Reply #40: First most letter carrier no long case their own mail, [View All]

[happyslug]

For that reason, whatever is in each bundle of mail set up for you home is NOT set by your local Carrier but by a Clerk who sets up the mail for delivery. What is in each bundle is up to the clerk who cases the mail NOT the Carrier who delivers it.

The Postal Service says this is for increase efficiency i.e. a clerk sets up the mail to be delivered by the Carrier, thus reserving the Carrier to the job of getting to his route and dropping off the mail. This has been a Postal Service goal ever since the Postal Strike of 1970, where the Carriers went on Strike, but the Clerks did not (Two Different union and even the Carrier's union opposed the Strike, but the Carriers went on strike anyway, even through it was illegal to do so). The Postal Service says it done to increase efficiency, the Carriers do what they do best, deliver mail, the clerks do what they do best, sort the mail. This ignores the fact Carriers have, since the Civil War when City Mail Delivery was started, always sorted their own mail for delivery, they know their routes better then anyone else (Most routes have two Carriers assigned to it, a regular carrier who delivers mail 5 days out of 6, and a flouter who does the 6th day but on five different routes).

Thus, on most routes today, the Carrier is NOT setting up your mail, a Clerk is. The Carrier has no authority or ability (given that the Clerk set up each set of mail) to makes changes or even to note that a letter is misdirected. If the Clerk does not catch the problem nothing happens till it is returned (The Clerk do NOT have first hand knowledge of the routes and who is on it).

Now in the 1980s before my Father retired from the Postal Service, the Postal Service was already on its way to making the Carriers NOT sort their own mail. Even then the Postal Service had another problem, it wanted to minimum number of Carriers, and did this by giving other carriers overtime to delivery mail over a route that has been cut so that four Carriers can delivery the mail on that route. Sounds like you are on such a route, divided up among other carriers who then delivery mail to your area after they have finished with their own routes. The Carriers will do it when they could, sometime before they did their own routes, but mostly afterward. Such routes are notorious for getting bad service for even the Carriers do not know what part their are delivering to till the day they are called in and asked to do the overtime.