90 Cities To Promote Vote-By-Mail, Demand First-Class Service Year-Round.
The public has a right to the prompt, reliable service that ballots and election mail receive, says the American Postal Workers Union.
Washington, DC – On Tues., Oct. 1 postal workers who are members of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) will be rallying with the public in front of postal facilities across the country to sound the alarm about the United States Postal Service’s substandard performance and service to communities. Rallies are planned in 90 cities including Atlanta, New York, Detroit, Denver, Seattle, and Honolulu.
“The postal service is doing an excellent job ensuring that ballots and election related mail are delivered in a timely manner. But efficient and timely service also should apply all year to the delivery of prescription drugs, Social Security checks, financial documents, personal correspondence, and other mail and packages,” said APWU President Mark Dimondstein.
With the exception of the special provisions being applied to election mail, mail service has been noticeably slower for millions of customers due to postal management’s poor implementation of its plan to modernize mail facilities and its move to ship much of the nation’s mail and packages to distant processing centers. Pressure from members of Congress and the collective efforts of postal workers has caused a rethinking of elements of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” plan. But it isn’t just postal management that is at fault; the Postal Board of Governors has limited public comments in its meetings and has made many of its decisions that slow service behind closed doors, including a recent decision that will further slow rural mail beginning in 2025 if allowed to take effect. The APWU is demanding greater transparency.
This week, APWU members, joined by community and labor allies, are calling for the public’s help in demanding improved staffing for postal workers and improved customer service along with more opportunity for public input. While some elements of the Delivering for America plan are necessary for the postal service to modernize, it makes little sense to take mail being sent within the same city, county or Zip Code to locations sometimes hundreds of miles away by truck and then transported back.
The APWU is advocating for the USPS to invest more in its workforce. Recruiting and retaining a dedicated workforce is key to reliable service. While the USPS has converted thousands of temporary, non-career positions to career track over the past couple years, it has not proven sufficient to address turnover problems and short staffing.
“Staffing is an issue that needs to be addressed. It’s not just new hires and retention. We need more staff. The public sees the long lines at postal counters, where we handle more packages today than ever before, but while the number of packages handled has dramatically increased, the number of clerks has declined over the past two decades by over 10,000,” said Dimondstein.
In 2006 the USPS handled 1.2 billion packages. In 2024 that number of packages processed has risen to more than 8.5 billion annually, 23.5 million packages every day.
The public is not blind to the problems. While a majority of Americans maintain a favorable impression of the USPS, according to polling released by the Pew Research Center in March 2023, the number of Americans viewing the USPS favorably dropped from 91 percent in 2020 to 77 percent in the latest poll.
This decline in confidence has likely dropped further this year due to false claims made by former President Trump and others about the reliability of election mail. Postmaster General DeJoy in a recent news conference debunked those claims. The USPS is taking “extraordinary measures” to deliver mail-in ballots. In postal facilities, election monitors are working to ensure election mail has been sorted and moved out for transportation or delivery. Ballots and other election mail is moved ahead of other mail. The USPS also authorized extra deliveries, collections, transportation, and overtime for this purpose.
USPS took a similar approach to election mail in the 2020 and 2022 elections and in the state primaries earlier this year, it worked extraordinarily well. In 2020, 97.9 percent of ballots were delivered to election officials within three days. In 2022, 99 percent of ballots were delivered to election officials within three days.
The American Postal Workers Union represents 200,000 employees of the United States Postal Service and is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. For more information on APWU, visit www.apwu.org