ALBANY COUNTY — If you’ve recently had trouble with your mail, local postal workers’ union president, the Rev. Ibrahím Pedriñán, says you’re not alone. 

The good news, Pedriñán told The Enterprise, is that unions are working to fix the various problems undercutting the United States Postal Service’s ability to perform its most basic functions in a timely manner. 

The bad news is that Pedriñán —  among others — believes those problems are being intentionally implemented by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump-era appointee who has millions invested in the private shipping industry.

The Enterprise spoke with Pedriñán after hearing from a Berne resident that her mail had not been delivered for a week, and after speaking with a postal employee from elsewhere in the region who was concerned about changes being made that the employee, like Pedriñán, felt were intentionally undermining workers’ efficacy so that faith in the post office would erode.

The Enterprise was not able to confirm any specific complaints made by either person due in part to the policy USPS has about speaking with the press — something the paper has bumped up against before on more benign issues. 

Former Westerlo Postmaster David McClure — who oversaw the other Hilltown post offices that had previously been consolidated into the Westerlo post office —  told The Enterprise last year as it sought comment on potholes in the East Berne post office parking lot that, “Nothing can be written in the paper or anything like that because we can’t have bad media for the postal service in general. If you do [a negative article] for here, it’s for the whole postal service in general … and we can’t have that.”

USPS spokesman Mark Lawrence did not confirm or explain the delivery problems in Berne when contacted by The Enterprise, saying instead that “service can be occasionally disrupted due to employee availability for reasons such as illness, inclement weather, personal leave, retirements and more that may impact mail deliveries on some routes.”

He also said that the post office will take measures to ensure deliveries, such as authorizing overtime; expanding the delivery schedule to include the early morning, late evening, and Sundays; and using carriers from other offices. 

Nevertheless, those two accounts were in line with what Pedriñán had seen as president of American Postal Workers Union Local 390, which represents the roughly 670 employees who are part of the clerks, maintenance, and motor vehicle divisions in the city of Albany and the Plattsburgh area. Pedriñán is also the president of the Albany County Central Federation of Labor.

Illustrating how widespread the problem is, Pedriñán, who uses they/them pronouns, recalled bumping into the city treasurer in Albany city Hall one day and being asked where the mail was. 

“It’s arbitrary, in a certain regard,” they said. “They’re not prioritizing city routes over rural routes. They’re literally not delivering to city hall for, like, three days.”

Part of the problem, they said, is short-staffing. 

“On the windows side of things,” Pedriñán said in reference to the clerks, “one of the things we find is absolutely horrific … is that they don’t have enough, or they don’t schedule enough people to get the mail up on time.” 

“You’re paying to have a post-office box,” they said, “your mail should be in your post-office box by, say, 11 a.m … So, you might show up to the post office at 10:55 because you’ve got an 11:15 appointment, and you’re expecting to get your mail. Well, if they didn’t staff properly, you’re not going to get your mail until 2 or 3 p.m., and if you need something in your hand by a certain time, then it’s problematic.” 

They said that the delays will frustrate customers, who take it out on the clerks, who will then get fed up with the job and leave, exacerbating the problem. 

Going postal 

As frontline employees and customers currently struggle against each other, upper-level management “fails or refuses to” fix the problem or respond to complaints, Pedriñán said. 

The goal, Pedriñán believes, is to let the postal service flounder so much that privatization is the only way out — a theory backed up at least in part by straightforward admissions. 

Former President Donald Trump, who appointed governors to the board that appointed DeJoy, called for privatization of the post office in a 2018 outline of government reforms his administration wanted to focus on.  

The first step of this, according to that outline, is to start running the postal service like a business instead of a public service, which has been the theme of the 10-year plan the USPS adopted in 2021, and which The Enterprise covered last month as it reported on local concerns about office consolidations as the post office moves toward a more centralized distribution system.

“A private postal operator that delivers mail fewer days per week and to more central locations (not door delivery) would operate at substantially lower costs …,” the 2018 outline says. “USPS privatization through an initial public offering (IPO) or sale to another entity would require the implementation of significant reforms prior to sale to show a possible path to profitability.”

Using the private postal system of some European countries as a model, the plan goes on to say, “To reach profitability, most international postal operations have gone through significant restructuring, including shrinking their physical and personnel footprints.”

Unlike any other federal government entity, the postal service is expected to pay for itself. In 2006, after operating on a “pay-as-you-go” system, the post office was required under a new law to fully fund its retirees’ health benefits for 75 years into the future.

