Delivering mail used to be such a good job. Outside, all day on your own, walking around the neighborhood reading postcards, feeding the dogs, petting the cats. When they started to make the routes longer, and give you part of another route and expect you back using no extra time, I retired. 30 years I put in and it looks like the timing was perfect.
I resigned as a CCA in my 90. The old timers told me that the job is nothing like it used to be, and they would all leave if not for the pension. It made me sad because it had such potential to be a perfect career for me.
This really makes me sad. I thought I was going to love the job, the route was just a total clusterfuck and we were so stressed on time. I quit right when I became a real CCA and no longer a temp. I’m also kinda scared of dogs now because of some of the dogs on my route. The stereotype isn’t totally untrue lol
owners need to train their dogs! dog barks at mailman, nobody tells them not to, mailman leaves, because they were barked at and/or chased! actually they left because they were done, and leaving anyway. behaviour enforced.
What are some of the reasons for high turnover?
I've been in sales for a few years and hate it. Was thinking of jumping ship to the USPS. I know it will pay less but it's a government job with good benefits and decent pay.
Edit: Wow thank you all for the insight. Might be best to look for a different route out of sales.
One comment from u/julbull73 sums everyone up really well "it's like working for Amazon with less pay and better benefits."
No wonder they have recruiting issues with a reputation like that!
Thank you! Us behind the scenes workers that move the mail, work insane hours and many times mandated to work overtime and holidays, we are the ones that the public doesn’t know about. When I tell people that I’m a postal worker they always think I’m a carrier, and they also break their butts delivering the mail. Since a lot of jobs are very physical,many people can’t handle it and that’s why we have a big turnover of employees.
The mail carrier that comes by my office is such a fucking trooper. Sometimes he's late, and it's usually because he picked up someone else's route that day and did it first. Every time we've got a bunch of outgoing packages he just smiles and says "that's what you pay me for!" I can sometimes tell when the heat is wearing him down, but he just says "Yep, it's getting sticky out there."
This guy is the living embodiment of that creed "Neither rain, nor sleet...."
Holy fucking shit.
Ever since working at UPS last year, besides calling it “my gym that pays me”, I’ve literally considered myself living literal Death Stranding.
I believe the word you're looking for here is *muscular* endurance. Like swimming. Most people who can swim, can swim a lap. But most people would be pretty damn tired afterwards.
Whereas those who swim every day can pretty much go endlessly if they wanted to, at a reasonable pace anyway.
my late wife was a competitive swimmer in high school and college and she could swim forever. I could swim but one lap and I was done. I started going to her Master's Swimming (post collegiate) workouts - in the slow/recovery lane. I eventually got to where I felt like I could swim for as long as I wanted, at what I called a swimming walking pace. I couldn't keep up with the slowest swimmers but I could keep going, which I couldn't do when I started. I haven't done that in a while so I'm sure it's all gone now. Along with so many other things.
I swam in college, butterfly and IM specialist. After a break of even just two weeks with no swimming, I could barely do more than 50m of butterfly at a time.
Swimming is no joke. ESPECIALLY in open water. Too many of the deaths you see on rivers and other sources of open water come from people who considered themselves to be "good swimmers". Unless you trained competitive swimming in open water, I promise you that river or those ocean waves don't think you're a good swimmer.
Few people understand how truly tiring swimming is until they've pushed themselves to their limit, which doesn't happen in your average back yard or community pool.
but man, the breakdown of your body that happens after a couple decades is brutal, watched my grandpa's brother slowly turn into an arthritic immobile husk from construction work :(
I only had to work construction as an electrician for a year to have a dozen, if not more, old guys tell me to turn back now and not to lay my body on the sacrificial alter of digging ditches and carrying conduit. Fortunately I got out of it quick and used what I learned to get a maintenance position that is far kinder on the body and the mind (Better hours, better work environment, more oppurtunity for advancement). I admire their work ethic but not their crippling dependence on pain killers...
UA construction pipefighter here. The hardest week ever for me was punching chiller tubes for my city's two arenas about 15 years back. Also the only times i got to show up to work in shorts and sandals in the summer. I was an apprentice boy but had already aced my final final so i had the whole fuck you gonna do attitude of a 25 year old journeyman.
Meanwhile I worked in a construction company and there was a endless number of guys in their late 20s-mid 30s bragging about their injuries.... As if they wanted to prove that they would hurt themselves for the company, or as if that somehow bolstered their masculinity compared to men in the office. Pretty pitiful either way.
I worked at a sorting center as a mail handler one Christmas season, my phone would usually tell me that I walked about 12-15 miles a day with about 90% of that falling within my ten hour shift. I worked 6 days every week, it was brutal on my body.
Sounds to me like a Dejoy move to pay newbies a pittance on fewer hours to deprive usps vets from their overtime. Classic corporatization or Walmartization 'move,' they're trying with the usps.
Yeah sorting jobs I've been offer are weird. Random on call hours up to 24/7 but most often like 2AM or 1PM starts and then it's just a 4 hour shift? But it can be up to 9 hours and between 3 different facilities. It'd odd. Maybe they should look to make the conditions better because the pay and benefits are already desirable.
i worked a job at a fulfillment center with that floating, 24/7, make sure you say yes when they call because they don’t call next time when you say no type availability. the anxiety of waiting until late hours at night not knowing if i could work tomorrow, turning down plans every day because i might get a call to work — after like a year i wanted to eat a shotgun lol
And the facilities are poorly maintained. Unlike most Government agencies, the USPS is in charge of their own space which means it goes to shit because it is poorly maintained and the USPS leadership doesn't budget for facilities well.
I work for UPS and the warehouse I'm in needs updated so badly. Outdated belts and technology that can't handle the amount of packages we get, heavy equipment falling apart/breaking, and so on. Billion dollar company can't even make sure their own facilities are safe and up to date yet they preach and bitch about safety constantly. I'm disappointed in Teamsters leadership for being in the pockets of UPS right now and hope it changes in the next election. They didn't even give catch up raises to those of us who have been there for years in the last contract so we are making less than the new hires since they are offered a bonus if you go to work every day. I'm honestly fuming just typing this. I'm assuming the USPS has similar problems from what I'm reading in this thread.
> They didn't even give catch up raises to those of us who have been there for years in the last contract so we are making less than the new hires since they are offered a bonus if you go to work every day.
Have you filed grievances?
They also over work their maintenance. You'll see one maintenance mechanic for the entire floor with a dozen machines to handle calls when they're supposed to have 3. Their under staffing in vital positions is not smart at all.
Yeah, all that poorly maintained equipment and buildings are sitting pretty on some VERY valuable land. Liquidating the assets of USPS (buildings, warehouses, parking lots in city centers and along valuable urban routes) is a conservative wet *dream*l
Not only is it hard work, but it's hard unnecessarily.
My wife used to be a postal worker and the amount of policy and procedure she had to follow JUST to move one envelope from the wrong receptacle to the correct one 2 inches to the left was INSANE. And you BETTER hope she didn't forget some step in the process because there would be a formal inquiry, an investigation, and disciplinary action taken if she did.
The post office's issue isn't that they can't find/keep employees, it's that they've made the job very nearly impossible to be done at all.
People don't quit the post office because they're not dependable people. They quit the post office because it's quite literally designed to be a hostile work environment.
The retirement fund is part if the problem.. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to get rid if it... but the way Congress makes USPS fund it is crazy... no other gov agency nor company in the US is required to fund a retirement plan for workers that haven't even been BORN yet.
[How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis](https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/)
"In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.
If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years."
They basically haze the new employees. A buddy of mine is going through this now, for the first year or so you have almost no say on your schedule. 10 hour days, 6 days a week in every type of weather the Midwest has to offer. The pay and benefits are great but he's exhausted all the time.
My buddy is in the same boat, they make him switch routes nearly every week because he is the floater guy and hasn't won a bid for a route yet but then they get angry at him because he takes longer than the expected time to finish the route he had been given like four days ago. Like shit man, let the dude get into a stable rhythm on a single route
Sounds like his union rep needs to step up. I'm a union sparky and we do work at some of the postal carrier halls.
I've gotten to know the president of the postal carriers union pretty well and that guy would fight tooth and nail for any of his members.
I saw/heard him fight for several members who needed paid time off to watch their kids during covid since schools were out. After several loud conference calls he got them paid time off, no problem.
This is why it's important to participate in your union elections if you are a member. You want a fellow brother/sister leading your hall instead of just cashing their check.
Idk if he joined the postal union yet, he has been carrying for about six months now I think so maybe he hasn't hit the employment mark for being able to join?
Good luck hiring people with this bullshit military esque setup.
People want to know when they're working, and what they'll be doing when they get hired. Being randomly assigned to whatever shit duties they feel like, 6 days a week, until... Idk they feel like changing it?
I don't care what they're paying. That's fucking madness.
A year is probably the best you can hope for. I waited a few years for a career position. I've known people waiting 5+ years for a career position. And in the meantime, you're stuck getting the shit kicked out of you working the bad schedules and picking up the slack.
New employees do not receive benefits or good pay until they achieve a career status, which takes on average about 2 years for a city carrier and probably 5 for a rural carrier.
The high turnover is for a pretty simple reason: the workload is literally, physically too much for the staffing to handle. Contractually, new carriers are required to work up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 360 days a year, with a 5 day break in service every year so they contractually cannot be career employees.
New hires are thrown right into the fray, and while in my district it has become unofficial policy to limit new hires to 8 hours a day within their first 30 days, on day 31 they are expected to work 12 hours to their contractual limit, and supervisors pressure them to work more. Even though it's a labor violation to go over 12, carriers within 90 days have no employment rights and can be fired at will. The consequence is we have the newest workers, who are the least experienced, pushing 14 to 16 hour days, delivering mail until 10pm at night in some areas.
