Maine complaints about mail delivery blamed on staffing shortages
Some Scarborough residents say they hadn't received letters in the mail for a week.
Some Scarborough residents say they hadn't received letters in the mail for a week.
Some Scarborough residents say they hadn't received letters in the mail for a week.
After Wanda Mitchell and Jon Spinner, neighbors in a retirement community, contacted WMTW News8 that they were not receiving any letters in the mail, we decided to pay them a visit.
"We didn't receive mail for a whole week,” Mitchell said. "You have to go down daily to check on it, and it's not there.”
"People waiting for their Social Security checks, waiting for their bills to come in," Spinner said.
Spinner had pulled aside a mail carrier, who told him, “The supervisors have told us to concentrate on packages, not the mail. He said because they’re short-handed.”
A labor shortage does appear to be the cause of current postal woes.
"We are understaffed, still," said Scott Adams, president of American Postal Workers, Local 458, which represents clerks in the primary southern Maine mail sorting facility, in Scarborough.
Adams says the facility has enough machines after a large sorter dismantled last year was rebuilt, but of 67 new positions created this year, only half are filled.
Adams also says, to save money, USPS headquarters downgraded its service promise last month from three-day delivery to five days.
"The biggest impact is not flying a lot of the mail – and that includes letters, flats and parcels — and putting that on ground transportation,” Adams said.
Nationwide, the postal service is said to be down 100,000 employees.
"We don't have the mail going out every day everywhere. we don't have enough carriers,” said Mark Seitz, president of Maine State Association of Letter Carriers.
In the Portland metropolitan area, 25 of 220 budgeted positions, or 11%, are vacant.
"We just can't get people to apply, and then when they do, and we hire them, I think, our turnover rate is somewhere between 60 and 70% right now,” Seitz said. "It's just a hard job. right now, when you're so shorthanded, they make you work seven days a week, 13 hours a day. people just aren't prepared to work that much."
Seitz also said the long shifts are taking a toll on letter carriers.
"The morale is down. They're tired. They're beaten. They're hurt," he said.
Corroborating Jon Spinner’s conversation with his mail carrier, Seitz said, parcels are treated with a higher priority than letters, partly because they’re tracked.
Seitz said, "Regular mail – letters, newspapers, magazines, stuff like that – won't have bar codes on it, so they don't know necessarily when it shows up or how long it's been sitting there. The parcels, when they come into the building, they'll get scanned, arrival to unit, so they know if it doesn't get delivered that day."
Steve Doherty, a USPS spokesman for the northeast region, did not dispute the workforce figures promulgated by Adams and Seitz and noted 28 Maine jobs are currently posted.
Doherty said in a written statement, “We are aggressively hiring currently. Not just for the holidays, but long term.”
He also said is committed to six-day-a-week mail delivery, Monday through Saturday.
Doherty said, “During the holiday season, because of the surge in packages, it is common to bring additional carriers in early in the morning or on Sunday to deliver just parcels.”