Anyone else having trouble with the US Mail?

[meyatt]

Originally Posted by David Kirk

We are having issues with local pick up/delivery of mail. I think on average we have mail service 3 days a week due to a severe labor shortage in the area. For the past few weeks the gentleman delivering our mail has been a New Yorker who is working here as a temp and making a more money that he otherwise would.

dave

USPS pays temp workers from November (sometimes mid-October) until the beginning of January to deal with the excess of holiday packages. They've done this for quite a long time and the temp hourly wage is generally pretty decent.

A non-trivial issue is in 2006 they passed the The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. It forced the USPS to pre-fund more than $120 billion in retiree healthcare and pension liabilities. They undid this in 2022, but services were largely decimated by the change. They were set up for lettered mail, not the package economy Amazon created.

My dad carried mail for 15 years and worked in maintenance operations another 30 years. He started and it was a fairly stable job with benefits, by the time he left it ended up as a common destination for people dishonorably discharged from the military, with bare-minimum staffing and sorting machines from the 1970s.

Postal service funding is regularly raided to pay for other services.