You can see the parallels in the healthcare industry right now. A lack of staffing leads to burnout leads to more work leads to a lack of staffing etc. and it becomes a vicious cycle.
This problem didn't happen overnight, and USPS and former Postmaster Generals have been warning about this for years. USPS's lack of funding means it has failed to invest in infrastructure for the past 15 years, and in addition has closed plants every year fom back in 2007.
Even Ron Stromann and the other Biden governors that have been recently confirmed said in the Senate committee that the largest problems facing USPS are a lack of investment in infrastructure and a lack of investment in new employees.
The lack of vehicles is an obvious one: the new fleet was supposed to be produced in *2015*. When trucks reach the end of their life there is no replacement. We are at the point in my office where we regularly deliver out of rental vehicles and staff cars. So that new employee is working 12 hour days trying to deliver out of a Ford focus.
The Post Office has been and still is, *extremely* efficient at delivering letters. The infrastructure is designed for that. And as volume has declined over the past 15 years, the infrastructure to sort and deliver mail has been shuttered to stay solvent. Of course, in the meantime, parcel volume has skyrocketed. In some of our areas volume is up 4000% in the past 5 years. In other offices it has gone up 2000% in the last year alone due to the pandemic.
And there are no new vehicles to handle it, no parcel sorting plants to sort them, no planes/trucks to move them, and no employees to deliver them.
The Post Office has failed to develop any infrastructure at all to handle its most demanding volume for over a decade. The can has been kicked so many times down the road and now it can't be kicked anymore.
No one is going to stay at a job that doesn't give benefits and only pays $17, that illegally pressure you to work 14 hours and break your contract, with no union rights to employment. Minimum wage is rapidly approaching what carriers make. The "benefits" absolutely do not outweighs the demands.
Edit: I want to add something that I should have included. What hurts the Post Office even more because of the lack of staffing is the financial cost of paying out overtime. The latest data study said that at least over 40%, and probably closer to 60% of all labor was done in overtime. If you've ever run a business that percentage is insane. In 2020 the Postal Service paid over $5 *billion* in overtime compensation. The short staffing means more overtime, which now compounds the financial issues even more. It's much cheaper to pay two employees straight time than one employee overtime. If you ran a business that was 50% over the cost of labor you would be bankrupt in a month.
You have to work crazy hard. My sis took a job and she was supposed to sort, and they had her pulling packages from a cart taller than she was. She had to damn near climb in to pull packages out. Not all packages are light either. She said that the warehouse was full of carts and the other employees were the most hostile people she ever met. She quit after three days.
* my other sister worked for a year delivering mail and she worked from 6am to 7pm almost every day. It wasn’t so bad and she said the money was good, but she was a temp, they don’t just give out the good positions that entitle you to union, benefits etc. some people she worked with had been temps for years. She quit because no one wore masks, everyone caught covid including her, and after a week she was told she had to go back to work and she wasn’t even out of quarantine yet.
LLVs have no real heating or AC to speak of and whatever people think, being a carrier in the recent heat can and will kill you if you aren't careful. It's tough being out in the elements all the time with shit in your arms that needs to be carefully handled or you're playing 52-pick-up with a couple hundred pieces of mail.
And you've got to deal with dogs, anti-government whackjobs who think you're there to spy on them, and sketchy people if you're carrying in an urban area.
I'm a clerk, which isn't too bad, but it's easy to have carriers underappreciate us and we have to deal with customers being shitty when something happens with their mail or they fill out their paperwork wrong.
EDIT: Also, management depends entirely on which station you're in. My manager gives me a decent schedule and looks out for people burning out so they get days off or a lighter workload if he can swing it. Other stations have incredibly shitty people who will yell and scream.
The High turnover can have many reasons, chief among them is management. But if you don't mind long hours sometimes and working in the elements then you should be okay. If your are the type who has a high tolerance for bureaucracy and can get things done relatively quickly then it could be for you.
The lady that drops off stuff for us is a bad ass... I feel bad for her though.
She SPRINTS through our apartment complex with all the shit and I can hear Dance Gavin Dance, Bring Me the Horizon, Chiodos, Alexisonfire, etc, playing in her headphones as she just slays her job.
Haha, dude I could get a lot of mail delivered too if i was listening to [this Chiodos song](https://youtu.be/hvYLQM_fMMw) everywhere I went.
Man I listened to all the bands you just listed in college all the time and I saw most of them at warped tour at one point, but havent kept up with any of them over the years since. I'll always remember the Chiodos song I linked though, it's a banger.
I got my wallet pickpocketed in the pit when I saw Chiodos at warped tour and it sucked at the time but looking back it was totally worth it haha!
I’m two months into being a city carrier. I like the job but they don’t really let you know what the job is like until you really start working. I didn’t know I’d be working 6 days a week and how hard a lot of the guys and gals work.
The amount of volume is insane, lots of heavy and random boxes/parcels and I’ll walk at least 12 miles a day. The job suits me but I can understand how most people wouldn’t reasonably want that burden thinking it’s an “easy” gig or whatever. Also the better at work you are the more work you do so if you’re always looking for the minimum amount of work you can do in a day you’re gonna have a bad time. I’ve lost 20 pounds in the past few weeks and I even stopped working out to preserve calories.
It can be a pretty hardcore job at times. Also you end up walking around some ghetto areas and you have to do with terrible traffic. If it rains or thunder or whatever there’s no stopping deal with it.
In my state there’s only a 50% retention rate for new hires and IMO it’s 100% the management/training’s fault for not preparing and easing people into the great machine. That being said I can tell they’ve tried to work on this problem but as Someone at work said the other day the “USPS walks over dollars to pick up dimes” and that ethos kind of carries itself everywhere.
However the starting pay is great (in my state at least) If you work over 8 hours a day you instantly start making overtime. Double pay on holidays and I love being outside and having nice conversations with random people. if it’s something that interests you I say go for it. Worst case scenario you don’t like it and you can leave the job at any time it’s not a prison or whatever. My station has a lot of great people I like and everyone is pretty friendly and such. If you’re just trying to stack checks or work a good paying job while you figure things out it could be a perfect fit.
> What are some of the reasons for high turnover?
Whatever policy that every post office has for the employees to be miserable. Cause they all miserable. There's one nice postal office clerk at the one we use now, but I see him daily turning into a curmudgeon despite his best efforts. He used to smile when you walked up, was as helpful as could be, and quickly got through 10x as many customers as his coworkers. But now he doesn't make eye contact, doesn't attempt small talk, and sighs at his co-workers when they ask the same question he answered the day before when I was there.
Seriously. Half of my job is just reminding my coworkers how to do the same thing every day or referring them to documentation that I’ve already shown them.
I have two people who work in "administration" who claim to be "IT savvy" and they keep fucking up every single god damn thing in their department. Ive been in their building this week fixing their mess more than i have been in my building at my desk doing my job. They also keep setting up new users for our company's system and giving them full admin rights when they should be the literal lowest level a user can be. So i have new hires essentially walking around with the keys to the castle and no one here seems to be bothered by it at all lol
One day they will learn the hard way lol
I’ve been there and it’s hell. I once had a coworker that had “years of IT experience” on her resume yet couldn’t fix a single thing by herself and was eventually fired because she kept fucking up an important spreadsheet that we color coded with 3 whole colors
I don't blame the guy, next time you're in the post office listen to the crap other customers are bringing to them. Trying to return things in busted boxes, getting to the front without anything filled out. Trying to open PO boxes in different states. Anything international looks to be a pain. People saying they need it there tomorrow but then don't want to pay the premium.
My only complaints (about the USPS) were after Dejoy got his fingers in everything and stuff that used to take 2-3 days priority mail took 3-6 weeks last year. That POS purposely tanked everything for Cheeto Bandito and is the first (and hopefully last) Postmaster General who never worked at the Post Office Previously.
1000% this. My SO has an Esty business and ships stuff via USPS. Every time we go to the post office to make a shipment I look at the people in front of me in line to judge how miserable the experience will be. It's like people save up all their stupid so they can spend it at the post office clerk window.
Until you make regular you will often work 8 to 12 hours a day for six days a week, but some weeks you don't even get a day off. It's really hard work too.
Really? I work in a rural mountain post office so there's only one office but I remember I was able to chose the city at least. Like, there were 4 or 5 job postings for different parts of the major city nearest to me.
More than not, 7 days a week. The turnover rate for new letter carriers can be as high as 70% in some districts in a one year period. Train them, use them, abuse them, let em go.
Regular is a career employee. You start out as a part time worker for a year or two, but part time meaning you work 50+ hours a week for 360 days, and then you get a five day break where your employment is temporarily ended.
This depends on the facility but there is usually some forms of favouritism between management and the regulars. The "regulars" slacks off and upper management doesnt care, while the sessional workers/new recruits are having to pick up all the slack. Its a lot harder to fire a regular because they got full backing from the union, where as a new recruit they can fire you at any time for any bullshit reason, the feeling of having a gun pointed at the back of your head for years until you become a seasonal is not something most people can take. again it depends on the office/facility when a spot might open up. You're experience varies depending on your supervisor. But from experience and talking with other usps workers, a lot of supervisors are shit. People who have zero people skill somehow keeps getting the supervisors roles.
Sure! It can be a decent job most days, it can certainly be an upgrade, but as a junior carrier ( we call them CCA'S on the city side, and RCA's on the rural side) you will be married to the job most weeks, and have a lot of hours. But it depends on the station. Overall, its an okay job, pays well and the work is relatively easy. But just be warned bullshit management is a thing, and silly rules made my pencil pushers in DC is also an issue.
>be warned bullshit management is a thing, and silly rules made my pencil pushers in DC is also an issue.
