DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – With only days until Christmas, the United States Postal Service is struggling to keep up with demand.
A spokesperson of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) told CBS 11 News their on-time delivery score is sitting at 75%. That number would normally be in the 90s, which means that one in every four packages is running late.
“Your delays I would more or less title up to the pandemic,” said Jonathan Cage, the executive vice president of APWU Dallas.
He says there’s almost 19,000 postal workers in quarantine, which is up over 10,000 since Thanksgiving.
Nine hundred of those are postal service workers in the City of Dallas alone.
“The pandemic has played its part. And with the employees being out we had mail processing slow-downs, but it’s not like the mail disappeared. The mail still has to be processed. But then when you have more and more people ordering things, and more and more people shipping things…it’s almost like double the mail,” he said. More at
Just to expand on this. Our plant saw several “unknowns” working among us. Turns out they were employees from our stations working on their days off. Also on a side note, the “office people” were told to help out. I saw a senior MDO and down helping out in our plant, and in plant support, among them. Turns out our plant manager was out for part of this, no fault, and we had a sub (from another plant). Anyway, we made things happen and yeah there will be grievances in the end, but we should maybe say thanks to ALL that made this historic peak season a success?? Note, we lost 70+ employees in only 3 days to covid related testing and still made it work in our plant. Just say thanks to ALL that helped out in the end. Have your chips and sub with no drinks, like we did, and say thanks for a job well done to all that made this happen. Like we did here and will move on in the end. Best wishes in your plants next year. Stay safe!!!
Too many of these employees are EAS level employees that don’t touch the mail or contribute to it’s delivery. They are”working” from home and could come into the plants and help, but won’t. 664,000 employees and 19,000 out is around what, 2 or 3 percent? That doesn’t explain the backlogs. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians .