Is your mail late? Blame it on staffing problems at the post office

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Before the holidays and even after, readers called the Star Tribune again and again with a question: what’s going on with the mail?

People were going days, even more than a week, without delivery at the end of last year. Some Minnesotans in Congress began pushing for answers at the highest levels of the U.S. Postal Service.

Meanwhile, Minnesotans like Bobbi Palmiter of Richfield have been doing their own digging, starting with their carriers and the clerks they see regularly at their local post office branches.

“They all mentioned staffing,” Palmiter told me earlier this month.

It has always been difficult to work. The postal system is a perpetual motion machine. It’s the ocean. One wave lands, and the next is right behind. It takes exceptional dedication to work in this environment.

During the pandemic, postage charges increased as more people ordered food and other products for home delivery. Today, with baby boomer retirements and other labor market constraints, an already tough workplace is finding it even harder to find workers.

Today, nearly all USPS branches and vehicles display hiring signs. There are career fairs at post office branches every month in the Twin Cities and many small towns in Minnesota.

Nationally, the Postal Service and the National Association of Letter Carriers are in talks for a three-year contract to replace the one that expires May 20. Union President Brian Renfroe opened the talks in February saying: at any time in history.”

For years, dating back even before the pandemic, carriers started the day knowing they might have to work “compulsory overtime” if their branch routes were not completed. From 2014 to 2019, overtime costs soared 35% for the USPS, according to a report by the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).

Although overtime has decreased in the system in 2021, it appears to have increased again last year, according to carriers and union officials. The OIG Postal Service has yet to release 2022 data.

The carriers’ contract says they’re not supposed to work more than 12 hours a day and 60 hours a week, but a postman in Minneapolis told me they sometimes exceed that time to get the mail out. This winter, I saw carriers in my west metro neighborhood until 9 p.m., their path lit by LED lights on their knit caps.

“If someone calls in sick, this route has to wait until the next day,” the Minneapolis carrier said. Carriers hate doing this, she said, calling it “leaving mail on the floor”. She asked not to be named, saying she feared being reprimanded by both the Post and the union.

A union spokesman in Washington also declined to speak officially, saying the labor shortage is a sensitive issue for all parties.

The Postal Service spokesperson for the Twin Cities was absent last week. A spokeswoman for a regional office in Kentucky declined to answer specific questions. However, she said the system was looking for 222 carriers in Minneapolis, where it now has 1,080, and 117 in St. Paul, where it has 640.

This means that in both cities, approximately 1 in 6 carrier positions are vacant.

As the carriers’ union pushes for higher wages in ongoing labor negotiations, the Minneapolis carrier said it believes other issues need to be considered. For example, she said that because of all the overtime work has become inapplicable for single parents. It starts too early and ends long after the children have returned from school.

Climbing to the highest pay tier also takes too long, the carrier said. It takes 13 years to reach the highest pay level, which is now $75,300.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons for delivery delays in the Twin Cities is that a relocation benefit for carriers has gone awry.

If a carrier lives in Bloomington but works in Eagan, he or she can monitor openings in Bloomington and bid on a seniority basis for the chance to work closer to home.

But nowadays, if there are too many openings in a branch, it is a sure sign that working people are constantly facing forced overtime. So no one is applying to work there.

A vicious spiral has set in in some branches, with veterans moving from emptier branches to ones with high staffing levels and low overtime. “Anyone with seniority gets the best out of Dodge,” the Minneapolis hauler said.

Mail volume decreases in the spring and summer, and some of the workload is now lightened for postal workers. Palmiter said that on its Richfield block, “It looks like there is a recovery going on.”

George Sundstrom, who complained to me about intermittent deliveries in January, had just finished crushing ice at his home on Old North Shore Road, northeast of Duluth, when I joined him again before the warm-up last week. “I haven’t had any problems lately with mail delivery,” he said.

A week ago on Saturday, the postman stopped by my house just as I was finishing dinner.

It was 7:22 p.m.

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