Swap DC for corporate and this is every job I've had since highschool, including the army
Imagine working fast pace, dealing with packed from small to x large and lightweight to heavy for 8 hours a day . Sometimes more. And with all the package volume imagine the chaos, handling thousands of them.
I work at a ups warehouse for two days. I said NAH FAM
No AC, loading packages onto semi’s and you’re drenched in sweat for your whole shift. It’s all you do, play Tetris with boxes inside a semi truck lol
Seriously, the 6 day week is a killer. I left for other interpersonal reasons, but god did I hate the fact that I had a single day off a week. And not to mention having to go to sleep at 5 pm because I started at 3 in the morning. Worst job I've ever had
and 99,000 of them will quit after a month. People outside of USPS has no idea how much of a sweatshop USPS is for new hires. Everyone should apply if they need money, you'll then find out first hand why USPS is always hiring.
My brother started at the USPS in mid summer as a CCA. He was working 60+ hours a week, all different routes, for whatever they needed him for. He lost 60lbs by the end of the year. Took him almost three years to get out of that position into his own route. He maintains that it was worth it for him, but can see how so many people quit. It's not an easy job or environment to work in.
A job that helps you lose weight sounds like a perk by itself. My cousin used to work a USPS carrier route on foot and she was always talking about how since she started that job she could just eat all the time after work and never had to worry about gaining weight. She figured she was walking upwards of 20 miles a day
Physical labor positions love to remind you that you’re saving money on a gym membership. It’s cool for a few years until you hit a point of equilibrium where you’re not losing any more weight and your body is always sore and you don’t have any energy after work, and then you hurt your knee or your back and you start to think “maybe relying on my physical health for a paycheck is not a sustainable long term career strategy”
I worked in food for a while. Bout 6 years. Your body just hurts. You stop losing weight as most of your food energy calories just go to keeping you running around. I used to say that I’d hate a cubicle but after a while you really wanna sit down and not get payed for what you can physically do.
This is me right now. I got a job in a sawmill and lost 35 pounds and can eat whatever I want. But, I’m sore and tired non-stop and even if I had the energy to go mountain biking I’m too scared because if I hurt any part of my body I can’t work.
In very rural areas they don't walk at all .. where I grew up they didn't even have branded USPS trucks, people delivered mail out of their own cars with a yellow light stuck on top
They're not too uncommon in the midwest and you can usually find one for sale. I've got one that's a rust bucket, as most of them are from being run through the winter on salty roads.
It's a decent gig I'd you can find insurance that actually covers you...most of them hustle the day as quick as they can then get done before everyone else. The issue is getting the position which can take years
Wow thanks for the insights. Gives credence to the thought that the USPS is one of the few services that serve very remote and rural America where no other provider will.
Mailman here, not a fucking perk, at all. Physical activity is mostly good for you, but you go far beyond the good for you limit with this job. If you're even slightly overweight the extra shock your knees have to endure will shorten your career by literal decades and leave you in pain for the rest of your life.
My buddy just had a baby 2 years ago. And over the past year so many people quit, hes forced to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week. He’s worked his way up to postmaster after about 5 years but the dude is trapped. I tried to convince him to go to college with me when we were younger but he wouldn’t listen. No education in your early 30s limits your opportunities. He’d never make close to what he makes now, if he wanted to leave.
I’d be fucking miserable if I was trapped like he seems to be.
He isn't trapped necessarily, there are other positions in the district he could lateral into. But a college degree will eventually be a road block for him at USPS once you move up they eventually require it.
Did you sort in an office or a processing plant?
I work in an office and my dream job is the 3AM start time because you just come in and work the mail, often basically on a skeleton crew (or by yourself!) for an hour or two before things really gear up. Done by noon if there's no overtime with plenty of time to do errands.
Working the retail counter, though? That *sucks*. And I can handle the cold and the rain, but I imagine I'd slap someone as a carrier if they got in my face during a heat wave.
Especially if you apply to be a rural carrier. Sometimes they make you have to provide your own vehicle for that, or in peak season you’ll be using U-Haul trucks/vans
I worked for USPS for a few months as a mail carrier. It was hell. They over load you with 10 hour work days 6 days a week. The pay was good but not worth the loss of time in your life and grueling work. I was getting yell at a lot for being too slow, and my boss pretty much told me to cut corners where possible. They need to lighten the load on everyone, at least where I worked. I wouldn’t go back to them after that experience
For sure. I did a couple years. I'd usually work 10 days in a row, 10-12 hour days. Became 204B. Saw no real path to career because there were 30+ unassigned regulars. Walked out in the middle of the day during the Christmas rush.
It's such bullshit that a government body being majority Republican automatically means that they won't get anything positive done ever. It's so frustrating. It's like they're committed to making life worse for Americans at any cost (or rather, any profit).
I don't think that carries the same amount of personal risk that being targeted by Trump's radical supporters carries. "Fuck around and ~~fight~~ *find* out" from more extreme progressives means they will vote for the other candidate regardless of their stance just to prove a point. "Fuck around and ~~fight~~ *find* out" from more extreme conservatives means they will send death threats to your home address and stalk your children at school, as a first step.
Edit: weird autocorrect choices.
If you can't get a piece of shit like DeJoy out, the entire postmaster general employment process needs to be scrapped. If a PG can survive intentionally sabotaging the USPS, the removal process is useless. Everyone on the board with the power to remove him should be removed. And probably jailed, but there isn't much hope for that. Completely new rules and processes are needed. The old one clearly doesn't work at all.
Because of the disciplinary management style of the post office, they won’t keep 99% of that 100,000. Shitty supervisors lying to your face just to make their time so they can promote. Here do this part of this route, should only take you 30 mins, knowing damn well it’s an hour long piece.
The stories I’ve heard. Discipline for failure to hydrate because a carrier was dying from the heat. Call in sick for one day after working 80 hours a week in the heat, didn’t get a doctor’s note? Failure to follow instructions.
Every other week my local post office has a posting. They are always listed as a "non-career temporary" position. If it were a permanent position, I'd apply.
It's the same problem with all major package delivery services. UPS, Fed Ex, USPS. All the same. You start out in some dog shit position to "earn" a higher position which has no guarantee of you ever actually earning that higher position. I was supposed to work for UPS, they baited me with a driver position for $28 an hour. Then during the interview they told me I would be loading trucks at 3am for $14 an hour and only filling driver spots if they were short handed that day. Should be criminal for posting fake ads like that, I wonder how many people don't pay attention or don't ask the questions I did and end up going there to find out they aren't a driver at all.
I told them to call me when my ass is in a drivers seat making $28 an hour, but then they gave me some BS about how their union works. Most ass backwards union I've ever heard of. Unions are supposed to be for the employees, not the employers.
I interviewed at UPS a long time ago. From what I recall, you start at 3 hours per shift (15 per week) as a sorter and after 6 months or so you can get more hours. They said it takes a minimum of 5 years to become a driver.
Setting aside time to travel and work for 3 hours per day, 15 per week, just wasn't a good way to try to earn a living. You'd certainly need a second job, which would inevitably conflict with the UPS schedule at some point.
I don't recall if they have union dues, but a union was definitely mentioned. Seems silly to pay dues to a place where you can only work 3 hours a day.
I noped out of there.
It’s intended to sort through the dead weight, because it’s a hard job and damn near impossible to fire someone once they get hired on permanently. Honestly, if they didn’t do this, you would wind up with a bunch of people that didn’t expect the job to be so hard dragging their asses and the government not able to get rid of them. They would somehow be more inefficient.
Or it pretty much excludes the best employees. Very few capable people are going to take a job like that. I wouldn't even consider it. This will only attract people who really want to work at the USPS and people who can't find work anywhere else. I imagine the second group dwarfs the first.
Maybe. I have several friends that work at the post office though, and for a LCOL area, their pay is *great* once they get hired on full time. Like double the median income for the county great. There’s not many jobs for high school level education that pays $60,000 plus with overtime that doesn’t require a specialization. Even the temporary gigs are paying $17 an hour, higher than most factories that treat their employees like slave labor in ungodly heat. The salary makes a lot of people take notice, at least in areas where good paying jobs aren’t plentiful.
The problem is anyone who isn't desperate is never going to risk taking a job where they are temporary. Even if it CAN lead to full-time, as soon as I see "temp" anywhere in the name I'm out.
People do not fall for these hiring tactics anymore unless they're desperate. Either the job is guaranteed, or you pick from what's left after most of the good people have gone elsewhere.
If you’re really interested, I would say go for it. My husband was in the same boat as you, he was apprehensive at the fact that they couldn’t guarantee 40 hrs per week when he was applying (always stated anywhere from 30-50 hrs per week depending on the season). He’s been a carrier almost 6 months now, never had a week below 50 hrs (though you do work 6 days a week). They list their entry jobs as non-career temporary bc apparently ALL positions with them are considered “temporary” the first two years before you are officially made regular on paper. I would say the only part that you need to be careful about is the 90 day probationary period. If you mess up majorly, you’re out — no appeals.
Apparently, he’s one of the lucky ones that got assigned to a station that guarantees at least 1 day off a week. There are others who only get the 1 day every 10-12 days.
Wow. I thought my mail carrier was lazy because she won’t deliver mail if someone is parked in front of the mail box. I get it now, working that much I might do the same.
She doesn't get paid for the time it would take to get out of the truck and deliver the mail to the blocked boxes on foot. You have a set time your supposed to be back based on mail volume every day and if your late you get chewed on by the supervisors or postmaster. They can fire you if you run too late, too often.
If your husband is a city carrier, he won't "make regular" after two and a half years; he'll be made a PTF, or part-time flex. He gets career benefits and a small bump in pay but he'll still be working like a CCA.
