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.
