First let me say that I am in no way speaking for the USPS or the workers. What I am saying here is strictly from my own experience working as a truck driver for a major mail contractor and speaking with the workers I encountered.
If we are talking about the disruptions that occurred between late October, ‘20 and January, then it was a combination of several factors;
1) The COVID pandemic causing workers to stay home from the sorting centers, either because they were actually sick or feared getting sick, causing massive systemwide manpower shortages.
2) The enormous increase of online shopping which resulted in a huge increase in overall volume.
3) The restriction of the Dock Expeditors (Those in charge of seeing to it the trailers I haul leave on time and with all the mail they are supposed to carry) ability to call in an “Extra” when volume is higher than normal. An Extra is simply a second trailer to cover the same contract route when the first or all the scheduled trailers are full.
4) The restrictions placed on street level carriers overtime hours. Typically if a carrier needed longer than 8 hours to get all the mail off his truck, he was allowed to do so. A rule was put in place during November and December that instructed carriers to return to their post offices after 8 hours, thus causing backlogs that became enormous.
The latter two may or may not have been commanded by DeJoy himself. Many threads back at Christmas time suggested he was directly responsible. I have no way to verify this.
Look at this satellite shot;
https://goo.gl/maps/CkWF5VhXDoWocMq4A
That is a major NDC just outside Washington DC. It’s a big one, but by no means one of the largest in the country. Notice the lanes between the rows of parked trailers on the west side of the building. In normal times those trailers would include outbound loaded trailers waiting for a truck to haul them away (which was never for very long - most within an hour and less than 4 hours, typically), inbound loaded trailers with mail needing to be sorted, waiting for a dock to be emptied, and empties waiting to be placed on a dock to be loaded with outbound mail. At one point in late December, every single spot in that lot was full and those lanes in between were also full of trailers, most with mail in them and some that had been waiting to hit a dock and be unloaded for TWO WEEKS! This was the case at several large Distribution Centers nationwide, but the East was particularly hard hit. The effect of what I state above was unprecedented.
I suspect what you are saying is only partially true.
You are free to have all the suspicions you want. There are some on this board that will not like what I might say on this subject no matter what proof I offer. As a result, I am not going to spend any more time typing this out than I need to in order to make myself clear.
The sorting machines that were decommissioned seemed to be targeted to cause the greatest disruptions in mail delivery.
It might SEEM that way, but from what I have observed, and as the poster above me stated, the removal of those machines was long planned. Did it look bad? Absolutely. Did it contribute to the breakdown of the system? Not by much, if any.
Why did first class mail delivery go from taking a week to taking over a month practically overnight?
See number 1 thru 4 above.
Even if eliminating some sorting machines was justified, he royally fucked up the USPS in the process.
You will get no argument from me that he was and continues to be the wrong man for the job. But I do not think he was completely and solely responsible for the massive backlogs we saw last winter.
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