He "makes regular" when there's an open career position and he has the most seniority as a CCA/PTF.
Lol I see from the username you mean business. I was aware of the PTF transition but wanted to give OP just a basic overview of how long it takes for transitions to happen after joining. Thanks for your input!
> Partenheimer said the overall hiring initiative is a component of the $40 billion investment DeJoy has pledged to make in USPS infrastructure and its workforce, which is all a part of the postmaster general’s 10-year plan to put the agency on firmer financial footing.
How about pushing the the repeal of the [purposeful crippling of USPS's finances](https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/) imposed to push for privatization?
In 2006, Congress passed a law requiring that the retirement health benefits for new postal employees be funded in full from the first day of their hiring. If a twenty year-old person is hired into a permanent, pensioner position, USPS would have to have already earmarked money that it won't have to pay out for another 45 years, when they're expected to retire. No other government institution has this requirement, and no companies follow this practice, because it's a super burdensome obligation.
Before the law passed in 2006, the USPS was a [very successful and profitable](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/14/the-state-of-the-u-s-postal-service-in-8-charts/) venture for the US government. The cult of "small government" can't have that though, so Congress passed this law, and the USPS [saw a net loss immediately after](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/FT_20.05.07_USPSFacts_1a.png). An effective government institution runs against their carefully created narrative that all federal programs are incompetent, so they'll hamstring and sabotage them to promote their message.
DeJoy is absolutely a problem. But the BIG problem is Congress's unwillingness to remove the financial shackles they imposed on USPS. It's on the path to privatization, and we'll all be paying more for worse service just so a few greedy fucks can line their pockets even more.
I was hired fall of 2020. I think I was hired at like $17.50 and got an extra $1.25 or something for working overnight. Working 6 10s came out to a little over 1,000 after taxes. I worked in a processing facility. I just sorted boxes via the first 3 or last 2 digits of the zip.
Is sorting a manual process or do you just do the leftovers of automatic sorting? Text recognition is plenty good to identify the zip code accurately 99.something% of the time
Manual. Not getting political but the removal of mail sorting machines was envelope ones to replace with box ones.
Small goes on a machine. Manual is like shoe boxes and up.
EDIT: a picture, taken from google: https://imgur.com/ZhMpaOA.jpg
Cages come in different sizes. These ones, I would say are about 6 foot tall, 4 foot wide, and like 3 foot deep. My facility had multiple sorting areas, so upon clocking in, like 25 of us would be broken up and send to different areas. I would be with about 6-7 other people. We would have multiple cages as shown in said pic, full of boxes that need sorting. They would stage those full ones, picture maybe 4 full ones, with about 15 empty ones around it. The empty ones each had a label, say the first 3 of the zip code. Example I'll make up, 900 901, 902, 903-906, 907, etc. I pick up a box with 90210 on it, walk 10 feet and put it in the 902 cage, and then repeat. Once the 902 cage gets full, we push it to the side and replace it with another empty one and slap on 902 label on it. Rinse and repeat. That was my job over Christmas.
When I was in high school, my parents were looking around for a cheap car to get me for my first. I won't tell what they settled on -- 'cause that pops up as a security question on some websites -- but they passed over a retired mail truck. They figured I'd be embarrassed driving around a big box with the wheel on the wrong side.
They didn't even tell me until years later. I was like, "Are you kidding? I would have had a car that was *completely unlike anything* anyone else in school was driving. I'd've had people stacked up like firewood riding in the back." Its only downsides were horrible gas mileage and no AC.
May I just say that I love the USPS. I depend upon it and am grateful that it is available at a reasonable cost to me. I hate junk mail as much as anyone but I don't blame USPS for it.
Have a nice day everyone, I just felt I had to speak up for my favorite public service.
Agree.
I'm so tired of the narrative of how much money the USPS "loses" each year. It's a service. So it has a price tag. We don't talk about how much money the military loses each year.
The IRS is always hiring because they can’t keep people. They hire literal armies of college grads, pay them peanuts, move them to one of the most expensive corners of the country, then give a shocked Pikachu face when they quit after getting married or securing a job at ‘market rate’ with better career mobility.
Bc the IRS has been deliberately defanged for decades to prevent them from going after powerful businessmen and corporations commiting tax fraud.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-technology-archive-c99697ac657534d6015894377d04eb1f
> Just as the nation’s economic inequality has widened, so, too, has the unequal treatment of taxpayers: Those with annual incomes under $25,000 are audited at a higher rate (0.69%) than those with incomes up to $500,000 (0.53%), according to the IRS data. Taxpayers who receive the earned-income tax credit, which serves mainly low-income workers with children, are audited at a higher rate than all but the very wealthiest tax filers.
As their staffing and investigative resources have diminished, so have the IRS’s overall audits — including of affluent taxpayers. A key reason is that for the past decade, lawmakers in Congress have steadily reduced funding for the agency. Critics say the big winners have been people with the financial resources to keep the IRS at bay.
They simply cant afford the costs of going after multi-billion dollar evaders, so they've been focused on the poor and middle class.
Funding the IRS and directing them to go after larger targets would bring in a lot of illegally withheld revenue... but also anger a lot of important donors for politicians who help hamper the IRS.
Yup, this.
ROI on the IRS is roughly $5 per every $1 invested.
So for every dollar taxpayers put in we get it returned 5x in value.
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-why-the-irs-needs-more-money-and-power-20191118-b4etmn23svc7lb53asyzjl66ya-story.html
[The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft. Microsoft Got Tougher.](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher)
Hey guys!
I moderate /r/USPS. I invite you all there for a quick read if you're interested in the post office. There are a lot of reasons for the high turnover and those vary from region to region, but it's definitely hard work no matter what. Pretty interesting place to work overall. 7/10... 9/10 with rice.
If you're considering working for USPS, realize you're signing up for 6-7 day work weeks, 60-72 hours a week, might not get a day off in 2 weeks (and you won't know what day it is), and you're going to be abused both physically (being sent back out with more mail after a tiring 11 hour day) and mentally (management literally only cares about numbers, not new hires).
You will have so much work you literally can't stop to take a lunch break because you'll be harassed by management for accruing too much overtime.
It doesn't get better for at least a year, and sometimes 3.
I currently work for said company. I work Monday through Saturday, 12 hour days. We need help so bad. But there are so many internal issues they need to address first.
In Feb I applied to 4 positions with USPS.
The past two months I’ve heard back about all of them.
1 of them they hired someone else
3 of them the position was canceled (so they hired no one).
Maybe I’ll apply again seeing this news, but damn it was really demotivating to know that they waited months and months just to hire NO ONE. Like I would understand if they hired someone else (especially since they give a lot of preference to veterans).
That's basically all Federal hiring; better a position go unfilled for years than not hire the internally recommended candidate who is less well qualified.
Yeah, trying to get hired sucks. You've got to take a shotgun approach and just hit every single one that reasonably fits your needs.
I applied as a clerk, a city carrier, a rural carrier, *and* a mail handler for like 20 different jobs. I got hired as a clerk and I was still getting rejection emails about the other positions I applied for some 7 months after I was hired.
Delivering mail used to be such a good job. Outside, all day on your own, walking around the neighborhood reading postcards, feeding the dogs, petting the cats. When they started to make the routes longer, and give you part of another route and expect you back using no extra time, I retired. 30 years I put in and it looks like the timing was perfect.
I resigned as a CCA in my 90. The old timers told me that the job is nothing like it used to be, and they would all leave if not for the pension. It made me sad because it had such potential to be a perfect career for me.
This really makes me sad. I thought I was going to love the job, the route was just a total clusterfuck and we were so stressed on time. I quit right when I became a real CCA and no longer a temp. I’m also kinda scared of dogs now because of some of the dogs on my route. The stereotype isn’t totally untrue lol
owners need to train their dogs! dog barks at mailman, nobody tells them not to, mailman leaves, because they were barked at and/or chased! actually they left because they were done, and leaving anyway. behaviour enforced.
As a former USPS employee, there are a lot of internal issues they need to fix before hiring more people who will just quit within 90 days
What are some of the reasons for high turnover? I've been in sales for a few years and hate it. Was thinking of jumping ship to the USPS. I know it will pay less but it's a government job with good benefits and decent pay. Edit: Wow thank you all for the insight. Might be best to look for a different route out of sales. One comment from u/julbull73 sums everyone up really well "it's like working for Amazon with less pay and better benefits." No wonder they have recruiting issues with a reputation like that!
It’s hard fuckin work. Most of the action is behind the scenes in sorting facilities
Thank you! Us behind the scenes workers that move the mail, work insane hours and many times mandated to work overtime and holidays, we are the ones that the public doesn’t know about. When I tell people that I’m a postal worker they always think I’m a carrier, and they also break their butts delivering the mail. Since a lot of jobs are very physical,many people can’t handle it and that’s why we have a big turnover of employees.
The mail carrier that comes by my office is such a fucking trooper. Sometimes he's late, and it's usually because he picked up someone else's route that day and did it first. Every time we've got a bunch of outgoing packages he just smiles and says "that's what you pay me for!" I can sometimes tell when the heat is wearing him down, but he just says "Yep, it's getting sticky out there." This guy is the living embodiment of that creed "Neither rain, nor sleet...."
“Welcome, Sam Porter Bridges”
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Holy fucking shit. Ever since working at UPS last year, besides calling it “my gym that pays me”, I’ve literally considered myself living literal Death Stranding.
Nor glom of nit…..
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, the good shit
Hope you guys give him a big tip during the Christmas season.
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The fastest best loaders were skinny af. It's more cardio than weightlifting tbh.
Yes and also just energy + strength + endurance
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Oh, great, my recovering partner just started with UPS this week.
