Postal workers quietly resist DeJoy’s changes
As election nears, some believe duty to deliver is greater than ever
This summer, as controversial new procedures at the U.S. Postal Service snarled the nation’s mail delivery and stirred fears of how the agency would handle the election, rank-and-file workers quietly began to resist.
Mechanics in New York drew out the dismantling and removal of mail-sorting machines until their supervisor gave up on the order. In Michigan, a group of letter carriers did an end run around a supervisor’s directive to leave election mail behind, starting their routes late to sift through it. In Ohio, postal clerks culled prescriptions and benefit checks from bins of stalled mail to make sure they were delivered, while some carriers ran late items out on their own time. In Pennsylvania, some postal workers looked for any excuse — a missed turn, heavy traffic, a rowdy dog — to buy enough time to finish their daily rounds.
“I can’t see any postal worker not bending those rules,” one Philadelphia staffer said in an interview.
With the Postal Service expected to play a historic role in this year’s election, some of the agency’s 630,000 workers say they feel a responsibility to counteract cost-cutting changes from their new boss, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, that they blame for the mail slowdowns. They question whether DeJoy — a top Republican fundraiser and booster of President Donald Trump — is politicizing the institution in service to a president who has actively tried to sow distrust of mail-in voting, insisting without evidence that it will lead to massive fraud.
DeJoy insists the operational shifts were not politically motivated, emphasizing that he inherited an agency on the verge of financial collapse. At the time of his arrival in June, the Postal Service also was trying to fend off a takeover by Trump’s Treasury Department, according to internal Postal Service documents. Its workforce was getting flattened by the pandemic as a result of surging absences and package volumes, and its biggest customer, Amazon, was threatening to pull its multibillion-dollar business.
With a mandate to stabilize the Postal Service’s balance sheet, especially its $160.9 billion deficit, DeJoy imposed stricter dispatch schedules on transport trucks that prohibited late and extra trips, forcing workers to leave mail behind. Managers cracked down on overtime, though DeJoy contends they did so of their own accord. He also declined to reinstall hundreds of mail-sorting machines and blue collection boxes removed under his watch despite public backlash. And, DeJoy told lawmakers last month, “dramatic” changes are in store after the November election, including cuts in service and price increases for Americans in rural areas.
DeJoy’s approach marks a fundamental shift, experts say, modeling the agency as more business enterprise than government service. But it also has profound implications for employees in the form of heavier workloads and lost overtime.
In interviews, 15 Postal Service workers and local union leaders in eight states described a deep decline in morale since DeJoy made clear his intent to retool the Postal Service — with little input from the heavily unionized workforce — that have fixed intense public and congressional scrutiny on the agency. They also say they are prepared to defy directives that would limit how they do their jobs.
Most of the workers interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were acting against agency guidance. Last month, an internal Postal Service memo warned employees not to speak to journalists and to be wary of customers who ask “a series of questions.”
For some postal workers, the long mail delays that resulted from DeJoy’s changes made them think more about the role they’d be playing come election season.
The Pennsylvania primary in early June provided a taste of what was to come, said one Philadelphia worker. Though the pandemic was the biggest worry at the time, “we had a lot of issues. There were people at the plant that weren’t coming in or were sick. We were seeing delays with that. So now we’re looking at this [general election] and going, ‘Oh, jeez, this is not going to be good.’ The stakes definitely feel higher, especially given what this election really means.”
In Michigan, one postal worker considered the removal of public mailboxes, which are subject to periodic checks to ensure they are being used, as disproportionately affecting people of color. When a collection box is removed in a wealthy suburb, residents have the time and resources to push back, said the carrier, who is Black. But when it’s removed in a racially diverse working-class neighborhood, it’s just another government service that’s been clawed back.
“It’s kind of like everything else. It wasn’t built for us,” the worker said of the Postal Service and its relationship with Black people.
DeJoy’s background — he’s donated more than $2 million to the Trump campaign and GOP causes since 2016 — doesn’t help matters, the postal worker said, and makes him feel as though the Republican Party has co-opted the Postal Service.
Taken together, Trump’s repeated attacks on mail-in voting, his connection with DeJoy, and DeJoy’s operational changes look too conspicuous to be coincidental, the carrier said, even if DeJoy has stated publicly that he’d stand up to the president when necessary. Some postal workers say the pushback has to start with them to show that DeJoy’s instructions go against the mail service’s operational and ethical mandates. Plus, they say, they are legally bound to ensure the timely delivery of mail.
In New York, one mechanic expressed dismay that he is surrounded by a “bunch of yes men” who are simply going to follow orders.
“It’s disheartening to hear from my boss that he wants me to do something that could very potentially cripple the system. It’s disheartening to hear that people think we’re going to fail. We handle this kind of volume all the time,” he said of the election. “But if they do these things with delivery times and we get high volume around holiday season and the election, it will fail. No question. It will fail. We should get the ballots out. We really should, but all it would take is one person in a nice shiny suit to say, ‘Leave those ballots, take the other mail.’ And everyone would say, ‘Yes sir.’
“There’s a point where I got angry. I’m not happy at all that I’m being politicized. I’m literally trying to do my job, and they’re telling me that I can’t.”