The first email came from a mail carrier in California. It landed in my inbox at 11:04 a.m. on Aug. 31 — less than two hours after the Center for Public Integrity published its investigation into wage theft at the U.S. Postal Service. The mail carrier wanted me to know that our findings are accurate, that supervisors at USPS regularly cheat employees out of their pay.
The article, based on private legal documents and Labor Department data obtained by Public Integrity, shows that hundreds of postal supervisors have illegally underpaid hourly workers for years. They’ve often been caught changing time sheets to show employees working fewer hours, and they’re rarely punished for it.
In her email, the postal worker told me she saw managers at her own post office clocking out mail carriers while they were still delivering their routes. She’s complained about it to her representative in Congress, she said, and to the USPS inspector general’s office, the U.S. Department of Labor, her local district attorney and the head of her local postal union — an affiliate of the National Association of Letter Carriers