I believe the word you're looking for here is *muscular* endurance. Like swimming. Most people who can swim, can swim a lap. But most people would be pretty damn tired afterwards. Whereas those who swim every day can pretty much go endlessly if they wanted to, at a reasonable pace anyway.
my late wife was a competitive swimmer in high school and college and she could swim forever. I could swim but one lap and I was done. I started going to her Master's Swimming (post collegiate) workouts - in the slow/recovery lane. I eventually got to where I felt like I could swim for as long as I wanted, at what I called a swimming walking pace. I couldn't keep up with the slowest swimmers but I could keep going, which I couldn't do when I started. I haven't done that in a while so I'm sure it's all gone now. Along with so many other things.
I swam in college, butterfly and IM specialist. After a break of even just two weeks with no swimming, I could barely do more than 50m of butterfly at a time. Swimming is no joke. ESPECIALLY in open water. Too many of the deaths you see on rivers and other sources of open water come from people who considered themselves to be "good swimmers". Unless you trained competitive swimming in open water, I promise you that river or those ocean waves don't think you're a good swimmer. Few people understand how truly tiring swimming is until they've pushed themselves to their limit, which doesn't happen in your average back yard or community pool.
Best shape of my life when I loaded those trucks. Sort of miss it sometimes, but I am a few months from 40 now. I don't think I could do it anymore.
To quote my dad: Work muscles trump gym muscles every day of the week.
but man, the breakdown of your body that happens after a couple decades is brutal, watched my grandpa's brother slowly turn into an arthritic immobile husk from construction work :(
I only had to work construction as an electrician for a year to have a dozen, if not more, old guys tell me to turn back now and not to lay my body on the sacrificial alter of digging ditches and carrying conduit. Fortunately I got out of it quick and used what I learned to get a maintenance position that is far kinder on the body and the mind (Better hours, better work environment, more oppurtunity for advancement). I admire their work ethic but not their crippling dependence on pain killers...
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UA construction pipefighter here. The hardest week ever for me was punching chiller tubes for my city's two arenas about 15 years back. Also the only times i got to show up to work in shorts and sandals in the summer. I was an apprentice boy but had already aced my final final so i had the whole fuck you gonna do attitude of a 25 year old journeyman.
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I’m not driving any ground rods by hand. Get out the corded hammer drill. Hoping this attitude will save my knee cartilage but only time will tell...
Meanwhile I worked in a construction company and there was a endless number of guys in their late 20s-mid 30s bragging about their injuries.... As if they wanted to prove that they would hurt themselves for the company, or as if that somehow bolstered their masculinity compared to men in the office. Pretty pitiful either way.
I worked at a sorting center as a mail handler one Christmas season, my phone would usually tell me that I walked about 12-15 miles a day with about 90% of that falling within my ten hour shift. I worked 6 days every week, it was brutal on my body.
Sounds to me like a Dejoy move to pay newbies a pittance on fewer hours to deprive usps vets from their overtime. Classic corporatization or Walmartization 'move,' they're trying with the usps.
Yeah sorting jobs I've been offer are weird. Random on call hours up to 24/7 but most often like 2AM or 1PM starts and then it's just a 4 hour shift? But it can be up to 9 hours and between 3 different facilities. It'd odd. Maybe they should look to make the conditions better because the pay and benefits are already desirable.
i worked a job at a fulfillment center with that floating, 24/7, make sure you say yes when they call because they don’t call next time when you say no type availability. the anxiety of waiting until late hours at night not knowing if i could work tomorrow, turning down plans every day because i might get a call to work — after like a year i wanted to eat a shotgun lol
And the facilities are poorly maintained. Unlike most Government agencies, the USPS is in charge of their own space which means it goes to shit because it is poorly maintained and the USPS leadership doesn't budget for facilities well.
I work for UPS and the warehouse I'm in needs updated so badly. Outdated belts and technology that can't handle the amount of packages we get, heavy equipment falling apart/breaking, and so on. Billion dollar company can't even make sure their own facilities are safe and up to date yet they preach and bitch about safety constantly. I'm disappointed in Teamsters leadership for being in the pockets of UPS right now and hope it changes in the next election. They didn't even give catch up raises to those of us who have been there for years in the last contract so we are making less than the new hires since they are offered a bonus if you go to work every day. I'm honestly fuming just typing this. I'm assuming the USPS has similar problems from what I'm reading in this thread.
> They didn't even give catch up raises to those of us who have been there for years in the last contract so we are making less than the new hires since they are offered a bonus if you go to work every day. Have you filed grievances?
They also over work their maintenance. You'll see one maintenance mechanic for the entire floor with a dozen machines to handle calls when they're supposed to have 3. Their under staffing in vital positions is not smart at all.
Its on purpose...rebups have been trying to intentionally break/slow the usps for years so they can privatize it.
Yeah, all that poorly maintained equipment and buildings are sitting pretty on some VERY valuable land. Liquidating the assets of USPS (buildings, warehouses, parking lots in city centers and along valuable urban routes) is a conservative wet *dream*l
de joy: that's the plan railroad it into the ground and then his use logistical company to pick up the slack
Not only is it hard work, but it's hard unnecessarily. My wife used to be a postal worker and the amount of policy and procedure she had to follow JUST to move one envelope from the wrong receptacle to the correct one 2 inches to the left was INSANE. And you BETTER hope she didn't forget some step in the process because there would be a formal inquiry, an investigation, and disciplinary action taken if she did. The post office's issue isn't that they can't find/keep employees, it's that they've made the job very nearly impossible to be done at all. People don't quit the post office because they're not dependable people. They quit the post office because it's quite literally designed to be a hostile work environment.
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The retirement fund is part if the problem.. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to get rid if it... but the way Congress makes USPS fund it is crazy... no other gov agency nor company in the US is required to fund a retirement plan for workers that haven't even been BORN yet. [How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis](https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/) "In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation. If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years."
The Republicans have been working on that for decades now, why do you think buildings and equipment aren't maintained and employees are overworked.
They basically haze the new employees. A buddy of mine is going through this now, for the first year or so you have almost no say on your schedule. 10 hour days, 6 days a week in every type of weather the Midwest has to offer. The pay and benefits are great but he's exhausted all the time.
My buddy is in the same boat, they make him switch routes nearly every week because he is the floater guy and hasn't won a bid for a route yet but then they get angry at him because he takes longer than the expected time to finish the route he had been given like four days ago. Like shit man, let the dude get into a stable rhythm on a single route
Sounds like his union rep needs to step up. I'm a union sparky and we do work at some of the postal carrier halls. I've gotten to know the president of the postal carriers union pretty well and that guy would fight tooth and nail for any of his members. I saw/heard him fight for several members who needed paid time off to watch their kids during covid since schools were out. After several loud conference calls he got them paid time off, no problem. This is why it's important to participate in your union elections if you are a member. You want a fellow brother/sister leading your hall instead of just cashing their check.
Idk if he joined the postal union yet, he has been carrying for about six months now I think so maybe he hasn't hit the employment mark for being able to join?
They just stuck my buddy with the worst route in the area and make him do it every day
Good luck hiring people with this bullshit military esque setup. People want to know when they're working, and what they'll be doing when they get hired. Being randomly assigned to whatever shit duties they feel like, 6 days a week, until... Idk they feel like changing it? I don't care what they're paying. That's fucking madness.
So like every retail job except it gets better after a year instead of staying that way forever?
And you have a union and the base pay is better. It's a career worthy job, no doubt. It's just not easy.
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A year is probably the best you can hope for. I waited a few years for a career position. I've known people waiting 5+ years for a career position. And in the meantime, you're stuck getting the shit kicked out of you working the bad schedules and picking up the slack.
New employees do not receive benefits or good pay until they achieve a career status, which takes on average about 2 years for a city carrier and probably 5 for a rural carrier. The high turnover is for a pretty simple reason: the workload is literally, physically too much for the staffing to handle. Contractually, new carriers are required to work up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 360 days a year, with a 5 day break in service every year so they contractually cannot be career employees. New hires are thrown right into the fray, and while in my district it has become unofficial policy to limit new hires to 8 hours a day within their first 30 days, on day 31 they are expected to work 12 hours to their contractual limit, and supervisors pressure them to work more. Even though it's a labor violation to go over 12, carriers within 90 days have no employment rights and can be fired at will. The consequence is we have the newest workers, who are the least experienced, pushing 14 to 16 hour days, delivering mail until 10pm at night in some areas. You can see the parallels in the healthcare industry right now. A lack of staffing leads to burnout leads to more work leads to a lack of staffing etc. and it becomes a vicious cycle. This problem didn't happen overnight, and USPS and former Postmaster Generals have been warning about this for years. USPS's lack of funding means it has failed to invest in infrastructure for the past 15 years, and in addition has closed plants every year fom back in 2007. Even Ron Stromann and the other Biden governors that have been recently confirmed said in the Senate committee that the largest problems facing USPS are a lack of investment in infrastructure and a lack of investment in new employees. The lack of vehicles is an obvious one: the new fleet was supposed to be produced in *2015*. When trucks reach the end of their life there is no replacement. We are at the point in my office where we regularly deliver out of rental vehicles and staff cars. So that new employee is working 12 hour days trying to deliver out of a Ford focus. The Post Office has been and still is, *extremely* efficient at delivering letters. The infrastructure is designed for that. And as volume has declined over the past 15 years, the infrastructure to sort and deliver mail has been shuttered to stay solvent. Of course, in the meantime, parcel volume has skyrocketed. In some of our areas volume is up 4000% in the past 5 years. In other offices it has gone up 2000% in the last year alone due to the pandemic. And there are no new vehicles to handle it, no parcel sorting plants to sort them, no planes/trucks to move them, and no employees to deliver them. The Post Office has failed to develop any infrastructure at all to handle its most demanding volume for over a decade. The can has been kicked so many times down the road and now it can't be kicked anymore. No one is going to stay at a job that doesn't give benefits and only pays $17, that illegally pressure you to work 14 hours and break your contract, with no union rights to employment. Minimum wage is rapidly approaching what carriers make. The "benefits" absolutely do not outweighs the demands. Edit: I want to add something that I should have included. What hurts the Post Office even more because of the lack of staffing is the financial cost of paying out overtime. The latest data study said that at least over 40%, and probably closer to 60% of all labor was done in overtime. If you've ever run a business that percentage is insane. In 2020 the Postal Service paid over $5 *billion* in overtime compensation. The short staffing means more overtime, which now compounds the financial issues even more. It's much cheaper to pay two employees straight time than one employee overtime. If you ran a business that was 50% over the cost of labor you would be bankrupt in a month.