Although the 2021 Delivering for America 10-year plan states that the USPS will seek to maintain six days of mail delivery and seven days of package delivery, it lines up with the other elements of the outline. 

“The footprint of our current network of facilities is inefficiently dispersed and accommodates too many disparate flows across products and classes, which drains resources, capacity, and degrades performance,” the plan says. “The design of our facilities also limits their ability to process growing package volumes. This is due to the increased cubic space requirements of packages — which has resulted in rising processing costs and declining service performance — a trend that will continue absent realignment.”

The plan does not address staff levels, but USPS data shows that, in 2022, there were 516,760 post office workers; in 2000, there were 787,358. These losses are more likely than not due to attrition, with Pedriñán acknowledging that job security of the segments they represent is “pretty great,” notwithstanding the increased toll the job takes.

Lawrence told The Enterprise that “staffing is currently adequate,” but that USPS is holding job fairs to strengthen its numbers.

With regard to office locations, union leaders were so unsettled by the prospect of consolidations and loss of services that they got the USPS to sign a memo this year, stating that locations would not be closed due to the construction of new sorting and delivery centers, which will serve as the central nodes of the delivery network.

“This is the constant thing that bosses want you to do,” Pedriñán said. “They want you to do more with less.”

This has also happened at a district level, they said, with DeJoy eliminating 17 of what used to be the country’s 67 districts in 2021. In New York, this meant that the entire upstate region became a single district, where in the past Albany was a hub for the northeastern part of the state. 

“The people who used to just be able to devote their time and energy to Albany now have to devote all of their time and energy to all of upstate New York, from Buffalo to Plattsburgh, all the way down” to the lower reaches of the state, Pedriñán said. 

One of the effects is that middle-management doesn’t know who to contact for things, they said. “It gives everybody the runaround.” 

Although the Delivering for America plan uses language that evokes modernity and innovation, Pedriñán says that it’s “change for the sake of change, not change for the sake of progress.” 

The post office, they said, used to be a driver of innovation, adopting technologies like rail travel and flight to make service more efficient. 

“Obviously, with the advent of the internet and email, we haven’t necessarily played that role or that function in the same way,” they said. 

The stated impetus for the overhaul of the postal service in the Delivering for America plan is the decline in paper mail and the rise in packages. A chart in the plan shows that in 2007, there were over 200 billion pieces of mail, while in 2020 there were around 125 billion. The volume of packages more than doubled, from more than 3 billion pieces in 2007 to more than 7 billion in 2020.

That the USPS is in a pivotal moment is undeniable, but Pedriñán says that cutting down its footprint — which is the only federal footprint in many communities — isn’t the way to re-establish its relevance.

“I think that’s where we need to imagine a new postal service that goes in and brings broadband to every community, that brings electric charging stations … How does the postal service embody some of that connectivity between the government and the people?”  they asked.

Pedriñán predicts that loss of faith in the service will render the new buildings that the service constructs underutilized, and they’ll be the “nice, brand new, shiny” face of the service when it’s “off at the auction block.” 

Lawrence did not address the allegations of DeJoy sabotaging the post office in his response to Enterprise inquiries. 

Pushing back

At a time of several high-profile labor strikes and protests, Pedriñán said that nothing so dramatic will happen with the USPS workforce, since it’s bound by a no-strike clause. (The illegal 1970 postal strike involved President Richard Nixon calling in the National Guard, although the American Federation of Labor considers the strike a success since it resulted in a reorganized postal service.)

Instead, the unions have binding arbitration to fall back on, which Pedriñán says is “a bit of a hindrance.”

“If management refuses to bargain in good faith”  they said, “you have to go to the National Labor Relations Board and there’s a whole … long and droning-on process to make any changes.”

But, they said, the striking unions serve as an empowering example for the postal employees to stay vigilant and find their own means of resistance against the hostile work environments fomented by the larger policy changes.

“I’m always hopeful that workers will get their voices heard,”  Pedriñán said. “The whole point of a union is having a voice and a vote — democracy in the workplace. My hope is always for democracy.” 

What gives them pause is the “anti-democratic” whims of people who have billions of dollars to spend and plenty of legal and political capital to get their way. 

“But we obviously have the numbers …,” Pedriñán said, “so my hope is that we learn our power, we use our power, and we make sure we’re keeping the bosses on notice that we’re the ones in charge.”