USPS is falsifying safety docs as its workers die of heat | Hacker News Reader

USPS is falsifying safety docs as its workers die of heat

texasobserver.org

174 pointsgeox82 comments

One sad thing I have noticed in American workplace is high levels of stress and higher levels of cruelty. This story is one such example. Another one is that Texas law, that eliminated (or limited, can't remember) water breaks. What is weird in this story is it is a government agency doing it, not a private entity :(

It looks like everything is designed to keep workers stressed, worried, scattered etc. Tying healthcare to jobs, preventing unionization at any cost, filling courts with as many pro-business/anti-worker judges etc etc.

It all looks well coordinated, deliberately planned and calculated.

It's called a capitalist economy; not a laborist one. What I've never understood is how this is a surprise to anyone or why labor chooses to vote against their interests.

That said, the heat this year in Texas was brutal (speaking from personal experience) and I don't know how people who work outside do it and how they'll continue to do it as global warming progresses.

I thought the USPS was a government agency with unionized employees. What’s the explanation for this abhorrent behavior?

Louis DeJoy is still in charge.

Unions simply existing don't magically make thing amazing for every employee and the US government doesn't actually care about people any more than corporations do.

If you read the article, it's pretty clear that this abhorrent behavior is coming from management, with the union pushing back. I'd guess it will be an issue during the next contract negotiations.

Agreed. Management’s actions, which are shameful regardless, seem further exacerbated by their ability to track carriers’ position to the minute and possibly having too few employees [0]. The latter may be the after effects of a requirement, since repealed, that required USPS to pre-fund pensions. (That’s not in the article)

To re-emphasize, these factors don’t excuse management’s actions.

[0]: https://apwu.org/press-release/angry-about-late-erratic-miss...

Its an "independent agency", which as we've seen, acts more or less like a capitalist corporation.

Unions for government employees are usually weird and impotent, because the government has either gutted the right to strike, or is straight up willing to just fire everyone.

Or much much worse, just completely ignore all bargaining that the Union attempts. This puts the Union in an odd position in that, people don't usually want to strike, but negotiation doesn't happen.

How did the USA end up in this position? Here, whenever the gov tries to limit the right to strike, the unions respond with an all sector whole country mother of all strikes.

I have a friend that lives in Delhi.

He told me that laborers are dropping dead on the job. It's not uncommon at all.

It's not uncommon at all

Yeah, that is the problem. It shouldn't be common

USPS workers have at least 3 unions: City carrier, rural carrier, and clerks.

In the case of USPS, there is a section of the American population who wouldn’t necessarily support better conditions. A relative of mine was a letter carrier. That whole branch of family, who you would think would, qua family, be sympathetic, regularly scoffed at the relatively decent working conditions he had at USPS. Comments like “You can’t tell me that he should be getting over $20/hour just to deliver the mail”.

Some of that was possibly jealousy. But another factor is that unions for public-sector employees have always been more controversial in the United States than unionization in general.

USPS has 3 unions. This is just a speculative rant, please don't do that here.

Where did I say USPS doesn’t have unions? The whole point of my post is that this is a unionized sector, and that unionization got results.

> unions for public-sector employees have always been more controversial in the United States than unionization in general.

For good reason. Unions pool workers' interests against the opposing interests of the employer; which means for public unions, they go against the interests of the public at large. There are countless examples of this.

Naturally, in a country with a deep history of skepticism of centralized government authority, people don't view public-sector unions very favorably.

>Naturally, in a country with a deep history of skepticism of centralized government authority, people don't view public-sector unions very favorably.

This feels contradictory to the sentiment in the preceding statement at first glance. If the people are generally skeptical of centralized government authority, why would they also be skeptical of unions who push back against that centralized authority, as opposed to seeing themselves as on the same side?

As I understand it, it's the rank-and-file "unelected" government employees that are perceived as the real problem. And all government spending is always bad. And unions are commie pinko bastards. And taxes are always bad. Add it all up, and government employee unions are corruption on corruption, fighting to screw the voter out of their tax dollars.

An argument of the left, however, goes that the employer of public-sector employees isn't actually the public at large, but rather a state controlled by the bourgeoisie that only claims to represent the public interest. In that case, both the public at large and public-sector employees are on the same side and both deserve union protection.

> For good reason. Unions pool workers' interests against the opposing interests of the employer; which means for public unions, they go against the interests of the public at large. There are countless examples of this.

