We have a similar issue here in the UK. The Royal Mail was privatised a few years ago and is now obsessed with profit rather than service. Mail workers have been encouraged to prioritize parcels over paper post, meaning some people only get letters once a week. This is explicitly against their charter and the big boss was hauled before a parliamentary select committee to answer questions. He was shown posters that had been displayed in mail offices ordering the parcels first policy and he just blamed it on some rogue managers. So far no consequences.
I don’t get the argument that Amazon is not at fault. If something bad is happening, it makes sense to blame the people who are doing it. But then it also makes sense to blame the people who are paying for it. It’s weird to only blame one side of that equation.
The thing with DeJoy is that he’s doing everything Biden and the Democrats have asked him to do. He actually convinced Republicans to sign legislation for Postal reform–legislation written by the Democrats. Here’s a story about that:
So, while this may be something he shouldn’t be doing, it seems that he is no longer considered a Trump-lackey who needs to be removed, but a valuable ally.
As for Amazon: they have another choice. One they used frequently. They just hired their own carriers. They delivered a ton of my stuff these past couple of years. Some local person would drive to the local Amazon drop off point and then deliver them.
And, yes, even my podunk town has one. It just isn’t some bespoke place. It’s the site of a local business. I know because they now offer to let me go pick up the item from there myself. But, for some reason, they don’t charge any less for that.
AMZN’s had a few struggles with that model, too:
My ex was a rural mail carrier. Evaluation of the route (and the amount paid to the carrier) is based on the yearly mail count. The postal service has always played games with the count, i.e. holding back mail during the count so that the count is artifically low. This Amazon thing is just an extension of their usual game.
The workers have contracts or are postal employees, they can negotiate better deals.
That was in one rural PO.
This, I think is the real problem. I don’t understand why rural carriers aren’t paid according to their actual hours worked. Everything I’ve seen about evaluating routes specifies rural carriers, so I assume city carriers are paid for every hour they work.
That is exactly the problem; they had already negotiated routes based upon existing volume, and after that was set the Postal Service made delivery of Amazon packages a priority, vastly increasing the workload.
The story anecdotally focused on Bemidji, but the problem is nationwide, as stated in the article:
Bemidji is not the only place where postal workers say they have been overwhelmed by packages from Amazon, the ubiquitous e-commerce giant. Carriers and local officials say mail service has been disrupted in rural communities from Portland, Maine, to Washington state’s San Juan Islands.
The situation stems from a crisis at the Postal Service, which has lost $6.5 billion in the past year. The post office has had a contract with Amazon since 2013, when it started delivering packages on Sundays. But in recent years, that business has exploded as Amazon has increasingly come to rely on postal carriers to make “last-mile” deliveries in harder-to-reach rural locations.
Stranger
Then they can negotiate another contract, next time.
And again. you ignore that UPS does the exact same thing in your hate filled diatribe against Amazon, which is really more fit for the Pit.
According to engineer-comp-geek, this contract dates back to Obama’s time in office, and a different postmaster; not implemented originally by Dejoy.
They can “negotiate a new contract, next time” in a few years. In the meantime, they are being overwhelmed.
At this point, you seem to be arguing just for the sake of having an argument rather than offering anything of substance, and hyperbolically accusing me of a “hate filled diatribe against Amazon” for stating an opinion based upon observed fact that you disagree with.
Stranger
The existence of a power doesn’t mean it must be exercised.
After all, the federal government hasn’t issued letters of marque and reprisal for quite some time now.
Fair enough; but the postal service is a public good; undermining it by essentially selling preferential service to a single retailer at a cute-rate price in a way that compromises its primary mission is an actively harming public welfare. Overworking postal delivery workers to the point that they are quitting is ultimately counterproductive, and frankly inhumane. And all of this is being done to reduce Amazon’s marginal costs and increase their profits, which should not be a national priority.
Stranger
Oh, quit yer’ whining.
They’re hiring at the draconian Amazon Warehouses.
/s
For less than one year. Then they renegotiated their contracts fully knowing that their workload has increased. The contracts are signed every year and the contractors have full knowledge of what their proposal says because they were the ones who wrote it.
The people you are white-knighting now are the ones who have known for years that package deliveries are here to stay and who have told the post office how much they wanted to be paid to deliver said packages. The post office, and more than likely DeJoy himself because due to the money involved, signed the yearly agreement with Amazon voluntarily because they wanted the money.
This is not a new thing.
For all the extra work, mail carriers weren’t making much more money. Rural mail carriers are paid only for the amount of time the post office estimates it will take them to finish their jobs. And in Bemidji, the routes had been reevaluated in October, just before Amazon changed everything.
As a result, “we’re giving away tons of free labor,” said Nelson, the carrier who staged the symbolic strike on Nov. 13. Though mail carriers aren’t legally allowed to strike — their union signed away that right more than 100 years ago — others joined him in the pre-dawn chill, carrying signs with slogans such as “USPS belongs to the people, not Amazon.”
National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC, the union representing most USPS delivery workers) negotiates four year contracts. Because they cannot legally strike they are limited in terms of terms. Private contractors have individual IDIQ contacts that are typically a 3-4 year base period with multiple 1-2 year extensions, and individual contract workers have little to no input on what the managing contractor negotiates.
Stranger
I don’t know how rural routes in Bemidji work, but in this state, the rural contract carriers submit their own proposals based on the amount of work they did last year and the knowledge that their workload will probably increase in the new contract year.
It is truly a shame that the contract workers in Bemidji are stuck with the contract they signed back in 2013, but I don’t think that’s how it works most other places.
Addressing your edit…I happen to know that our contract carrier negotiates her own contract, others choose to allow someone else to do it for them. I don’t know about post office employees, because the only people I talk to are the contract workers and they are telling me a much different story.
I’m only speaking as someone with experience as a “regular” carrier but from what to understand Rural Carriers prefer their set-up because it means they can leave early if they finish their route quickly, as opposed to the “Finish EVERYTHING but you do get paid for every minute worked” we have.
Except that they never finish their route faster than the evaluation. More often it’s the opposite and they’re working really late.
Amazon was just engaging in business. The blame belongs with the USPS and the congress, who will never be held responsible, so Amazon has to be the whipping boy.
It’s a big deal to the people who live there.
And there are quite a lot of people for whom it would be a hardship to have to drive into town every day to check their mail – and who may at unpredictable intervals get mail that they need to do something about more or less immediately.
(Raises hand.)
Amazon’s welcome to use the service – on the same damn basis as anybody else. Not with priority over everybody else. If USPS actually took a contract saying that they were going to give one shipper priority over everybody else, that should be shut down in a hurry. It’s a major obstruction of the proper duties of the post office (and, possibly more effectively these days, a restraint of trade of all other commercial shippers.)
I don’t think we’ve even got “contract carriers” for USPS. If you want to be a mail carrier, you apply to work for USPS as an employee.
I have, so far, been getting my mail; as well as packages coming from shippers other than Amazon, though those often come via UPS or Fedex, but sometimes it’s USPS. I hope USPS keeps functioning around here. I have massive sympathy for those living where it doesn’t.