He said that “something completely different” encompasses a lot of interconnected problems, one of which is an agency that’s understaffed.
“They haven’t kept up with the times in hiring people…And when they do hire—they spend a lot of money training people, but then they don’t treat them very well and they don’t stay. And so their turnover is very high.”
The carrier said the lack of people leads to an overwhelming amount of work for those who handle your mail.
“There’s offices that are so short-staffed that they can’t get all the mail out every day.”
This carrier is a Rural Carrier Associate, or RCA, a substitute who covers full-timers’ routes when they need time off.
“If you don’t have those to back those people up, there’s nobody to carry the mail.”
“They’re so short of subs now—and the few that they have, they’re overworked.”
The carrier said it wasn’t a mystery why the Postal Service is so short-staffed.
“It was funny, a few—I don’t know how many years ago, two or three…they had to do a study on why they couldn’t get people to do the RCA, the sub jobs.” He added, “They came out with all kinds of things, that they needed to be trained better in this and that.”
But he said the problem behind short-staffing was much more straightforward.
“Treat me like a human being and pay me better.”
“It’s not rocket science,” he added.
Amen!
Delivering For America feels more and more like they are trying to park an LLV between our buttcheeks.
It doesn’t help the union has no backbone. I was placed on leave pending dismissal for attempting to “artificially inflate my mail” during a count. I reached out to the local union president who replied “Let me know when you’re fired, can’t really do anything until they do.”. I had two kids in college and that wasn’t an option. I ended calling a friend who was the number 3 guy in D.C. to bail me out. When the union president saw me in the office one day I heard him ask the steward “How’d he get his job back?”. He was pissed, the steward said “He signed a Last Chance agreement”, he said “We don’t honor those”, at that point I chimed in “I do, thanks for all your help you worthless POS”. Stop paying your dues, they’ll figure it out.