorted twice, and in at least one case, a large shipment from Amazon was turned away because facilities had no space to process it.
At a massive mail facility in Santa Ana, tractor-trailers began pulling away from the docks even if workers were in the middle of loading them, said Will Khong, president of the postal union’s Orange County-area chapter.
That left-behind mail muddled one of the Postal Service’s key automated processes: sorting hundreds of thousands of letters into the exact order that they will be delivered along postal carriers’ routes. Workers had to sort some pieces of mail twice to ensure they were put in the proper order for the next day.
“We were just shaking our heads,” Khong said. “Why would you have a policy where you then have to run the mail twice — if all you have to do is have the trucks wait a few more minutes?”
The share of first-class mail that was delivered on time across the U.S. fell by more than 9 percentage points during the time that DeJoy made his changes, according to agency data analyzed and released Wednesday by the office of Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). In the first full week of July, before the trucking policy change, 90.6% of first-class mail was on time; in the second week of August, that had dropped to 81.5%, the analysis said.
Times reporters who mailed 100 letters to five cities in late August found that at least 22 of the envelopes arrived late or were never delivered. One letter sent from Sylmar took 11 days to get to Austin, Texas. Another item mailed from Malibu sat in the Los Angeles processing center for three days before being delivered to a San Francisco suburb four days later.
“I feel like I’m in a day care,” Bockman said, noting that someone has put signs up in Seattle and Tacoma processing facilities that feature clip art of a stopwatch and say “5 Minutes Early Is The New ON TIME!” with the phrase “NO EXCEPTIONS” in bold red type.
“The micromanagement has really caused issues in the workplace,” Bockman said. “It’s stressful. You don’t want to be late, and you sure as hell don’t want to be talked to by supervisors” about it.
Bockman said the pressure to leave five minutes early means that about four times a week he has been driving down freeways with an empty trailer.
Empty trucks, falsified records, late mail: How Louis DeJoy’s changes at the Postal Service brought chaos
For new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who wanted the U.S. Postal Service to operate more efficiently, it seemed like an obvious fix: Just run the trucks on time.
So in July he ordered drivers to start leaving post offices and distribution centers exactly on schedule and curtailed extra trips to pick up any mail that missed earlier cutoffs.
Workers who spoke to The Times described troubling details about how the rigid schedules have played out: Some trucks have traveled empty, and mail left behind has accumulated at massive processing centers, creating backlogs in a system that is not designed to store mail. Loading dock managers have falsified records so it appears that trucks are departing earlier, some mail has been sorted twice, and in at least one case, a large shipment from Amazon was turned away because facilities had no space to process it.
At a massive mail facility in Santa Ana, tractor-trailers began pulling away from the docks even if workers were in the middle of loading them, said Will Khong, president of the postal union’s Orange County-area chapter.
That left-behind mail muddled one of the Postal Service’s key automated processes: sorting hundreds of thousands of letters into the exact order that they will be delivered along postal carriers’ routes. Workers had to sort some pieces of mail twice to ensure they were put in the proper order for the next day.
“We were just shaking our heads,” Khong said. “Why would you have a policy where you then have to run the mail twice — if all you have to do is have the trucks wait a few more minutes?”
The share of first-class mail that was delivered on time across the U.S. fell by more than 9 percentage points during the time that DeJoy made his changes, according to agency data analyzed and released Wednesday by the office of Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). In the first full week of July, before the trucking policy change, 90.6% of first-class mail was on time; in the second week of August, that had dropped to 81.5%, the analysis said.
Times reporters who mailed 100 letters to five cities in late August found that at least 22 of the envelopes arrived late or were never delivered. One letter sent from Sylmar took 11 days to get to Austin, Texas. Another item mailed from Malibu sat in the Los Angeles processing center for three days before being delivered to a San Francisco suburb four days later.
“I feel like I’m in a day care,” Bockman said, noting that someone has put signs up in Seattle and Tacoma processing facilities that feature clip art of a stopwatch and say “5 Minutes Early Is The New ON TIME!” with the phrase “NO EXCEPTIONS” in bold red type.
“The micromanagement has really caused issues in the workplace,” Bockman said. “It’s stressful. You don’t want to be late, and you sure as hell don’t want to be talked to by supervisors” about it.
Bockman said the pressure to leave five minutes early means that about four times a week he has been driving down freeways with an empty trailer.