Postal workers, letter carriers and Oregon’s U.S. senators spoke outside the Local Processing Center in Springfield on Tuesday as part of a national day of action to protest consolidation in the Postal Service and advocate for the American Postal Workers Union as it negotiates its contract.
Delivering for America
The Postal Service has begun several changes under its 10-year Delivering for America plan, enacted in 2021 by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
“You understand the Postal Service had been in a financial death spiral for the 14 years prior to my arrival in June of 2020 and had no plan to curtail these losses, and therefore no plan to become fiscally self-sufficient,” he told a U.S. Senate committee in April 2024.
Despite some cited improvements at the Postal Service, many senators decried how its plan has led to delays in their constituents’ mail. The Postal Service, which had forecast a $1.7 billion surplus in 2024 in the Delivering for America plan, is expected to lose more than $8 billion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, and has asked the White House for an additional $14 billion, The Washington Post reported.
Delivering for America’s processing centers
One major change under Delivering for America is a restructuring away from local mail processors and toward “larger, centrally located sorting and delivery centers,” USPS wrote, which it said “will provide faster and more reliable mail and package delivery over a greater geographic area … (and) … enable more effective workflows that simplify the movement of all classes of mail and packages.”
Under the Postal Service’s plan there will be about 60 of these larger locations around the country, called Regional Processing and Distribution Centers, including one in Portland. These would be served by Local Processing Centers, which sort letters to carrier routes and send packages to regional centers. At the 2023 National Postal Forum, DeJoy described local centers as “transfer hubs” and said the new model would “increase (USPS) throughput and reduce cost.”
As part of this transition, many Processing and Distribution Centers around the country are being turned into Local Processing Centers, including Eugene/Springfield’s center next to the Gateway mall. Without that “distribution” aspect, mail processed at the facility is trucked to Portland before being delivered. In August 2023, USPS projected this would lose 36 jobs but save $4-$5.4 million annually with “no service performance downgrades.”
In May, the Postal Service halted new changes, but not before the center on Gateway lost its outgoing mail processing and its letter cancelling machines, Eugene APWU President Cory Benitez-Egerton said. He said USPS hasn’t cut staff at the center yet.
According to USPS spokesperson Kim Frum, “97% of First-Class Mail within the 974 (Eugene) ZIP Code area was delivered within the service standard. It takes less than two days to process and deliver mail sent within the 974 (Eugene) ZIP Code … the same for this time last year and in FY2022.”
But postal workers and the Eugene area’s congressional delegates said this is not what they’ve seen.
“By default, this plan is adding a one-day delay to all mail clients,” because of the trip to Portland, Sean Townsend, Vice President of the Eugene APWU chapter said. He also said DeJoy manipulated that service standard number, by changing the standard from 1 to 3 days to 2 to 5 days.
“This illogical detour has already caused significant delays in essential services, including prescription drugs, bill payments and other critical communications. The plan does not serve the people and undermines our community’s trust in the postal system,” Benitez-Egerton said. “We will not stand by quietly as our essential services are eroded.”
The workers were backed up by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Congresswoman Val Hoyle (D-Ore) through her deputy chief of staff, who criticized DeJoy and advocated for USPW in its ongoing contract negotiation.
“I asked citizens across Oregon to send me their postal experience,” Merkley said. He shared stories of someone who incurred credit card fees because they got their bill days before it was due, and people who ran out of medicine because their prescriptions didn’t arrive on-time.
“Mail has to go hundreds of miles to the processing center, just to be reorganized and sent back,” Merkley said. “(Postal workers) want fair benefits. They want fair wages. They want fair treatment. And they want employees to be able to share what’s going on.”
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