PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — If it’s taking longer for your mail to arrive, members of the American Postal Workers Union say the blame can be placed on a nationwide staff shortage.
Local 89 union members picketed outside the mail processing center in Southwest Philadelphia Friday morning to publicize their frustrations. The shortage has led to slow mail delivery and toxic working conditions.
Union President Nick Casselli said managers don’t respect his members, and the stress and friction on the work floor has even led to fistfights.
“When management doesn’t get the mail out, they get theirs from the higher-ups. And they bring that attitude to the craft employees already overworked because we’re understaffed. And that causes a chain reaction,” he said.
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The union said new workers aren’t trained properly, leading to more employee turnover and more stress.
Paul Smith, a regional spokesperson for the Postal Service, said in a statement to KYW that the position being presented by APWU leadership is "absent of anything based in reality," and that in the last two years, they have worked diligently with their union and management associations to address their shared goals of employee recruitment and retention, workplace safety, and career training and advancement.
"We have focused steadily on stabilizing our workforce resulting in employee availability and overtime requirements being at the most favorable levels in many years," he said. "We have converted 125,000 pre-career workers to full-time career employees since October 2020, including 50,000 conversions between April 2022 and March 2023. We have already reversed years of declining service reliability and now 98 percent of the nation’s population receives their mail and packages in less than three days, and we are working hard to correct service-related issues in the other limited areas."