50 years ago I don't know about it. But I have been delivering mail since 2000. Some pretty drastic things have happened since then.
Congress decided that USPS should fully fund the pension plan for 75 years. This was an annual payment of 5.5 billion. By the way the Republican led Congress promptly "borrowed" this money.
To make up for this huge expense USPS was forced to make drastic cuts which meant closing down a lot of the sorting centers including the one that serves my Post Office.
Fast forward as we struggled with this Congress enacted a hiring freeze. This affected me personally as the carrier I was subbing for retired so that put me working his route at the same part-time pay and without ANY benefits. In fact even in my small 7 route office, we had 3 retire during this time which completely use up all the subs and we couldn't hire more. This led to borrowing subs from other offices cross-training them on our routes. As it stands today this is the norm. We no longer have a sub for each route. Our sub with the most time in now is trained on 19 routes. When I broke down Saturday (brakes went out), there wasn't ANYONE anywhere that could take the last 2 hours of the route. It ended up that the Postmaster (on his day off) and his wife came and got the mail so I could be towed. His wife drove and he stuffed the boxes.
Then we hit 2016 and DeJoy whos continued goal was to #1 interfere with the 2020 election and #2 line his pockets. His company has trucking contracts with USPS and has VASTLY increased paychecks without doing any more work. Of course it is difficult to oust him as someone ( with a orange hue) packed the Board of Governors (they oversee USPS) with his yes men.
This brings us to the pandemic. Yes we are essential workers and as such we on the whole have been hit hard by covid. We also were not in line for early vaccination. On top of that with everyone home they discovered the joy of subscription services on Amazon (I'm rural no Amazon vans in my delivery area). So pre-pandemic I normally had 40-50 packages only a dozen or so too large for the mailbox daily. Now more often than not I have to leave notices for a few each day because I can't fit them all in the Jeep. Heck I have delivered over a dozen mattresses, 2 fridges, a drill press, and a 69.2# bounce house besides tons of dog food cat litter and cases upon cases of diapers TP Papet towels and energy drinks (I have a guy that gets 2 cases of Monster a week). Oh and by the way routes are evaluated and they haven't been evaluated in this whole pandemic. So even though I show up at 6:30 am and am rarely back to the office before 4:30 I still get paid the evaluated time of 7:30 to 3:30.
There is more but it's 5:12 and I need to be out the door at 5:30, I have a long commute on top of this.
