On June 20, Alex Azevedo, a maintenance technician at the U.S. Postal Service’s St. Paul Processing and Distribution Center in Eagan, Minnesota, was escorted off the property by police and referred for a psychiatric evaluation. Management ordered the evaluation after he became distraught over its refusal for more than 24 hours to clean up human feces that had been smeared across mail-sorting equipment.
The incident exposes the systematic degradation of working conditions across the USPS under the “Delivering for America” (DFA) restructuring plan. Facility consolidations, staffing cuts and the elimination of millions of work hours have intensified the pressure to keep equipment operating despite dangerous conditions. Four workers have died in two years at the Palmetto Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Georgia, where an independent inquiry by the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee has documented reports of inadequate safety protocols and emergency medical resources.
Azevedo’s removal also follows a documented pattern of harassment and retaliation at the St. Paul facility. Steven Linell Smith, a maintenance mechanic at the plant, endured five years of racial harassment, stalking, death threats and management retaliation before being fired on a pretext. He won a federal hostile work environment case against the USPS, while the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which had declared his case “unwinnable,” refused to fight for his reinstatement.
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