Friday, August 21, 2020

The Post Office: Sabotage, or Business as Usual?

A San Diego Union Tribune article reports on mail processing in California. The situation looks rather bad. The SDUT writes:
“Six weeks ago, U.S. Postal Service workers in the high desert town of Tehachapi, Calif., began to notice crates of mail sitting in the post office in the early morning that should have been shipped out for delivery the night before. 
At a mail processing facility in Santa Clarita in July, workers discovered that their automated sorting machines had been disabled and padlocked. 
And inside a massive mail-sorting facility in South Los Angeles, workers fell so far behind processing packages that by early August, gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes.”
The article indicates that the information about impaired services is coming from postal service employees. The postal workers union claim that six high-speed mail-sorting machines in San Diego have been removed. The employees assert that the postal service had planned to remove 671 (about 10%) of its mail-sorting machines. Seventy-six were to be removed from in California. At least five high-speed mail-sorting machines have been removed from service in Sacramento. The post office also cut overtime pay and imposed a new policy that could delay outgoing mail.


I know nothing
Amazingly, new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy claims he was unaware of mailboxes and mail sorting machines being removed under any new policy. The Washington Post writes:
“DeJoy described the removal of mail-collection boxes and sorting machines as typical within the Postal Service and denied he knew anything about them or the process behind the decisions before the issue became a source of public controversy.

‘Since my arrival, we've removed 700 collection boxes, of which I had no idea that was a process,’ he said, adding that he ‘decided to stop it’ once he ‘found out about it’ and all of the ‘excitement it was creating.’ 
Mail-sorting machines were removed regularly in previous years when data showed underutilization, he said, calling it a ‘process I was not aware about’ until it got a ‘lot of airplay.’

Answering questions from committee chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said the Postal Service has “adequate capacity” to handle a flood of election mail for the November election and that the agency’s policies for election mail have not changed.

‘I’d like to emphasize there has been no changes of any policies in regard to election mail for the 2020 election,’ DeJoy said. 
‘We deliver 433 million pieces of mail a day; 160 million ballots over the course of a week is a very small amount,’ he added.”
Mr. DeJoy’s comments are not credible or coherent. His claim that removing mail-sorting machines was an ongoing event is contradicted by what postal system employees are telling news sources. His comments do not address why food was rotting in Los Angeles due to slowed processing of packages. Maybe that was due to the post office cutting overtime pay. 

“The Department of Veterans Affairs has been forced to find alternative ways to ship mail-order prescriptions for patients whose medication is delivered by the United States Postal Service, including FedEx and UPS, CNN has learned.
The VA acknowledged the change in an email to a veterans group called Disabled Vets of America after it raised the issue on behalf of patients who had reported significant delays in receiving medication from USPS in recent weeks amid a nationwide slowdown, according to a copy of the correspondence reviewed by CNN.  
‘The VA has now confirmed to us that the United States Postal Service (USPS), which is responsible for delivering about 90% of all VA mail order prescriptions, has indeed been delayed in delivering these critical medications by an average of almost 25% over the past year, with many locations experiencing much more significant delays," the group's national commander, Stephen Whitehead, said in a statement Monday.’”
A few things seem to be rotten in the post office and they include Mr. DeJoy and his boss the president.


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