CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- As if snow, rain, heat and gloom of night aren’t enough to contend with.
In recent months -- or years, some would point out -- mail carriers have also dealt with making their appointed rounds with depleted ranks in the U.S. Postal Service.
As a result, residents on many routes have not gotten their mail on a daily basis, due to staffing issues at the Cleveland Heights Post Office.
The current labor situation prompted a resolution passed Jan. 17 “expressing the concern of the residents and City Council for delays in USPS mail delivery in several Cleveland Heights neighborhoods over the past several months and appreciation to postal carriers who are working long hours due to significant staffing shortages.”
The resolution, introduced by Councilwoman Davida Russell, notes that delays in delivery of as much as two to three weeks have had “an especially detrimental impact on some residents who receive their personal and business bills and medication or other important documents in the mail through USPS.”
Russell said she sponsored the legislation after receiving “a lot of inquiries about people not getting their mail and seniors not getting their medication” from residents in the Coventry, Taylor, Caledonia and Noble neighborhoods, among others.
She then contacted Erick Poston, president of Branch 40 of the Letter Carriers Union, who appeared before City Council Jan. 3. Poston explained that the staffing issues are widespread, with no relief in immediate sight for the Cleveland Heights Post Office.
Of the 41 routes that are supposed to be operating out of the station on Severance Circle, six of those routes had no letter carrier assigned to them at the time.
“They’re vacant, every day,” Poston said. “We have two mail collection routes, and no letter carriers assigned to those routes. There are eight utility carrier positions to fill in when those carriers are off. Three of those utility positions are vacant -- no carriers assigned.”
Poston said that on Dec. 7, 8, 9, 12 and 14, the union office received numerous calls from “citizens here in Cleveland Heights asking where their mail was. Ms. Russell reached out to me, and I told her it’s a staffing issue.”
In that time span, anywhere from four to nine routes were not being delivered on a given day, Poston added.
“You’re talking about up to 4,000 of our customers -- your residents -- not being delivered on a given day,” Poston said. “Some of those customers didn’t receive mail for weeks, and some of those routes weren’t delivered for three to seven days.”
Meanwhile, many remaining carriers averaged some 10 to 12 work hours a day.
“Half our carriers were working more than 50 hours that week and 10 carriers worked 60 hours that week,” Poston said. “Carriers start at 8 a.m. and they clock out at 8:30 p.m. -- well into the dark. This has been ongoing for over two years, with no end in sight at the Cleveland Heights Post Office.”
For new employees, there was a 20 percent retention rate at the Severance Circle station, which Poston said is due to the long hours and workload they are given.
“Additionally, on Nov. 10, we had a letter carrier robbed at gunpoint,” Poston said. “This is an issue for not just Cleveland Heights, unfortunately, but throughout Cleveland’s east side. But it was an issue here in November.”
Poston noted that the carrier was robbed of his USPS master key or “arrow key,” which 43-year Cleveland Heights resident Regina Williams, who retired recently after 35 years as a letter carrier, explained is “what you use to open up mailboxes,” including those in apartment buildings.
As a postal service union official, Williams said, “I’m also here to speak about Cleveland Heights not having the adequate workforce that they need.”
Williams said she realized at one point in December that she had not received mail for four days.
“Being as I know what’s going on, I wasn’t too alarmed as far as I was concerned, but my neighbors were also calling because they know I worked for the postal service,” Williams said.
“I explained that we’ve been short-staffed and it’s been that way really since the COVID-19″ health emergency.
The pandemic created “a major crisis -- letter carriers are essential workers, providing important services like delivering prescriptions and paying bills for a lot of people who cannot get out, so they look forward to seeing their mail carriers,” she said.
The union asked for some additional safeguards as well from the city, with Williams citing national statistics showing that between 2019 and 2022, some 2,600 mail carriers were attacked. Ninety-three of those incidents happened in Ohio. Overall, 176 were robbed of their arrow keys.
That leads to more property crimes, namely theft from mail and checks fraudulently cashed -- sometimes altered for far greater sums than they were originally written for, wreaking havoc on the bank accounts and credit ratings of law-abiding postal customers.
And while such a crime can still be deemed a federal offense -- which used to serve as enough of a deterrent in itself -- Williams noted that “U.S. Postal Police duties have changed, and there are not enough people checking to see what’s going on.”
There have also been robberies of mail carriers in Beachwood, Collinwood, East Cleveland and Newburgh Heights.
Somewhere along the line, “we had two ladies around during a shootout,” Williams said of another incident around Cleveland in which the postal workers happened to be bystanders. “They had to duck for their lives.”
And in Milwaukee, a letter carrier was killed on Dec. 9.
“We don’t want that to happen in this area,” Williams said.
The resolution also recognizes that “many postal carriers are working long hours into the night to alleviate the impact of USPS staffing shortage.”
It further requests that federal elected officials in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives intervene to address the understaffing in Cleveland Heights and elsewhere.
The measure was also forwarded to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance, and Congresswoman Shontel Brown.
Read more from the Sun Press.
Ad Choices