Anthony Behar/Sipa via AP Images
A postal worker delivers along his route in the Elmhurst section of Queens, New York, August 2020.
The Trump administration has long set its sights on eviscerating the U.S. Postal Service and reconstituting it as a private business. In 2018, the White House set up a task force to devise cost-cutting measures to render the country’s most popular government agencies more palatable for sale to a private-sector entity, ideas that Speaker Nancy Pelosi called “really dangerous.”
Then came COVID-19. Still, the USPS soldiered on, delivering the necessities and frivolities that get millions of Americans through the pandemic and burnishing its reputation for reliability with every letter and package.
But there is more to this assault than privatization. President Trump has been explicit about his goal of crippling the USPS just in time for an election that will depend on vote-by-mail. The sabotage of USPS even included a nationwide roundup of mail sorters and blue mailboxes that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has equivocated about putting back even as he proposes to walk back other destructive management changes.
In a year of historic crises, this bizarre turn of events has produced nationwide outrage and dismay. Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, shared his perspectives on the disruptions and the November election. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How are the management changes that Postmaster General DeJoy implemented disrupting mail delivery?
Most of our evidence right now is anecdotal. The changes that the postmaster general made by implementing policies that definitely slow down mail are not isolated to one part of the country or the other. It’s become a systemic problem, not urban or rural. For instance, we know from the news media about Veterans Affairs and veterans’ reports that mail-order medicines are not arriving in a timely way. Eighty to 90 percent of VA medicines are mail-ordered and go through pharmaceutical centers that the VA runs.
He also told Speaker Pelosi that the mail sorters and blue mailboxes won’t be put back in their old locations. What can be done to get them back?
It can be done if the post office decides to bring them back and that’s really going to be the issue. Can the union do something specifically about what machines they have or don’t have in the post office? No. Can the union be part of a movement to share with the public what’s really going on and be part of a movement for change? We’ve seen that in the last month.
Our concern with taking out the machines is that it’s one piece of a puzzle. Certainly, machines come and go with the post office: Machines change over the decades. But there is no way they should be taking out machines in a COVID moment. Even if there is some justification, and we don’t know that there is, this is not the time. Mail volume is down because of the COVID impact. You don’t say, we don’t need these machines because letter volume has fallen by 30 percent, in a COVID world. What’s going to happen in the fall? What’s going to happen next year? We think it’s the wrong time to lose any of the sorting capacity.
What is the situation with the blue mailboxes?
That really bothers us because here’s the problem with that: That’s your access, your relationship with the post office. We don’t want the post office saying there’s less letters in that mailbox, so we don’t want the letter carriers spending five minutes going in to get those letters, ’cause it’s just not as many as there used to be. Our guess is—I don’t have the figures—that they are generally coming out of poorer or low-income areas, more populated areas—and it’s wrong.
The point for us is mailboxes mean availability, an extension of the retail and the delivery services that the post office provides. You live in a neighborhood, maybe you’re an elderly person and the post office is 12 blocks away. The blue box is on your corner. You should be able to walk to the corner and put your letter in that blue box. I don’t care if it’s one letter or a hundred letters at the end of the day. That’s part of our relationship with the people of this country and the people’s relationship with their post office.
What have you heard from companies and small businesses?
EBay, which is a major postal customer with hundreds of thousands of small businesses being fed through that platform, is alerting their customers that there are delays in the system. It is also extremely demoralizing for the postal workers who are dedicated to moving mail, getting mail out on time, and doing what people expect under that law: prompt, reliable, and efficient services. Prompt means speed. When the postmaster general puts in these arbitrary policies, it’s going to drive business and revenue away.
The problem is a general delay of mail. It’s important to take into account the COVID world: There were already challenges to the Postal Service. The public understands that. We’ve had 40,000 people quarantined since March. Obviously, when people are quarantined they can’t be at work. There just aren’t the normal amount of workers. But the customers accept that.
What people can’t accept is that the post office [bans] overtime. Well, the post office runs on 15 to 20 percent overtime, that’s an indication that they are short-staffed. Overtime is a way of life in the post office because there’s ebbs and flows in the mail. You can’t just hire for the flow because then you may have too many people for the ebb. If you take away 15 or 20 percent of the employees’ hours of work arbitrarily in the name of cost-cutting and the work is still there, then the work doesn’t get done.
That to me is the fundamental issue. It’s not that we had a particular office where we had a COVID outbreak and maybe they had to be closed for a day or two. That’s not the problem. You may have moments where there was some COVID impact. But you have a new postmaster general who has very little knowledge of the inner workings of the post office come in, and on July 10, just look at a piece of paper, and say that overtime is too high and we are just going to cut it out, then the work doesn’t get done.
Do the rank-and-file members view these developments as related to the November election?
We are huge supporters and fans of vote-by-mail long before the pandemic. It’s secure, private, virtually free of fraud. Voters who use it embrace it. In some states, you have to use it—Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Hawaii. Some states have no-fault absentee voting, like California. Ask the people who have decided that this is a superior way to vote and have embraced it.
But in a pandemic, the post office is actually going to be the vehicle by which tens of millions will be able to safely vote. If it is a choice between an unsafe vote and voting, some people may not vote at all. Vote-by-mail is absolutely critical. I am convinced that the post office has both the capacity and the sortation operation—we do almost 500 million pieces a day; in peak seasons, it could be 600 million pieces a day.
We do national mailings all the time. The idea that there is going to be all these ballots and they can’t handle it is absolutely wrong. The idea that there is fraud is absolutely wrong.
What is concerning to us is the speed by which those ballots, and all the rest of the mail, will travel. Postal workers are very committed to vote-by-mail, they give it high priority, they pay a lot of attention to make sure those ballots get moved. It’s not being moved on the basis of allegiance to a candidate or to a political party. It’s part of our civic duty.
But the general concern of the rank and file is that mail shouldn’t be delayed and that includes everything we do, including ballots. The postmaster general maybe took a small step in the right direction, holding off on some of these policies until after the election. Our advice is vote by mail, get your absentee ballot early and vote early.
Should cities and towns set up alternatives to vote-by-mail?
Drop boxes have always been a good idea. People can have a choice if they want to mail a ballot back. Most of the states have drop boxes; they are secured and run by the election commissions. If people are more comfortable, it’s a way to make sure that they don’t run out of time. People need to be aware of their state’s rules, getting the ballot, and voting quickly. If there is plenty of time, there should be no problem; if it gets too tight, drop it off.
What does the post office need to do its job today?
In terms of the election, the post office needs to restore confidence that election mail will move rapidly and promptly, giving it the priority treatment that it is always given. But the post office does not run elections, the states do. There’s a lot of cooperation and coordination that can be there, from ballot design to intelligent bar codes that follow the mail to the voter and back from the voter and to the election jurisdiction. There’s a lot of training that can be done from postal headquarters all the way down to the workroom floor about how to handle ballots, make sure that they get cleared every night; how to deal with business reply versus stamped mail, and making sure that the postmarks are on there.
More generally, what do we need? We are understaffed; we need people to be hired. We need to do new and creative things such as expanding financial services: paycheck cashing; ATMs run by the post office, not by the banks but running the service in the public sphere. The post office has to recommit themselves under this new leadership; it’s not the United States Postal Business; it’s the United States Postal Service.
