In our efforts to report on all things OB, we found a reference to the Post Office in Ocean Beach in today’s Los Angeles Times. In an article about how the takeover by the new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has resulted in empty mail trucks, falsified records and chaos at the Postal Service, an OB mail carrier discovered a snafu.
In the Ocean Beach neighborhood of San Diego, a mail carrier arrived at work the morning of Aug. 18 to find tubs of mail sitting outside an office. The mail had been collected the day before but never made it to the plant because it had missed the last truck.
The carrier, a 22-year veteran of the Postal Service who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that would not have happened in the past; a post office manager would have authorized overtime for an employee to make an extra trip to the distribution facility.
“Some way or another, we always got the mail out every day,” the carrier said.
August 18 was just 4 days before the protest / support rally at the OB Post Office attended by 50 OBceans.
Support rally for OB Post Office, Aug. 22, 2020. Photo by Brendan Cleak
It was in July that DeJoy ordered mail drivers to leave post offices and distribution centers exactly on schedule, plus he forbid extra trips to pick up any mail that missed earlier cutoffs. The Times:
Weeks-long delays began to ripple through a system already reeling from COVID-19 absences and a surge in package delivery during the pandemic, shaking Americans’ faith in one of the country’s most popular services and raising concerns about how the Postal Service will handle mail-in ballots in November.
The abrupt scheduling move also raised more questions about DeJoy’s stewardship of the Postal Service, which has been marked by severe delivery snafus and charges by critics that he is working to slow service in order to help President Trump’s election bid by making voting by mail more difficult.
Workers who spoke to The Times described troubling details about how the rigid schedules have played out: Some trucks have traveled empty, and mail left behind has accumulated at massive processing centers, creating backlogs in a system that is not designed to store mail. Loading dock managers have falsified records so it appears that trucks are departing earlier, some mail has been sorted twice, and in at least one case, a large shipment from Amazon was turned away because facilities had no space to process it.
At a post office in Carmichael, near Sacramento, employees ran out of storage space and refused to accept about 1,500 packages from Amazon drivers Aug. 29, said Saintil Perry, president of the local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union.
“That’s a no-no. That’s revenue, regardless of how heavy the shipment is,” Perry said about refusing incoming parcels. “But they literally don’t have space. The letter carriers don’t have space. If they take on this mail, they won’t have time to leave because they would have to process it.”
At a massive mail facility in Santa Ana, tractor-trailers began pulling away from the docks even if workers were in the middle of loading them, said Will Khong, president of the postal union’s Orange County-area chapter.
For the balance of the LA Times article, please go here (the OB reference is near the end of the article).
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Got it wrong; even though the article in the LA Times was online by yesterday morning, it didn’t hit the paper version until this morning – front page, main article. The reference to the OB Post Office is at the very end.