Some time in late fall, Miriam Linder noticed mail was coming later and later – sometimes as late or 7 or 8 p.m.
“We go, ‘Oh, gee, there must be something going on. This guy had a rough day or something, and so that’s weird,” Linder said.
But the issue persisted, and Linder, who works as a cabinet maker now but who delivered mail on a rural route in California when she was younger, started asking people – including her own mail carrier and her friend Jamie Partridge, a retired mail carrier and the co-founder of Community and Postal Workers United – what was going on.
It wasn’t just that her carrier had one bad day, or even a string of them, and it wasn’t Linder’s imagination. Instead, she discovered her post office – 97217, which Includes several neighborhoods in North Portland – is participating in a national pilot project to uncouple mail sorting from mail delivery.
Earlier this fall, the National Association of Letter Carriers sued the Postal Service over the initiative. A judge dismissed the suit at the end of November, saying the court lacked jurisdiction. Both parties were left awaiting arbitration.
In late November, CPWU held a rally to protest the initiative. It has suggested postal customers in the neighborhood call the U.S. Postal Service and the Kenton Station Post Office to complain.
They’re concerned not only about what’s going on right now, but what will happen if the initiative, which is called “consolidated casing” and is being tried in 65 other ZIP codes nationwide, is more broadly adopted.
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Typically, when mail carriers arrive at work in the morning, they get the mail for their route and sort it themselves. Because they know their route, they can sort the mail in a way that makes logical sense to them — grouping every letter for the same apartment complex together, for example, or arranging packages and letters differently based on the type of mailbox the customer has.
There have always been postal workers who were office workers only and solely responsible for sorting mail, said Jim Cook, who worked as a letter carrier in Portland from 1977 to 2007 and served as a former president of the National Association of Letter Carriers in Oregon. But the effort to completely uncouple the last stage of sorting from carrying is new.
“What we see is management’s attempt, like in other industries, to remove the craft element – the skill element of a job,” Cook said.
A current letter carrier who spoke with Street Roots on condition of anonymity said routes have also been redrawn so individual carriers have more territory to cover.
While having mail sorted by someone else may be intended to streamline the process, postal workers have argued it slows it down.
“The whole system is like, all the mechanics of letter carrying has been turned on their head. And then beyond that, the mail has just gotten more, more complicated, more unsafe,” the carrier said.
The project might not even be a money saver. Letter carriers are working more hours to finish their routes and racking up not just overtime but additional pay for working after dark.
Willie Groshell, president of Oregon State Association of Letter Carriers, said the Portland area is unique in that carriers get an additional $50 if they work after sunset. (Nationwide, Groshell said, carriers who end up working after 6 p.m. get a smaller night differential payment.)
“It’s kind of one of those plans where when you look at it on paper, you know, from a long ways away from the actual work that it involves, it looks like it might be something that could save a lot of money, but the actual implementation to my understanding up to this point is it’s done exactly the opposite,” Groshell said.
Street Roots contacted the Postal Service for comment for this story, including whether it had collected data on potential cost savings of the program.
Ernie Swanson, the USPS strategic communications specialist for the Portland Seattle Districts responded, saying only: “Consolidated Casing is an internal test process USPS is investigating and have implemented at just one Oregon Post Office – Kenton Station. All customers continue to receive mail on a daily basis.”
The first national pilot project in the consolidated casing initiative was started in May, Groshell said. The Kenton pilot started in September, and there’s talk within the Postal Service of expanding it.
While the Kenton project is new, it’s also part of a longer trend as the Postal Service struggles to stay afloat. USPS has reported losses for the past decade. It reported a net loss of $8.8 billion in its fiscal year 2019, up from $4.9 billion the previous year, most of it involving actuarial calculations related to workers’ compensation expenses.
Groshen and Cook said the Postal Service has engaged in previous projects aimed at streamlining and de-skilling work and saving money but haven’t had the desired result.
The Postal Service traces its roots to the Continental Congress of 1775, when Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General. Mail delivery was handled by what was then called the United States Post Office Department. That agency was part of the U.S. government.
The modern U.S. Postal Service, created in 1970, is officially overseen by the federal government, but federal subsidies for it were phased out in the 1980s. It’s now entirely self-funded through postage sales.
The formation of the modern postal service was spurred in part by a 1970 strike by postal workers who were previously forbidden from collective bargaining but were explicitly granted them when the new agency was formed.
In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which included the unusual mandate that the agency pre-fund its retirement program 75 years into the future. That led to the closure of several mail processing plants, including two of the three that used to exist in Portland, and slower delivery of mail, Partridge said.
More recently, the Postal Service has been pushed to privatize. Under pressure from Amazon, Partridge said, the agency made a deal with the corporation to create a lower-tier position called city carrier assistant that is akin to the substitute carrier position in terms of pay and benefits and delivers mail and packages on Sundays. And in October, Postmaster General Megan Brennan, after pushing back against President Trump’s efforts to increase shipping costs on Amazon, announced she would retire in January.
Partridge’s group, Community and Postal Workers United, is a coalition of local organizations formed in 2012 to support postal workers and the preservation of the Postal Service.
“We’re hoping to raise enough of a stink about it and hoping to have enough leverage to kill that we will slow this train,” Partridge said.
“As isolated and alienated as we’ve become, this still is a community,” Linder said. “And it matters to us that the letter carriers have good working conditions that allow them to take pride in their work and do their work professionally.”