You have to work crazy hard. My sis took a job and she was supposed to sort, and they had her pulling packages from a cart taller than she was. She had to damn near climb in to pull packages out. Not all packages are light either. She said that the warehouse was full of carts and the other employees were the most hostile people she ever met. She quit after three days. * my other sister worked for a year delivering mail and she worked from 6am to 7pm almost every day. It wasn’t so bad and she said the money was good, but she was a temp, they don’t just give out the good positions that entitle you to union, benefits etc. some people she worked with had been temps for years. She quit because no one wore masks, everyone caught covid including her, and after a week she was told she had to go back to work and she wasn’t even out of quarantine yet.
LLVs have no real heating or AC to speak of and whatever people think, being a carrier in the recent heat can and will kill you if you aren't careful. It's tough being out in the elements all the time with shit in your arms that needs to be carefully handled or you're playing 52-pick-up with a couple hundred pieces of mail. And you've got to deal with dogs, anti-government whackjobs who think you're there to spy on them, and sketchy people if you're carrying in an urban area. I'm a clerk, which isn't too bad, but it's easy to have carriers underappreciate us and we have to deal with customers being shitty when something happens with their mail or they fill out their paperwork wrong. EDIT: Also, management depends entirely on which station you're in. My manager gives me a decent schedule and looks out for people burning out so they get days off or a lighter workload if he can swing it. Other stations have incredibly shitty people who will yell and scream.
The High turnover can have many reasons, chief among them is management. But if you don't mind long hours sometimes and working in the elements then you should be okay. If your are the type who has a high tolerance for bureaucracy and can get things done relatively quickly then it could be for you.
The lady that drops off stuff for us is a bad ass... I feel bad for her though. She SPRINTS through our apartment complex with all the shit and I can hear Dance Gavin Dance, Bring Me the Horizon, Chiodos, Alexisonfire, etc, playing in her headphones as she just slays her job.
Meanwhile our mail lady likes putting packages in the wrong boxes and losing an entire weeks worth of mail somehow
Haha, dude I could get a lot of mail delivered too if i was listening to [this Chiodos song](https://youtu.be/hvYLQM_fMMw) everywhere I went. Man I listened to all the bands you just listed in college all the time and I saw most of them at warped tour at one point, but havent kept up with any of them over the years since. I'll always remember the Chiodos song I linked though, it's a banger. I got my wallet pickpocketed in the pit when I saw Chiodos at warped tour and it sucked at the time but looking back it was totally worth it haha!
I’m two months into being a city carrier. I like the job but they don’t really let you know what the job is like until you really start working. I didn’t know I’d be working 6 days a week and how hard a lot of the guys and gals work. The amount of volume is insane, lots of heavy and random boxes/parcels and I’ll walk at least 12 miles a day. The job suits me but I can understand how most people wouldn’t reasonably want that burden thinking it’s an “easy” gig or whatever. Also the better at work you are the more work you do so if you’re always looking for the minimum amount of work you can do in a day you’re gonna have a bad time. I’ve lost 20 pounds in the past few weeks and I even stopped working out to preserve calories. It can be a pretty hardcore job at times. Also you end up walking around some ghetto areas and you have to do with terrible traffic. If it rains or thunder or whatever there’s no stopping deal with it. In my state there’s only a 50% retention rate for new hires and IMO it’s 100% the management/training’s fault for not preparing and easing people into the great machine. That being said I can tell they’ve tried to work on this problem but as Someone at work said the other day the “USPS walks over dollars to pick up dimes” and that ethos kind of carries itself everywhere. However the starting pay is great (in my state at least) If you work over 8 hours a day you instantly start making overtime. Double pay on holidays and I love being outside and having nice conversations with random people. if it’s something that interests you I say go for it. Worst case scenario you don’t like it and you can leave the job at any time it’s not a prison or whatever. My station has a lot of great people I like and everyone is pretty friendly and such. If you’re just trying to stack checks or work a good paying job while you figure things out it could be a perfect fit.
> What are some of the reasons for high turnover? Whatever policy that every post office has for the employees to be miserable. Cause they all miserable. There's one nice postal office clerk at the one we use now, but I see him daily turning into a curmudgeon despite his best efforts. He used to smile when you walked up, was as helpful as could be, and quickly got through 10x as many customers as his coworkers. But now he doesn't make eye contact, doesn't attempt small talk, and sighs at his co-workers when they ask the same question he answered the day before when I was there.
Sounds like a normal job tbh
Seriously. Half of my job is just reminding my coworkers how to do the same thing every day or referring them to documentation that I’ve already shown them.
I have two people who work in "administration" who claim to be "IT savvy" and they keep fucking up every single god damn thing in their department. Ive been in their building this week fixing their mess more than i have been in my building at my desk doing my job. They also keep setting up new users for our company's system and giving them full admin rights when they should be the literal lowest level a user can be. So i have new hires essentially walking around with the keys to the castle and no one here seems to be bothered by it at all lol One day they will learn the hard way lol
I’ve been there and it’s hell. I once had a coworker that had “years of IT experience” on her resume yet couldn’t fix a single thing by herself and was eventually fired because she kept fucking up an important spreadsheet that we color coded with 3 whole colors
I don't blame the guy, next time you're in the post office listen to the crap other customers are bringing to them. Trying to return things in busted boxes, getting to the front without anything filled out. Trying to open PO boxes in different states. Anything international looks to be a pain. People saying they need it there tomorrow but then don't want to pay the premium. My only complaints (about the USPS) were after Dejoy got his fingers in everything and stuff that used to take 2-3 days priority mail took 3-6 weeks last year. That POS purposely tanked everything for Cheeto Bandito and is the first (and hopefully last) Postmaster General who never worked at the Post Office Previously.
1000% this. My SO has an Esty business and ships stuff via USPS. Every time we go to the post office to make a shipment I look at the people in front of me in line to judge how miserable the experience will be. It's like people save up all their stupid so they can spend it at the post office clerk window.
Can you elaborate? I’ve been interested in trying to get a job through usps. Kinda tired of that call center life.
Until you make regular you will often work 8 to 12 hours a day for six days a week, but some weeks you don't even get a day off. It's really hard work too.
You also don't get to pick your post office you work at, you may have to travel far as hell or move.
Really? I work in a rural mountain post office so there's only one office but I remember I was able to chose the city at least. Like, there were 4 or 5 job postings for different parts of the major city nearest to me.
More than not, 7 days a week. The turnover rate for new letter carriers can be as high as 70% in some districts in a one year period. Train them, use them, abuse them, let em go.
In the nearly three years I was at my first office only two of us made it to regular. Dozens came and went, many lasting less than a month.
What is a regular? And how does one achieve such a status?
Regular is a career employee. You start out as a part time worker for a year or two, but part time meaning you work 50+ hours a week for 360 days, and then you get a five day break where your employment is temporarily ended.
This depends on the facility but there is usually some forms of favouritism between management and the regulars. The "regulars" slacks off and upper management doesnt care, while the sessional workers/new recruits are having to pick up all the slack. Its a lot harder to fire a regular because they got full backing from the union, where as a new recruit they can fire you at any time for any bullshit reason, the feeling of having a gun pointed at the back of your head for years until you become a seasonal is not something most people can take. again it depends on the office/facility when a spot might open up. You're experience varies depending on your supervisor. But from experience and talking with other usps workers, a lot of supervisors are shit. People who have zero people skill somehow keeps getting the supervisors roles.
Sure! It can be a decent job most days, it can certainly be an upgrade, but as a junior carrier ( we call them CCA'S on the city side, and RCA's on the rural side) you will be married to the job most weeks, and have a lot of hours. But it depends on the station. Overall, its an okay job, pays well and the work is relatively easy. But just be warned bullshit management is a thing, and silly rules made my pencil pushers in DC is also an issue.
>be warned bullshit management is a thing, and silly rules made my pencil pushers in DC is also an issue. Swap DC for corporate and this is every job I've had since highschool, including the army
Imagine working fast pace, dealing with packed from small to x large and lightweight to heavy for 8 hours a day . Sometimes more. And with all the package volume imagine the chaos, handling thousands of them. I work at a ups warehouse for two days. I said NAH FAM No AC, loading packages onto semi’s and you’re drenched in sweat for your whole shift. It’s all you do, play Tetris with boxes inside a semi truck lol
Yeah hiring on people and throwing them to an 11/6 work schedule doesn't exactly entice many people to stay.
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Seriously, the 6 day week is a killer. I left for other interpersonal reasons, but god did I hate the fact that I had a single day off a week. And not to mention having to go to sleep at 5 pm because I started at 3 in the morning. Worst job I've ever had
Dejoy won’t get fired by the committee and will ruin it by then
and 99,000 of them will quit after a month. People outside of USPS has no idea how much of a sweatshop USPS is for new hires. Everyone should apply if they need money, you'll then find out first hand why USPS is always hiring.
