Kathy Hunter started as a mail carrier in 1996. Today she’s the union president for Branch 246 of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) in Kalamazoo.
"If we go on strike, it's considered against the law, so we can be arrested and fined,” Hunter said.
“The last one was a wildcat strike back in 1970 and that's where we actually got our first collective bargaining rights."
Thousands of letter carriers have been working without a contract since last week. Hunter said a collective bargaining conference for the union that represents 205,000 letter carriers across the country is scheduled for early June. Among the issues to be addressed, she said, are wages, employee retention rates, forced overtime and job safety.
The contract expired Saturday amid complaints from Kalamazoo-area customers about U.S. Postal Service delivery delays.
Carriers have little say in how the mail is delivered, and management decisions to change delivery services to make it more efficient and reliable have had the opposite effect, according to Hunter.
Consolidation
In 2024, the U.S. Postal Service consolidated delivery units in Portage, Schoolcraft and Kalamazoo into one Sorting and Delivery Center in Oshtemo Township. USPS said it would make mail delivery faster and more reliable.
But two years later, carriers said mail delivery is slower and unreliable. And routes are longer and more dangerous for workers.
Hunter said later start times, and 11-hour days, six days a week, are causing injuries. That’s especially true in the winter months when it gets dark early.
"What we're also seeing is with the later start times and the mandatory overtime there's more injuries,” Hunter said.
“People are working longer. They are working in the dark, you know, and can't see where they're walking."
Hunter said before the 2024 consolidation, mail sent between local addresses was sorted locally and usually delivered in a day. Now it goes to Grand Rapids and takes up to four days for delivery.
Hunter said concerns over quality of service, physical demands and risk of injury have led many to quit. She estimated that at least 24 Kalamazoo-area letter carriers have either quit or transferred since 2024.
Heather Clark is one of them. She said she was injured when she slipped on ice making holiday deliveries. The USPS veteran of over 20 years said she quit in March, a little over five years before she was eligible for a pension.
“I understand that some people may think that I threw this career away,” she said. But Clark said the job has changed so much, it wasn’t worth it to her to stay.
"When I first started my career, there was quite a few people that were very eligible for retirement. They chose to stay. They liked the job.”
Clark said you don't see as many older workers today.
She called the first holiday after the 2024 consolidation “hell on Earth.” It was the first time she said a supervisor told her to leave mail behind and just focus on packages.
For Clark, it was embarrassing to leave The Wall Street Journal at the Kalamazoo Sorting and Delivery Center in Oshtemo instead of delivering it on the day it was published.
"It got to the point that I'm like, I'm tired of fighting this. I'm tired of fighting to go back to this failing environment, you know, and it was just like, it's like war,” Clark said.
She added, “It's exhausting. After 20, almost 21 years of it, I’m just tired, you know, I'm tired of doing it."
In March, around the same time Clark quit, U.S. Representative Bill Huizenga met with U.S. Postal Service officials. The 4th District Republican had expressed concern about the workplace environment for postal employees, and local delivery delays.
More that 2,000 Southwest Michigan constituents responded to a survey sent by Huizenga’s office. They reported experiencing severe mail delays that negatively impacted the delivery of medications, bills, and important documents.
In an email, Huizenga spokesperson Brian Patrick said, “Sadly, the Postal Service has largely dismissed these concerns, blaming first the weather and later ‘staffing issues’ for many of the problems.”
Patrick added that the Postal Service missed Huizenga’s April 8 deadline to provide data to back up its claims and to submit a revised plan to resolve problems in Southwest Michigan.
The US Postal Service declined a request for an interview or comment.
