AU.S. Postal Service worker in Montpelier made a public plea for help last month as residents complained about widespread delivery delays.
“We are understaffed, overworked, and completely buried in packages,” Michelle Burton wrote in a Jan. 21 post on Front Porch Forum, describing herself as a postal employee.
The Postal Service has had to deliver a deluge of packages since people started staying home and ordering online at the onset of the pandemic two years ago, and Vermonters have been raising concerns about problems with the mail for months.
“We are less than fine and haven’t been since covid hit,” Burton wrote in a follow-up post on Saturday. “All we want to do is get your mail and packages to you, but at this time it’s an impossible task.”
Burton declined to comment for this article.
VTDigger spoke to two mail workers in Vermont on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the press. Both shared accounts that mirrored Burton’s posts on Front Porch Forum.
One of the mail carriers, who works all over the state, said mail delivery is hamstrung when every package must be delivered every day, especially when routes are getting 200 packages a day. The person told VTDigger that when packages are not delivered or scanned as attempted delivery, it’s registered as a failure in the postal service’s internal systems.
Yes, the USPS prioritizes the delivery of Amazon parcels. When the Amazon trucks arrive all other parcels are put on hold in order to get Amazon parcels sorted first. Priority Mail, the Postal Services’ primary product takes a back seat to Amazon. We carriers are told ‘ forget the mail’ get Amazon scanned before 8pm. Congress needs to conduct a full investigation into the USPS before they grant one cent of tax payers money to the Postal Service. Employees are also being forced to work 15 hour days. The Postal Service stops paying employees after 12 hours in a day.