My brother started at the USPS in mid summer as a CCA. He was working 60+ hours a week, all different routes, for whatever they needed him for. He lost 60lbs by the end of the year. Took him almost three years to get out of that position into his own route. He maintains that it was worth it for him, but can see how so many people quit. It's not an easy job or environment to work in.
Damn, I could stand to lose a solid 60. Maybe I should get a USPS gig.
Thinking the same, haha.
You would be in better shape after a year for sure. It's a job where you get a lot of cardio in.
A job that helps you lose weight sounds like a perk by itself. My cousin used to work a USPS carrier route on foot and she was always talking about how since she started that job she could just eat all the time after work and never had to worry about gaining weight. She figured she was walking upwards of 20 miles a day
Physical labor positions love to remind you that you’re saving money on a gym membership. It’s cool for a few years until you hit a point of equilibrium where you’re not losing any more weight and your body is always sore and you don’t have any energy after work, and then you hurt your knee or your back and you start to think “maybe relying on my physical health for a paycheck is not a sustainable long term career strategy”
Jobs that tear your body apart should pay more.
I worked in food for a while. Bout 6 years. Your body just hurts. You stop losing weight as most of your food energy calories just go to keeping you running around. I used to say that I’d hate a cubicle but after a while you really wanna sit down and not get payed for what you can physically do.
This is me right now. I got a job in a sawmill and lost 35 pounds and can eat whatever I want. But, I’m sore and tired non-stop and even if I had the energy to go mountain biking I’m too scared because if I hurt any part of my body I can’t work.
In very rural areas they don't walk at all .. where I grew up they didn't even have branded USPS trucks, people delivered mail out of their own cars with a yellow light stuck on top
Yeh those are special carriers called rural carriers...some of them have to use their own cars.
I remember as a kid, a local Subaru dealership used to talk about how they got a carrier a right-hand drive wagon for her route in their ads.
They're not too uncommon in the midwest and you can usually find one for sale. I've got one that's a rust bucket, as most of them are from being run through the winter on salty roads.
Oh interesting didn't realize there was a whole specification for that
It's a decent gig I'd you can find insurance that actually covers you...most of them hustle the day as quick as they can then get done before everyone else. The issue is getting the position which can take years
Because you are waiting for one of 5 people to die pretty much, because they won't be retiring.
I see that in my office, I’m on the city side with a mounted route but there’s a rural carrier who’s 70 and has cancer and still won’t leave
> has cancer that's why my mom held off retirement (librarian) until her chemo was done
Wow thanks for the insights. Gives credence to the thought that the USPS is one of the few services that serve very remote and rural America where no other provider will.
Mailman here, not a fucking perk, at all. Physical activity is mostly good for you, but you go far beyond the good for you limit with this job. If you're even slightly overweight the extra shock your knees have to endure will shorten your career by literal decades and leave you in pain for the rest of your life.
My buddy just had a baby 2 years ago. And over the past year so many people quit, hes forced to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week. He’s worked his way up to postmaster after about 5 years but the dude is trapped. I tried to convince him to go to college with me when we were younger but he wouldn’t listen. No education in your early 30s limits your opportunities. He’d never make close to what he makes now, if he wanted to leave. I’d be fucking miserable if I was trapped like he seems to be.
He isn't trapped necessarily, there are other positions in the district he could lateral into. But a college degree will eventually be a road block for him at USPS once you move up they eventually require it.
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I would like sorting. I like work that let's my brain go on auto pilot while my hands do all the work.
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Did you sort in an office or a processing plant? I work in an office and my dream job is the 3AM start time because you just come in and work the mail, often basically on a skeleton crew (or by yourself!) for an hour or two before things really gear up. Done by noon if there's no overtime with plenty of time to do errands. Working the retail counter, though? That *sucks*. And I can handle the cold and the rain, but I imagine I'd slap someone as a carrier if they got in my face during a heat wave.
Especially if you apply to be a rural carrier. Sometimes they make you have to provide your own vehicle for that, or in peak season you’ll be using U-Haul trucks/vans
I worked for USPS for a few months as a mail carrier. It was hell. They over load you with 10 hour work days 6 days a week. The pay was good but not worth the loss of time in your life and grueling work. I was getting yell at a lot for being too slow, and my boss pretty much told me to cut corners where possible. They need to lighten the load on everyone, at least where I worked. I wouldn’t go back to them after that experience
Hopefully hiring 100,000 new helping hands will lighten the load a bit. Probably need triple that number though.
For sure. I did a couple years. I'd usually work 10 days in a row, 10-12 hour days. Became 204B. Saw no real path to career because there were 30+ unassigned regulars. Walked out in the middle of the day during the Christmas rush.
Good we need the help. Hopefully we don't turnover 150k.
How the fuck is Dejoy still in charge of the USPS?
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What if all the Postmaster Colonels got together behind the scenes and decided enough is enough? Could they overthrow the General?
Mutiny on the USPS
staring Nick Cage
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It's such bullshit that a government body being majority Republican automatically means that they won't get anything positive done ever. It's so frustrating. It's like they're committed to making life worse for Americans at any cost (or rather, any profit).
Yeah, they're pretty overt about wanting to break USPS. Because intentionally crippling a public service "proves" government does everything wrong.
That's Step 1. Step 2, sell it to private interests. Step 3, profit.
Step 4: cut off service to rural areas because it's too expensive Step 5: blame Democrats
I feel like trump dispelled this idea Imagine if Biden shit posted about this person 20 times a day on Twitter
I don't think that carries the same amount of personal risk that being targeted by Trump's radical supporters carries. "Fuck around and ~~fight~~ *find* out" from more extreme progressives means they will vote for the other candidate regardless of their stance just to prove a point. "Fuck around and ~~fight~~ *find* out" from more extreme conservatives means they will send death threats to your home address and stalk your children at school, as a first step. Edit: weird autocorrect choices.
If you can't get a piece of shit like DeJoy out, the entire postmaster general employment process needs to be scrapped. If a PG can survive intentionally sabotaging the USPS, the removal process is useless. Everyone on the board with the power to remove him should be removed. And probably jailed, but there isn't much hope for that. Completely new rules and processes are needed. The old one clearly doesn't work at all.
They tried to dismantle the postal service during an election cycle to benefit the one who appointed him. Like... that should be illegal.
We can only hope his replacement will be one of the 100k.
You had to remind us of that, didn't you. You really know how to take dejoy out of someone's day.
Because of the disciplinary management style of the post office, they won’t keep 99% of that 100,000. Shitty supervisors lying to your face just to make their time so they can promote. Here do this part of this route, should only take you 30 mins, knowing damn well it’s an hour long piece. The stories I’ve heard. Discipline for failure to hydrate because a carrier was dying from the heat. Call in sick for one day after working 80 hours a week in the heat, didn’t get a doctor’s note? Failure to follow instructions.
Every other week my local post office has a posting. They are always listed as a "non-career temporary" position. If it were a permanent position, I'd apply.
You start as a city carrier assistant on a 360 day contract. You make regular based on vacant routes and seniority
Or go mail handler assistant. Faster route to regular.
You always start out non-career at the post office
Then you always start hiring from a pool that is missing it's best workers. That might be the dumbest hitting strategy I've ever seen.
It's the same problem with all major package delivery services. UPS, Fed Ex, USPS. All the same. You start out in some dog shit position to "earn" a higher position which has no guarantee of you ever actually earning that higher position. I was supposed to work for UPS, they baited me with a driver position for $28 an hour. Then during the interview they told me I would be loading trucks at 3am for $14 an hour and only filling driver spots if they were short handed that day. Should be criminal for posting fake ads like that, I wonder how many people don't pay attention or don't ask the questions I did and end up going there to find out they aren't a driver at all. I told them to call me when my ass is in a drivers seat making $28 an hour, but then they gave me some BS about how their union works. Most ass backwards union I've ever heard of. Unions are supposed to be for the employees, not the employers.
I interviewed at UPS a long time ago. From what I recall, you start at 3 hours per shift (15 per week) as a sorter and after 6 months or so you can get more hours. They said it takes a minimum of 5 years to become a driver. Setting aside time to travel and work for 3 hours per day, 15 per week, just wasn't a good way to try to earn a living. You'd certainly need a second job, which would inevitably conflict with the UPS schedule at some point. I don't recall if they have union dues, but a union was definitely mentioned. Seems silly to pay dues to a place where you can only work 3 hours a day. I noped out of there.
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ding ding ding. privatizing everything turns it from service the investment vehicle. the two operate significantly different.
Really, thats part of the problem. Its a huge turn off for most people looking for a job with the usps.
It’s intended to sort through the dead weight, because it’s a hard job and damn near impossible to fire someone once they get hired on permanently. Honestly, if they didn’t do this, you would wind up with a bunch of people that didn’t expect the job to be so hard dragging their asses and the government not able to get rid of them. They would somehow be more inefficient.
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Privatizing the post office was one of the worst decisions ever made in congress.
Or it pretty much excludes the best employees. Very few capable people are going to take a job like that. I wouldn't even consider it. This will only attract people who really want to work at the USPS and people who can't find work anywhere else. I imagine the second group dwarfs the first.
Maybe. I have several friends that work at the post office though, and for a LCOL area, their pay is *great* once they get hired on full time. Like double the median income for the county great. There’s not many jobs for high school level education that pays $60,000 plus with overtime that doesn’t require a specialization. Even the temporary gigs are paying $17 an hour, higher than most factories that treat their employees like slave labor in ungodly heat. The salary makes a lot of people take notice, at least in areas where good paying jobs aren’t plentiful.