Or against the politicians / political class. And given the amount of gerrymandering that goes on in the US, whether the elected politicians actually accurately represent the public at large is debatable.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

See also "Teachers are now five times more likely to have a side gig than the average full-time worker":

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/4/17164718/te...

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/01/about-one...

Perhaps some public sector employees need unions because they're getting steam-rolled. (Of course some unions (e.g., police) may be too powerful.)

The police ones aren’t actually unions. In most countries they aren’t even called that.

The importance of "The Economy" doing well is baked deep into the American psyche: if the economy is healthy, the country is healthy. And "doing well" is understood to mean businesses are healthy (revenue/market/profit growth). That means working as much as possible, for as few benefits as possible, is the accepted standard. Because who wants the economy (and by implication, the country) to do poorly? And if some, or a lot, of people suffer from stress and mental breakdowns, physical injuries, or death, well, that's a price our business and political "leadership" is willing to pay. (Some sarcasm there, in case it isn't obvious.)

Recently there does appear to be more noise around employee/worker benefits (including wages), hence things like the striking screen actors and auto workers (and attempted strike from railroad workers, who have shockingly terrible benefits), and renewed interest in unions.

The health of a country ought not be measured solely by its GDP and financial markets.

I think a lot of this is because of the shift from pension plans to 401Ks and IRAs. When an economic downturn means that you have years of retirement savings wiped out, of course you'll want the economy to do well.

Pension plans and 401K/IRA are invested in the same thing.

The only difference is a pension plan board/fund manager is an additional middleman that can be stupid/corrupted, hence more agency risk for the benefit recipient.

Taxpayer funded pension plans offset that agency risk with the power of being able to increase taxes, assuming their tax base is sufficient.

Historically, many pensions were defined benefit, rather than defined contribution. Market risk (and benefit) fell upon the employer rather than the employee. My understanding is that defined benefit pensions are pretty rare these days.

The problem of pension is that it doesn't come out of thing air. Someone still has to pay for it. In US the company pension get raided. In France pension is gonna run out soon and it put much pressure on the young people. Unless you have deep pocket like Norway oil money, pension would always favor the old. I have never seen a pension system that favors young people instead of the old yet. I think 401k style of you get what you pay is at least fairer to the individuals.

I remember Bush got a lot of flak in the press over his attempts at partial privatization of Social Security, with a payroll tax going into named accounts invested in broad-based equity indexes. (The details differ substantially, but it was somewhat like making 401(k) contributions mandatory and deducted from every paycheck.)

Increasing the size of the investing class and putting names and yearly balance statements on accounts (so voters will call bloody murder if the legislature raids the funds like they currently do with Social Security) both seem extremely useful to me.

Though, increased transparency would likely force reductions in benefits for current retirees, with current workers being the beneficiaries. Also flooding so much money into the major indexes would likely bring down investment returns, but likely resulting in a slight narrowing of income inequality.

And the risk of the employer not existing or being profitable enough decades in the future still falls on the benefit recipient, so just another agency risk.

It's interest rates that are screwing the worker. When they say they're fighting inflation they mean wage 'inflation.' When wages go up working class people are more able to repay their loans without incurring penalties and interest, which isn't good for mortgage companies or banks. Don't confuse the two, the interests of capital and working people are necessarily at odds when it comes to interest rates.

That's one of the contradictions of capitalism. As wages are pushed down, so does the ability to purchase the wares and services they produce. This also hurts the profits of companies.

> It all looks well coordinated, deliberately planned and calculated.

It may look that way, but it is much more likely an emergent cultural phenomenon.

You said weird... But it's completely fucked up... At that point government needs a makeover

UAW is getting good media coverage but if you watch Shawn Fain's live streams (available on YouTube) he mentions numerous unions currently striking all over the US. A lot of them with tens of thousands of workers.

I think it boils down to leaders being self-centered. Being the boss isolates you. Isolation leads to self-centerdness. Being self-centered is isolating. It's a vicious circle.

It's cruel to embue one person with sole decision making power because it's leads to psychosis.

The US gov cares less for their employees then the other companies, because other companies can be sued by their employees. None of those postal workers can sue, and can at most receive a small annuity if they end up permanently hurt only if they fight 'right' for it(reduced at 62 to regular retirement). Amazon did that they'd have a class action.

You're telling me that USPS cares less than Amazon that demands workers work in tornado outbreaks?

USPS will make you deliver in hurricanes so yeah.

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" is a phrase long associated with the American postal worker. Though not an official creed or motto of the United States Postal Service, the Postal Service acknowledges it as an informal motto along with a slightly revised version of Charles W. Eliot's poem "The Letter".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service_c...

