Tacoma, Wenatchee postal workers go against USPS orders, reinstall sorting machines
Aug 24, 2020, 12:31 PM
Protesters at a rally against changes to the USPS. (Getty Images)
(Getty Images)
On Monday, U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy reiterated his position on not reinstalling mail-sorting machines removed at processing facilities across the country in recent weeks. In Washington state, though, some facilities are restoring them anyway.
Seattle-area postal workers ‘don’t see a plan’ to fix machines
Roughly 40% of letter-sorting machines in the Seattle-Tacoma area postal service processing plants were decommissioned prior to DeJoy pausing a series of changes he had enacted to the USPS.
According to a report from KUOW, five of those machines at a Tacoma plant were restored last week, while two others were repurposed to boost sorting capacity for other functioning machines. A machine in Wenatchee was also reinstalled. Both facilities took action against orders from USPS head of maintenance Kevin Couch to leave decommissioned sorting machines as is.
Facilities in Tacoma, Wenatchee, and Dallas appear to be the only ones defying the order to not restore mail sorting machines. USPS machines are capable of sorting over 20,000 letters in an hour, and are roughly the size of a city bus. Without them, postal service employees tell KUOW that it “would take a crew of 20 to 30 people hand-sorting the mail all night to do what one of these machines can do in a couple hours.”
Despite messaging from DeJoy and Couch indicating no plans to reinstall these machines, Gov. Jay Inslee had previously heard from Seattle-area USPS management that they “intend to replace what they broke.” He also spoke to workers, though, who informed him that no such plan had been put into place.
Ferguson ‘considering all legal options’ to fight Trump changes to USPS
“We’ve been told by one officer those are going to be repaired, but we have recent reports from the working people actually doing it that they have been broken and can’t be repaired,” Inslee said during a press conference last Thursday. “They are very concerned about this because they don’t see a plan to actually fix what the Trump administration broke.”
That’s largely the motivation behind state Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s decision to move forward with a recently-filed lawsuit, which seeks to end the reductions enacted by DeJoy, and replace decommissioned machines as quickly as possible.
