mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
Look Out. Things could get far worse before things get better about getting our packages delivered.
Doge is slated to fire 10,000 postal employees. It is unclear as to what positions or when this would start happening. This is likely to be a significant issue for all us sellers that use USPS as our carriers.
Here are some links to various articles about this subject. I gave a variety as I know some have a preference as to where they get their news from.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-usps-layoffs-could-impact-mail-deliveries-2044678
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/us/politics/postal-service-musk-doge.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/usps-signs-agreement-doge-agrees-081008330.html
https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/03/doge-work-usps-find-efficiencies-dejoy-says/403739/
@tarotfindsandmore wrote:I'm looking forward to this. There is a ridiculous amount of inefficiency in the USPS right now. All across the country there are carriers who haven't set foot in a branch for years, still getting paid. I personally covered a rural route in 2023 where the regular carrier hadn't been to work since 2017 because of a supposed knee injury. She had remained "employed" for six years without ever setting foot in her case. At my regular branch, there were three separate city carriers who had been on light or partial duty for well over a year (which means another carrier would have to take part of their route or all of their packages for delivery). All three were over sixty and could no longer physically do their jobs (city carriers walk 10-12 miles a day in all weather conditions).
Unfortunately, because of a combination of union regulations and federal labor laws no one can tell these people it's time to hang it up. The cost of carrying this dead weight represents money that could be redirected to update the archaic internal IT systems that cause so many problems for customers, shippers, and the USPS itself. I'm genuinely looking forward to the USPS getting rid of the thousands of employees who have continued to take paychecks for jobs they stopped doing a long time ago.
I know most of you will rail against this post, and take the usual Chicken Little position, but I feel very optimistic about this particular clean up. The USPS is a sad old mama dog that needs to let the next generation of healthy young pups come in to run through rain, sleet, and snow to get our packages where they need to go.
@tarotfindsandmore You have made some excellent points here. I live in a zip code with a lot of postal problems. In the 30 some years I've lived here, our PO has changed mgmt probably twice the number of years I've lived here. I have had very long & arduous conversations with many people at the PO. They often point to the unions as a big issue. For example, I often don't get my pickup, esp if there's a sub. I found out more than once that the mgr talked to the employee & the employee gave them a hand gesture that I can't put in here. I've always worked for huge corporations, you get fired if you do that. I was in shock. He told me they're used to it, their hands are tied by the Union, the employee will complain to the union that they're being discriminated against, the union will come in to support them. That's only 1 of many issues I've discoverd by talking to numerous people who are old timers & truly care. I found out I was on a 'rural route', what? My subdivision alone is at least 800 houses, how can that be rural? Oh, it gets worse, over half of my ENTIRE CITY is on a rural route. My city of almost 1M people. There is virtually no rural at all within the city limits, yet we're all on rural routes. Then I made the mistake of asking why they don't change that LOL. That answer took an hour. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of problems & I can't talk to the Postmaster, b/c we've had 3 of those in the last 4 years or so. 2 you could only reach an admin & never got a call back, the last one is in jail for SA. I don't think any one person or action can fix it at this point, they are worse as far as bloating & complexity than most large corporations.
They definitely could benefit from less unionization, otoh, things are alredy a problem as they are. Just this week I had a pkg go INR when I shipped on the day she bought it 😞
@tsme35 wrote:I ask my mail lady(rural route) about this, she was told the 10K people would be early retirement buy outs. She said they have a couple mail persons over 70, she loves them but they just can't do the job anymore. The only major problem is getting subs that are willing to work. They last a week or two and quit, she's had at least 6 subs in the last 2 years, only one has worked out.
@tsme35 My PO has explained that they hire 60 subs at a time. They're not official full-time employees at the start. They train & by the end of the training/probation, they usually, if lucky, have 10 left.
@carlmarxx wrote:My PO had 3 carrier's training working mail route I live on ,until they had a regular they picked out of 3 .
After my regular retired, I went over a year with all subs. Different one every day. Nightmare. Thankfully, I finally have a new regular & he's good. My last regular was great, but he was an afternoon guy, so I was friendly with him & go to know him well. This one is an early morning bird, so I still haven't met him. But after some snafus a few weeks ago, I left him a letter to tell him how my old carrier & I dealt with pickups, to see if he was open to it (basically I text them the night before) & he surprised me by saying yes, even though he hadn't met me, cool guy. The subs are often not real employees yet & they're not well trained or seasoned. SOme of the stories I have are crazy!