Why can't employees sue the US government? That seems absolutely bonkers.

(I'm British, so don't have a huge context for these things)

The State has sovereign immunity. It cannot be sued unless the State explicitly waives its sovereign immunity rights.

Can’t sue me unless I say you can.

The "sovereign immunity" argument is practically never invoked, and claiming that it's a hindrance against suing any government is wrong, and arguable fearmongering. Sure, they could, and maybe we could talk about if they should even have the ability to do such a thing, but they don't really ever use it. Congress has, many times, clawed back some of the reaches of such an argument anyways.[0]

For some examples, in the many lawsuits against the NSA (from the leaks by Snowden), the government didn't get out through "sovereign immunity", but the more reasonable "illegally obtained evidence" argument.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...

Texas Tech used it to get out of paying Mike Leach his buyout when they fired him. Even having a law degree wasn't enough for Leach to get his day in court as the university claimed sovereign immunity and washed their hands of it.

Wait, a university can claim sovereign immunity in the US?

That's wild.

I don’t understand why there isn’t more outrage over USPS based advertising. You are, basically, legally required to have a box where they deliver physical ads. Besides the annoyance factor, it also generates a huge amount of pointless waste which is bad for the environment.

Why aren’t more people angry about that?

I'd love to be able to pre-reject anything sent standard class, but there are limits to how much time I can spend on activism and how much I can afford to spend bribing politicians.

I did the opt-out linked below and the volume of junk mail dropped significantly.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail

Amazing that instead of fixing the problem, the government actually requires I pay some third party to handle this for me.

The alternative would be to properly fund the system with tax money instead of ad money. When you bring that up most Americans start acting like a toddler, cover their ears, and shout “bla bla bla that’s communism”.

Physical paper mail is pretty clearly a legacy system at this point, no? Seems straightforward to delete it and replace it with an email service where each physical address gets an email handle that gets transferred between residents when someone moves in/out. For very old people and Amish there could be an opt-in physical alternative but you need to pick it up at a central location, or pay to have it forwarded by a private package delivery service. Am I sounding like a toddler?

This will be hard to implement. If I got an email because I live on xx then I moved to xxx what will happen to my old email? and would I be getting a new email for the new address. Privacy issue a side as you don't want the next resident to know your history of stuff you got... bla bla. We can solve it by requiring dynamic mapping between email address and physical address. But then your email will be tied to you as a person. Which ironically will mean that whoever got hold of this email will always be able to send you ads.

It would much harder to get an email for each address you have and preventing re-using it will require some effort.

I don't think a universal email will work in the US. The US does not even have a national ID and many Americans does not have passports (because a lot of then will never need one).

The US does have a national ID card: The US Passport Card. They should strive to make it free of charge and compulsory.

I understand that. And I mentioned the passports already in my comments. But in the context of my comment. national ID would be required and must issued for every citizen (adult), which is not the case. So hence there is not effective national ID in tue US.

The passport card acts an internal passport, between the 50 subject states and dependent territories.

Thank you for acknowledging Canada’s true status.

This is disinformation. US citizens do not require any form of passport to travel to US territories (let alone states). https://www.usa.gov/visit-territories

> This will be hard to implement.

Sure, we do need to think about it for more than 30 seconds, but I don't think it makes any sense to punt to personal addresses.

Physical mail doesn't have a history, so why should "housemail"? It expires after k days, you need to forward it to a personal address if you want to save it.

"Housemail" doesn't need to receive arbitrary information, only information that can't be shifted to personal email because there is no registration step. So e.g. things that aren't opt-in, and things where you are legally expected to check what you receive. So, traffic tickets, backup communication from utilities (e.g. water is getting turned off), etc.

I think constraining it to only the necessary use cases makes it a lot simpler than what you are imagining.

My understanding is that bulk mail essentially subsidies individual mail to a large degree.

I do dislike getting ads in any form though. They have recycle bins in my P.O. Box building so I toss any flyers right then and there. When I used to get delivery it always annoyed me having to bring trash from my mailbox into my house to recycle it.

It's also an excellent vector for scamming the elderly. There are literally legal businesses who's entire model is fooling seniors into buying stuff (sending money) by making their communication look similar to government agencies and other legitimate bussinesses.

Whatever I get junk mail, I check to see if it has one of those "business reply mail" prepaid envelopes.

