President Donald Trump’s recently installed postmaster general on Tuesday said he would postpone plans to slash overtime pay and remove mail sorting machines and blue mail collection boxes.
The announcement came amid a growing outcry over Trump's efforts to swing the November presidential election in his favor by undermining the public's ability to vote by mail during a pandemic.
In New York City, Brooklyn’s processing center, which takes in mail from Brooklyn and Staten Island, had been slated to lose 8 of 42 delivery bar code sorters, while Manhattan’s processing facility, which also fields mail from the Bronx, was expected to lose 7 of 42 machines.
No removals were planned for Queens processing centers.
The plan did not detail how many blue mail boxes were slated for removal but New Yorkers have reported seeing boxes removed. Over the weekend, dozens of blue mailboxes were found discarded behind a post office in the Bronx while others were seen being loaded onto a USPS truck in West Harlem.
The postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, said in his statement that he would suspend all changes in retail office hours, halt the removal of blue collection boxes and mail processing machines and restore overtime pay until after November 2nd.
“To avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail, I am suspending these initiatives until after the election is concluded,” he said. “The Postal Service is ready today to handle whatever volume of election mail it receives this fall.”
A spokesman for the USPS did not immediately respond to an inquiry on how many electronic sorting machines or blue post boxes had already been removed, and whether they would be replaced if they had been taken out of service.
DeJoy had originally maintained the changes were an effort to address “dire” financial conditions, which he blamed on “declines in mail volume, a broken business model that Congress and the Postal Regulatory Commission have failed to act upon, and the crippling economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic,” according to a memo he sent to USPS staff on August 13th.
Even before the pandemic, USPS was losing an estimated $6 billion a year, according to a report from the US. Government accountability office, that blamed rising costs of compensation and benefits for workers and subsequent declines in the volume of First Class Mail. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, the George W. Bush-era Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act manufactured a long-term financial crisis for the Postal Service by requiring it to "pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs 75 years into the future," a mandate that "applies to no other federal agency or private corporation."
Democratic New York and New Jersey lawmakers have been ringing alarm bells with rallies and press conferences in recent days, decrying the slowdown in service and reports of sorting machines and blue post boxes being removed nationwide.
On Tuesday, prior to DeJoy's reversal, New York Congresswomen Carolyn Maloney held a press conference at Union Square condemning the actions of the postmaster general.
"Experts are predicting that there will be more mail-in voting than we have ever seen in this country and these steps amount to voter suppression plain and simple and we must stop it," Maloney said. "We will not let this postmaster general take our voices or our votes away."
The federal government was also facing the threat of lawsuits from attorneys general in at least 14 states. DeJoy was called on to testify before Congress and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi requested lawmakers return to D.C. later this week to vote on a bill that would halt the implementation of service reductions.
On Twitter, New York Senator Chuck Schumer congratulated Senate Democrats for ratcheting up the pressure on DeJoy.
“Immense pressure from @SenateDems and the American people has forced Senate GOP to confront Postmaster General DeJoy’s ongoing sabotage of the USPS that threatens the integrity of our elections and delays vital services,” Schumer wrote.
According to the USPS Equipment Reduction plan dated May 15th, USPS mail processing centers in the Northeast service area were scheduled to see a 20 percent reduction in the particular kind of electronic mail sorting device that processes mail-in ballots, from 448 to 359 machines. Similar reductions were proposed across the country. Overall there was a planned removal of 746 of those machines, about 20 percent.
Meanwhile, an unprecedented surge in mail-in ballots are expected this November due to concerns about the potential spread COVID-19 in crowded polling places.
Ron Suslak, President of the Queens area local of the American Postal Workers Union, said, he understood mail volume for letters sorted by those machines had decreased during the pandemic, but he questioned the timing of the removal.
“Why would you decide to take these machines out now, when all you gotta do if you don’t want to use them is you flip the switch and you don’t utilize them? At least they’re there when we start to get impacted by the ballot mail and that’s gonna come in very shortly...It makes no sense,” he said. “Why would you do it now, I mean two months before an election?”
Several mail carriers who spoke to Gothamist/WNYC said cuts in overtime pay had affected mail delivery.
Angie, a USPS worker for the last eight years, said her overtime had been cut so many days that she was not able to complete her full route, meaning mail delivery to customers was delayed. She asked that her last name be withheld because she was not authorized to speak to the press.
“Right now, I’m about to call my supervisor, I’m not gonna make it...What am I to do? Do I bring the people’s mail back? It’s just a nightmare,” she said, while finishing up her route earlier this week. “Mind you I’ve been out here since the pandemic, I never took off. So we’ve been out here since day one, never stopping. It was almost like Christmas every day then all of a sudden it’s like you gotta stop.”
Veteran employees had urged their co-workers to stay calm.
Louis Tropia, a truck driver in Brooklyn who has worked for USPS for more than two decades, said he was always told not to get nervous about cuts.
“They been telling me that for 25 years. It’ll last for about a month, and then when they see all the mail's backed up, somebody's gotta deliver it,” he said.
He added: “It’s against the law not to deliver it, whether it’s today, tomorrow or the next day. Somebody's gotta deliver it.”