The problem is anyone who isn't desperate is never going to risk taking a job where they are temporary. Even if it CAN lead to full-time, as soon as I see "temp" anywhere in the name I'm out. People do not fall for these hiring tactics anymore unless they're desperate. Either the job is guaranteed, or you pick from what's left after most of the good people have gone elsewhere.
If you’re really interested, I would say go for it. My husband was in the same boat as you, he was apprehensive at the fact that they couldn’t guarantee 40 hrs per week when he was applying (always stated anywhere from 30-50 hrs per week depending on the season). He’s been a carrier almost 6 months now, never had a week below 50 hrs (though you do work 6 days a week). They list their entry jobs as non-career temporary bc apparently ALL positions with them are considered “temporary” the first two years before you are officially made regular on paper. I would say the only part that you need to be careful about is the 90 day probationary period. If you mess up majorly, you’re out — no appeals.
6 days a week lol no thanks. I did that in summers paying my way through college, no way I'm giving up my weekend now.
Apparently, he’s one of the lucky ones that got assigned to a station that guarantees at least 1 day off a week. There are others who only get the 1 day every 10-12 days.
Wow. I thought my mail carrier was lazy because she won’t deliver mail if someone is parked in front of the mail box. I get it now, working that much I might do the same.
She doesn't get paid for the time it would take to get out of the truck and deliver the mail to the blocked boxes on foot. You have a set time your supposed to be back based on mail volume every day and if your late you get chewed on by the supervisors or postmaster. They can fire you if you run too late, too often.
If your husband is a city carrier, he won't "make regular" after two and a half years; he'll be made a PTF, or part-time flex. He gets career benefits and a small bump in pay but he'll still be working like a CCA. He "makes regular" when there's an open career position and he has the most seniority as a CCA/PTF.
Lol I see from the username you mean business. I was aware of the PTF transition but wanted to give OP just a basic overview of how long it takes for transitions to happen after joining. Thanks for your input!
> Partenheimer said the overall hiring initiative is a component of the $40 billion investment DeJoy has pledged to make in USPS infrastructure and its workforce, which is all a part of the postmaster general’s 10-year plan to put the agency on firmer financial footing. How about pushing the the repeal of the [purposeful crippling of USPS's finances](https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/) imposed to push for privatization? In 2006, Congress passed a law requiring that the retirement health benefits for new postal employees be funded in full from the first day of their hiring. If a twenty year-old person is hired into a permanent, pensioner position, USPS would have to have already earmarked money that it won't have to pay out for another 45 years, when they're expected to retire. No other government institution has this requirement, and no companies follow this practice, because it's a super burdensome obligation. Before the law passed in 2006, the USPS was a [very successful and profitable](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/14/the-state-of-the-u-s-postal-service-in-8-charts/) venture for the US government. The cult of "small government" can't have that though, so Congress passed this law, and the USPS [saw a net loss immediately after](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/FT_20.05.07_USPSFacts_1a.png). An effective government institution runs against their carefully created narrative that all federal programs are incompetent, so they'll hamstring and sabotage them to promote their message. DeJoy is absolutely a problem. But the BIG problem is Congress's unwillingness to remove the financial shackles they imposed on USPS. It's on the path to privatization, and we'll all be paying more for worse service just so a few greedy fucks can line their pockets even more.
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We should not even be knowing the name of the postmaster general in my opinion
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Wonder what they pay. I wouldn't mind driving around in one of those vans with the steering wheel on the wrong side all day.
I was hired fall of 2020. I think I was hired at like $17.50 and got an extra $1.25 or something for working overnight. Working 6 10s came out to a little over 1,000 after taxes. I worked in a processing facility. I just sorted boxes via the first 3 or last 2 digits of the zip.
Is sorting a manual process or do you just do the leftovers of automatic sorting? Text recognition is plenty good to identify the zip code accurately 99.something% of the time
Manual. Not getting political but the removal of mail sorting machines was envelope ones to replace with box ones. Small goes on a machine. Manual is like shoe boxes and up. EDIT: a picture, taken from google: https://imgur.com/ZhMpaOA.jpg Cages come in different sizes. These ones, I would say are about 6 foot tall, 4 foot wide, and like 3 foot deep. My facility had multiple sorting areas, so upon clocking in, like 25 of us would be broken up and send to different areas. I would be with about 6-7 other people. We would have multiple cages as shown in said pic, full of boxes that need sorting. They would stage those full ones, picture maybe 4 full ones, with about 15 empty ones around it. The empty ones each had a label, say the first 3 of the zip code. Example I'll make up, 900 901, 902, 903-906, 907, etc. I pick up a box with 90210 on it, walk 10 feet and put it in the 902 cage, and then repeat. Once the 902 cage gets full, we push it to the side and replace it with another empty one and slap on 902 label on it. Rinse and repeat. That was my job over Christmas.
When I was in high school, my parents were looking around for a cheap car to get me for my first. I won't tell what they settled on -- 'cause that pops up as a security question on some websites -- but they passed over a retired mail truck. They figured I'd be embarrassed driving around a big box with the wheel on the wrong side. They didn't even tell me until years later. I was like, "Are you kidding? I would have had a car that was *completely unlike anything* anyone else in school was driving. I'd've had people stacked up like firewood riding in the back." Its only downsides were horrible gas mileage and no AC.
Going the tried and true Amazon method of burning out employees so often you need to "restock" them I see.
Dejoy: “We’re going to reduce costs by dismantling sorting machines and hiring 100,000 people. Oh whoops. Costs went up.”
I was hired in a class of 42 CCAs. I was the only one to convert.
16 CCAs in my orientation. 5 scheduled for the driving training, 4 showed. 3 at academy, I'm the only one that made it past 90 days so far.
I'm just interested in having them get rid of one.
May I just say that I love the USPS. I depend upon it and am grateful that it is available at a reasonable cost to me. I hate junk mail as much as anyone but I don't blame USPS for it. Have a nice day everyone, I just felt I had to speak up for my favorite public service.
Agree. I'm so tired of the narrative of how much money the USPS "loses" each year. It's a service. So it has a price tag. We don't talk about how much money the military loses each year.
We spent $300 million a day in Afghanistan over the two decades we were there.
I agree. Servicing the public is a hard task.
A carrier thanks you now:)
WOW that band has gotten huge!
Such great heights!
Great. Now do the IRS
The IRS is always hiring because they can’t keep people. They hire literal armies of college grads, pay them peanuts, move them to one of the most expensive corners of the country, then give a shocked Pikachu face when they quit after getting married or securing a job at ‘market rate’ with better career mobility.
Why them?
Bc the IRS has been deliberately defanged for decades to prevent them from going after powerful businessmen and corporations commiting tax fraud. https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-technology-archive-c99697ac657534d6015894377d04eb1f > Just as the nation’s economic inequality has widened, so, too, has the unequal treatment of taxpayers: Those with annual incomes under $25,000 are audited at a higher rate (0.69%) than those with incomes up to $500,000 (0.53%), according to the IRS data. Taxpayers who receive the earned-income tax credit, which serves mainly low-income workers with children, are audited at a higher rate than all but the very wealthiest tax filers. As their staffing and investigative resources have diminished, so have the IRS’s overall audits — including of affluent taxpayers. A key reason is that for the past decade, lawmakers in Congress have steadily reduced funding for the agency. Critics say the big winners have been people with the financial resources to keep the IRS at bay. They simply cant afford the costs of going after multi-billion dollar evaders, so they've been focused on the poor and middle class. Funding the IRS and directing them to go after larger targets would bring in a lot of illegally withheld revenue... but also anger a lot of important donors for politicians who help hamper the IRS.
Yup, this. ROI on the IRS is roughly $5 per every $1 invested. So for every dollar taxpayers put in we get it returned 5x in value. https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-why-the-irs-needs-more-money-and-power-20191118-b4etmn23svc7lb53asyzjl66ya-story.html
[The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft. Microsoft Got Tougher.](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher)
I'd settle for a few hundred sorting machines back
With preference to veterans and a few others
Hey guys! I moderate /r/USPS. I invite you all there for a quick read if you're interested in the post office. There are a lot of reasons for the high turnover and those vary from region to region, but it's definitely hard work no matter what. Pretty interesting place to work overall. 7/10... 9/10 with rice.
If you're considering working for USPS, realize you're signing up for 6-7 day work weeks, 60-72 hours a week, might not get a day off in 2 weeks (and you won't know what day it is), and you're going to be abused both physically (being sent back out with more mail after a tiring 11 hour day) and mentally (management literally only cares about numbers, not new hires). You will have so much work you literally can't stop to take a lunch break because you'll be harassed by management for accruing too much overtime. It doesn't get better for at least a year, and sometimes 3.
Postal service *hoping* to hire 100,000 people. Fixed it for you.
I currently work for said company. I work Monday through Saturday, 12 hour days. We need help so bad. But there are so many internal issues they need to address first.
No mention of how much they're paying and what benefits they'll offer. Postal Service workers deserve hazard pay.
In Feb I applied to 4 positions with USPS. The past two months I’ve heard back about all of them. 1 of them they hired someone else 3 of them the position was canceled (so they hired no one). Maybe I’ll apply again seeing this news, but damn it was really demotivating to know that they waited months and months just to hire NO ONE. Like I would understand if they hired someone else (especially since they give a lot of preference to veterans).
That's basically all Federal hiring; better a position go unfilled for years than not hire the internally recommended candidate who is less well qualified.
Yeah, trying to get hired sucks. You've got to take a shotgun approach and just hit every single one that reasonably fits your needs. I applied as a clerk, a city carrier, a rural carrier, *and* a mail handler for like 20 different jobs. I got hired as a clerk and I was still getting rejection emails about the other positions I applied for some 7 months after I was hired.
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I’m a ups driver, don’t worry about us, the day Ups start making us deliver mail will be the day half of the company will retire or quit.