I then shove as much of my other junk mail into that envelope as I can, and mail it back to the company on their tab.

This is surprisingly effective at reducing junk mail.

A sad state that definitely needs attention. USPS is buying up and supposedly deploying Next Generation Delivery Vehicles in the coming years that supposedly have AC. Why not prioritize these hot states first?

by charging much more for postage in these areas

> by charging much more for postage in these areas

This would seem to fundamentally be at odds with interpretations of the USPS’s universal service obligation (USO). Though it seems there’s some ambiguity about exactly what the USO requires.

https://about.usps.com/universal-postal-service/usps-uso-exe...

https://www.oversight.gov/report/usps/reevaluating-universal...

people are dying, so maybe that policy should change

This likely does not make sense economically if the damage to the wider economy from unstable shipping costs is more than differential shipping pricing would recoup.

You are also directly marginalizing and redlining large parts of the country when going from a single, integrated shipping system where domestic shipping is a negligible overhead that most businesses eat to a system where most get slightly cheaper service, while others face prices drastically higher.

Is it worth it to subsidies the margins to ensure everyone has access and opportunity?

The Rural Electrification Act, Affordable Connectivity Program, Universal Service Fund, federal funding of transit (road & rail construction) and education would not exist if we as a society decided to say "Let's do nothing for our fellow American that don't have access to X".

> people are dying, so maybe that policy should change

I have a harder time drawing a straight line between the universal service obligation and postal workers dying than you seem to.

I think there are tons of other issues about the USPS that can be fixed and will be more effective than just introducing regional rates for postage (and thus putting a larger burden on poorer people in those regions who need to mail things).

One example of a thing (that was recently maybe fixed) was the USPS’s need to pre-fund retiree health and pension benefits on a scale that I’m not aware applied to any other business or federal entity in the US.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billi...

Wasn't it the USPS that used to have much more complicated postage rates, until someone did the calculation that the extra employee hours required to calculate and enforce the system were more expensive than reduced revenue from just making the minimum rate a flat rate everywhere?

I do wonder why letter carriers in these areas aren’t simply allowed to do their delivery in the evenings or overnight when temps have cooled. Seems a more cost-effective solution than a whole new vehicle fleet.

The new fleet is already coming for other reasons anyways, it just so happens to have AC.

Further increasing emmissions

Damn. I live in Dallas. It's been a brutal year for heat. Pretty consistently triple digits in Fahrenheit up until a few weeks ago afte being that way the entire summer and some of late spring.

It seems senseless whatever these branch managers are pushing them for. 99% of the mail I get is unsolicited spam catalogs and magazines I never asked for, plus all the wannabe real estate investors sending fake personal postcards saying they want to buy my house. Straight from the mailbox to the trash and I guess people are literally dying to make sure we get it on time. All because the spam e-mail, SMS texts, sponsored television breaks, and phone calls aren't enough. Everyone with a marketing newsletter needs to make absolutely certain they have poisoned and turned useless every possible communications channel available to us.

USPS needs to implement blocklists. Let address owners provide a list of senders they don't want to receive anything from and just dump that shit as soon as you get it. Don't bother to deliver it and instantly cut your workoad at least in half.

But that junk mail provides a lot of the revenue for the USPS, doesn't it?

I'd rather pay double for shipping

I've been told stamps would cost between 15 and 100 times more if junk mail wasn't a thing.

Hard to believe.. but 15 and 100 are 2 very different numbers anyways

Very odd that the union hasn't been able to resolve this. USPS unions are unusually powrful, not just in comparison to other government employee unions but all unions in general. Protecting employees from being harmed and in some cases dying from workplace conditions is a very basic mission of any union. This should be something the union is pushing against nonstop and not just by filing grievance documents or waiting until the next contract negotiations.

What does Louis DeJoy have to do to get fired at this point?

Content aside, this is by far the best news website I’ve seen, particularly on mobile. Clean design, no ads, none of those large text excerpts that break the flow of the article, and no popups. The website is so beautiful and snappy.

I want to incentivize news outlets making more websites like this, so I just donated.

Happy to be a supporter of the Texas Observer. My tshirt says “Texas needs an Observer” — that’s an understatement.

Well, Congress wanted it to act more like a private company...

They are going about this all wrong.

Make a wearable sensor that records body temperature. The employer must provide them for all workers in the heat. Body temperature gets too high, it sounds an alarm.

Uhh, I don’t think most people would appreciate the location that sensor would need to be to continuously measure core body temp…

I believe it can be done with surface sensors these days.

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